BILLY FURY
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1959–1982 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Halfway To Paradise
(1961) |
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Album
released: May 21, 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) That’s Love; 2) My Advice; 3)
Phone Call; 4) You Don’t Know; 5) Turn My Back On You; 6) Don’t Say It’s
Over; 7) Since You’ve Been Gone; 8) It’s You I Need; 9) Alright, Goodbye; 10)
Don’t Leave Me This Way. |
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REVIEW
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The
key factor here might be that — unlike quite
a few of the supposedly more «authentic» British Invasion acts that came in
the guy’s wake — Ronald Wycherley, a.k.a. Billy Fury, wrote all of his
material himself. Yes, he idolized American pop music and rockabilly, and he had
no intention whatsoever to go out there and make something different. But he
did craft his own melodies and construct his own lyrics, and when you are
doing this in the genre of light entertainment, there is rarely any middle
ground — either you fall flat on your face in a puddle of embarrassing
clichés, or you somehow mobilize these clichés, spruce them up
with some personality, and make them come alive in an interesting way. Given
Billy’s tremendous popularity from about 1960 to 1963, you’d think that he must have come up with the second
strategy. And just a quick listen to The
Sound Of Fury, his first and unquestionably best record, might convince
you that he may have succeeded in it. Yes, he likes all of them whitebread rockers
overseas and hardly likes anything else, and he alternately writes and sings
in the style of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, the Burnette
brothers, and/or Elvis — all of
whom he had to be at once for the hungry British crowds. But the simplest
thing to do would be to simply appropriate their melodies and add new
lyrics, and yet I do not recognize direct rip-offs. Each time a song starts
off exactly like some other classic, it quickly shifts into its own territory
— like ʽIt’s You I Needʼ, for instance, whose verse starts off just like ʽThat’s Alright (Mama)ʼ, but then gets its own brief poppy chorus in a different key. A
trifle, of course, and one might argue that all these cosmetic changes were
mainly designed as safe guarantee against lawsuits while all the royalties
could be kept for the artist. But I still hope that there was more to it than
just financial reasons — that Billy Fury really liked writing his own songs in the manner of his idols.
They weren’t better songs, but they did bear the mark of individual
creativity. Of course, The
Sound Of Fury is quite a misleading title in itself, and anyone looking
forward to uncover a long-lost classic of kick-ass early rock’n’roll must
immediately lower those pulsating expectations. Even something like ʽShakin’ All Overʼ, also recorded in the UK that same year by Johnny Kidd & The
Pirates, blows Fury’s «fury» out of the water — not to mention
most of the major American rock
stars of the 1950s. The «wildest» track on here is ʽTurn My Back On Youʼ, an echoey, suggestive, bass-heavy rockabilly romp in the vein of
Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette, but altogether about four years late to
seem in any way «dangerous» to anybody
but the most killingly conservative grandparents (not that there weren’t
still quite a lot of them in 1960, of course). Everything else is even more
tame, with each rock’n’roll number usually having a pop or country underlining.
Hell, even such a little-known wussy band as the Silver Beetles, who once
refused to become a backing band for Billy because he wanted them to fire
their bass player (Stuart Sutcliffe at the time, not Paul McCartney, so I
sort of understand), was consistently «heavier» in its pre-glory days than
Fury’s ensemble. So always remember to take the album title with a grain of
salt. On the other hand, Billy did have himself a nice
playing outfit — including a young and ambitious guitarist called Joe Brown
(yes, that Joe Brown who later went
on to befriend George Harrison, become the father of Sam Brown, and write
some decent music in between), helping him out with original riffs (he doesn’t
solo all that much), and Reg Guest on piano, typically playing in the style
of such American greats as Amos Milburn and Johnny Johnson (the boogie pattern
above everything else). If anything, The
Sound Of Fury does sound like a perfectly professional endeavor — it just
seems a little bit out of date for 1960, what with all the echo and reverb
and bass slapping and a near-total lack of drums (at least loud ones; extra
bit of trivia — Andy White, later to play on the Beatles’ recording of ʽLove Me Doʼ, is the drummer here). You’d almost think the radio did not work and
it took these guys four years for a steamship to deliver The Sun Sessions to their doorstep.
(The story also goes that, while doing the bass slapping, they had to have
two bassists — one to pick the notes and one to actually do the slapping.
