BILLY FURY: BILLY (1963)
1) We
Were Meant For Each Other; 2) How Many Nights, How Many Days; 3) Willow Weep
For Me; 4) Bumble Bee; 5) She Cried; 6) Let Me Know; 7) The Chapel On The Hill;
8) Like I've Never Been Gone; 9) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 10) I'll Show
You; 11) Our Day Will Come; 12) All My Hopes; 13) One Step From Heaven; 14) One
Kiss; 15) Hard Times; 16) (Here Am I) Broken Hearted.
Unsurprisingly for 1963, Billy's best-selling
LP was his artistic nadir — and with the Beatles on the near horizon, ironically,
it would also be his last proper LP.
Nothing here is self-written; most of the songwriters involved in the project
are hack-like professionals, long since forgotten; and the emphasis is rapidly
shifting from light, cutesy pop-rock to saccharine balladry.
The voice is still there, and, actually,
Billy's range and art of imitation are the only things that seem to have been
improving with time. For instance, Ray Charles' ʽHard Timesʼ will never make
anyone forget the original, but it is not
a bad cover: sung with the proper feeling, without superfluous over-emoting,
and it's hardly probable that the record industry people forced this cover on Billy — why not just another hack tune from a
local craftsmanship instead? Even at this point he might have been allowed the
liberty to make a small bunch of «artistic choices», and this one's not bad,
and neither is the LaVern Baker nursery-R'n'B of ʽBumble Beeʼ (with Billy's
British audiences, most likely, wondering their heads off about the title,
because instead of the expected "you hurt me like a bee, an evil bee, an
evil bumble bee", Billy prefers to sing "oo-wee, my life is misery,
get out of here and don't come back to me". Was «bumble bee» a slang term
for something offensive at the time in Britain? Who knows?).
But the rest of the songs leave rather faint
traces, to put it mildly — even a bare glance at song titles like ʽThe Chapel
On The Hillʼ is quite enough to get a preliminary idea of the content and the style: strings, strings, more
strings, superstrings (okay, not really), and epic romantic vocalizing over
passable, ten-for-a-dime melodies, of which old Tin Pan Alley standards like ʽWillow
Weep For Meʼ are actually the «highlights». The upbeat, but still heavily
orchestrated, ʽHow Many Nightsʼ and especially ʽLet Me Knowʼ are the only
tracks on here that could even barely suggest that four years earlier, this
here gentleman was the unofficial head of Britain's rockabilly scene — on ʽLet
Me Knowʼ, the familiar Elvis «snap» reaches out from under the softcore arrangement
— but barely suggest is the key
phrase here.
Overall, this is just for those who can't get
enough out of their Paul Anka records; but, perhaps, Beatles fans also deserve
a listen — it would be interesting to try and imagine the Fab Four's reaction
to this act of «musical betrayal» (and appreciate their own force of resistance: as we all remember, even George Martin
almost fell into the trap of «taming» and «teenifying» their act by trying to
saddle them with silly soft crap like ʽHow Do You Do Itʼ at the beginning). An utterly
ignoble thumbs
down.
Last proper LP? I guess it isn't hard to see why. Meanwhile, that record cover art screams "make a meme of me"!
ReplyDeleteAgain!
ReplyDeleteOnce again you put down poor Paul Anka.
Have you actually listened to Paul carefully? How can you dislike compositions like "Put your head on my shoulder" or "Tonight my love, tonight", I wonder?
Probably because he's a classic Brill Building tunesmith, rather than an inspired rock and roll original. You wouldn't expect Cole Porter or Irving Berlin to draw many reviews on this site, would you? Performers like Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, Tab Hunter, Paul Anka, and Pat Boone simply aren't rock and roll, no matter how many timely cash-in's they may have waxed between 1955-58.
DeleteWell, Autechre is not rock and roll too, I guess.
DeleteTrue, but Autechre exists in the post-rock era as a product of it. Paul Anka and co. owe their inspiration to the era that preceded rock.
Delete