Hey, it actually works!). But they made their own Sun Sessions, and they do
sound somewhat like the real thing. As a singer, Billy never had a unique
voice, but it was capable of many things: he can have it all glottalic and
hiccupy and rockabillish on ʽTurn My Backʼ, or he can have it slyly sweet with a hillbilly
whiff à la Buddy Holly on ʽThat’s Loveʼ, or he can do tender sentimental pleading on ʽAlright, Goodbyeʼ (although the from-the-bottom-of-my-heart crooning style on ʽYou Don’t Knowʼ is one time where he seems to severely overcook it: his frail lungs
simply cannot handle the ambition). So, looking back on this stuff from more
than a half-century distance, I would hesitate to call this «empty posing»: the
guy really dug whatever he was doing here. That said, the best track on the current CD issue is
to be found not on the album itself, but on one of the accompanying bonusy
B-sides: ʽDon’t Jumpʼ is a terrific pop-rock exercise in the style of
post-army Elvis (think something like ʽLittle Sisterʼ), but with
heavy emphasis on Duane Eddy-ish twangy guitar and an independently invented «heartbreaking» story of a
teenage suicide set to Billy’s own lyrics. Just a juicy, seductive example of
one of those «light somber moods», set to a steady pop rhythms, that were
produced so frequently in the early Sixties and then vanished almost
completely, replaced by genuinely depressing heavy somberness. |
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Album
released: May 21, 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Maybe Tomorrow; 2) Gonna Type A
Letter; 3) Margo; 4) Don’t Knock Upon My Door;
5) Time Has Come; 6) Collette; 7) Baby How I Cried; 8) Angel Face; 9) Last
Kiss; 10) Wondrous Place. |
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REVIEW Billy’s
second LP seems to have been little more than a scoop-up of his latest
singles, which is perhaps why, unlike most of his early 1960s records, this
one never got a CD release, and I had to do a bit of a reconstruction from a
variety of sources (including some extremely poor quality recordings). It is relatively important to include it
here, though, since the self-titled LP contains both the A- and B-sides to
his first two singles from 1959 — the stuff that made him a star in the first
place. |
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Interestingly,
both of the A-sides are sweet ballads, with the rocking material relegated to
the B-sides: apparently, British marketeers were not willing to take chances
and counted on Billy’s potential lady fans to be a more stable source of
income than the rowdy masculine rock’n’roll riff-raff rabble. Indeed, the
ballads are syrupy enough, but not hopeless: ʽMaybe Tomorrowʼ is an attempt
to write something in the Everlys’ style, with a vocal part that finds a good
balance between pathos and humility (it also helps that no strings are
involved, though the ghostly female backup vocals are almost comically spooky),
and the somewhat denser ʽMargoʼ, based on the same chord progression and replete
with the same echoey female backups and woodwind flourishes, is more in the vein
of sugary post-Army Elvis. (My favorite thing about ‘Margo’ just might be the
ridiculously ambiguous lyrical line "Oh please be mine / Most of the time" — I am all but sure
the author himself never paid much attention to the idea that some of the time Margo might be
somebody else’s, but I do wonder if the BBC radio services ever had any
problems with this). Of
the rockers, ʽDon’t Knock
Upon My Doorʼ is the more
important one — one of Billy’s fastest and craziest tunes, a straightforward
Elvis homage in the spirit of ʽHard Headed
Womanʼ, but a little
less dangerous-sounding due to the oddly placed have-a-good-time cheerleader
harmonies (replete with obligatory mental visions of early 1960’s girls in sexy
tights) and the lack of any sharp lead guitar work (in a curious twist, the
solo is relegated over to the bass edge of the piano). Still, it is as fun as
any second-tier rockabilly number, and so is ʽGonna Type A Letterʼ, although the
latter is, unfortunately, marred by a rather corny brass backing (whatever
these wind blowers were doing in the studio on that day, they surely were not
prepared for a true rock’n’roll number) — do, however, spare a minute to
appreciate the novelty touch of using the keys of an actual typewriter for
additional percussion (at least, as somebody who still remembers well enough
the sound of a proper typewriter, I think
it’s an actual typewriter). Most
of the other tracks are ballads, ballads, ballads, ranging from the easily
tolerable (the bluesy waltz ʽBaby How I
Criedʼ) to the highly
questionable (ʽColletteʼ — way too
hard trying to become the Everlys here, even double-tracking the vocals so as
to sound like Phil and Don at the
same time) to the awful (an overtly-sickeningly sweet attitude on ʽAngel Faceʼ, sadly, presaging many of the disappointments to come). But at least the
album does get a modestly-excellent conclusion with ʽWondrous Placeʼ, a moody Latin/Western hybrid with a melancholic flair which Billy
pulls off real well, even if, once again, it is just one of several of Elvis’
incarnations that he is modelling here (I can just picture the song becoming
even better with Elvis’ gruff baritone instead of Billy’s nasal tenor). Overall,
the album does sound significantly different from The Sound Of Fury — more echo, more atmosphere, less rockabilly,
more balladry — which is mildly curious, considering that most of this stuff
was recorded at approximately the same time. Openly recommending it is beyond
my honesty-bending skills (not to mention that this would require setting up
a special Ebay search), but putting it down for reasons of cheesiness or lack
of originality is not something I would like to do, either: even most of the
ballads are well within the adequacy limits, and some do have original melodic hooks. It is rather pathetic, though,
just how few rockers they let Billy place on the LP, despite his obvious
attraction to the bawdy side of the business. For a guy named
"Fury", there sure is a sore deficiency of genuine fury — ‘Don’t
Knock Upon My Door’ is the only song on which the singer sounds even remotely
angry. It is things like these that make me wonder what was the precise
mechanism to get all those brash young rock’n’roll-loving guys to tone down
their image once they’d made the big time — big money? free pussy? promises
of even bigger stardom? all of the above and a complementary ticket to
Disneyland? Unfortunately, the further we get removed from that epoch, the
more difficult it becomes to answer that question... yet in some ways, it is
one of those perennial questions where you might actually get insights from
the present in order to clear up the past. |
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Album
released: 1961 |
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Tracks: 1) Halfway
To Paradise; 2) Don’t Worry; 3) You’re Having The Last Dance With Me;
4) Push Push; 5) Fury’s Tune; 6) Talkin’ In My Sleep; 7) Stick Around; 8) A
Thousand Stars; 9) Cross My Heart; 10) Comin’ Up In The World; 11) He Will
Break Your Heart; 12) Would You Stand By Me. |
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REVIEW
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What
is significantly worse than just «softening up», though, is that Billy was no
longer willing to (or allowed to) write his own songs. Apart from ʽFury’s Tuneʼ, a short semi-nostalgic, semi-comic folk-pop ditty in which he amuses
himself by quoting as many titles of his own past hits as possible, everything
else is just stuff by contemporary US and UK professional songwriters,
writing for the lite-pop scene: for the most part, I do not recognize the
titles, other than ʽYou’re Having
The Last Dance With Meʼ, which, probably
for copyright reasons, invents new lyrics for the recent contemporary Ben E.
King classic ʽSave The Last
Dance For Meʼ, otherwise
leaving the melody intact. Still,
if you have nothing against early 1960s soft-rock per se, Halfway To Paradise is as nice and
elegant as an overall musical sketch of that epoch could hope to be. Pure
pathos syrup is largely confined to just one orchestral ballad (ʽA Thousand Starsʼ), floating along at a somnambulant waltz tempo and quickly forgotten;
most of the rest is lively, upbeat, often catchy pop with occasional echoes
of blues and R’n’B, and if only the arrangements were relying a little less
on keyboards, strings, and girly harmonies and a bit more on tastefully recorded
guitar patterns, the whole thing could have been extolled as a cool,
worthwhile example of pre-Beatles pop-rock. For
starters, ʽHalfway To
Paradiseʼ, want it or
not, is a Carole King classic about being friendzoned, perfect melodic
resolution and all, and Billy, with his Elvis-like style, actually does a
grittier, less manneristic job with it than Tony Orlando. Then there is some piano-led
country-pop stuff like ʽDon’t Worryʼ and ʽTalkin’ In My
Sleepʼ (imagine Elvis
guest singing lead on a Jerry Lee Lewis album from his country period, but
do remember to dim the lights a little — this is Billy, after all, not Elvis or Jerry); some bossa nova
influences (ʽHe Will Break
Your Heartʼ); some further
cuddlifying of the sentimental approach of Buddy Holly (ʽStick Aroundʼ)... nothing jaw-dropping, that is, but still a respectably diverse
bag of styles, created with a modicum of intelligence, arranged with a big
nod to catchiness, and, for the most part, delivered without any signs of
overt sweetening or theatrical exaggeration. Of
course, the extra smoothness begs for at least a few licks of salt — the
addition of even a single track that would have a faint hint at going a
little deeper (such as ʽWondrous Placeʼ) would have helped a lot. From a historic
perspective, Halfway To Paradise helped
make Billy a national star while at the same time forever burying his hopes
of future artistic growth — but the exact same thing applies to Elvis, and
apparently what was good for Elvis was also good for all his imitators across
the ocean. At the very least, there is still much more integrity in this kind
of record than there was in contemporary albums by Cliff Richard, who chose
to bury himself up to his neck in old standards and sentimental journeys
home; the core of Billy’s intended audience still consists of kids rather
than their parents, and I would take this album over something like Listen To Cliff! any time. |
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Album
released: April 1963 |
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Tracks: 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. |
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REVIEW Not
too surprisingly for a guy who willingly surrendered into the mechanical arms
of the mighty pop machine, Billy’s best-selling LP was his artistic nadir —
and with the Beatles having already released their first LP, ironically, this
would be his last chance to feel himself at least a little relevant (or, for
that matter, his last chance to actually put one more proper LP under his
belt at all). Not a single song here even pretends to be self-written; most
of the new songwriters involved in the project are boring professional hacks,
long since forgotten; and the general emphasis is rapidly shifting from light
and cutesy pop-rock to rose-colored balladry. |
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Admittedly, the voice is still there. Actually,
Billy’s vocal range and impeccable art of imitating his betters are just
about the only things that seem to have improved, rather than deteriorated,
with time. For instance, while this cover of Ray Charles’ ʽHard Timesʼ will hardly make you devalue the original, it is objectively not bad:
sung with proper feeling, delivered without superfluous over-emoting, and it
is unlikely that the record industry forced this cover on Billy — why not
just another hack tune from local craftsmanship instead? Even at this point
he might have been allowed the liberty to make a small bunch of independent artistic
choices, and this one feels genuine. And so does the LaVern Baker nursery-R’n’B
of ʽBumble Beeʼ, although Billy’s British audiences were probably
wondering their heads off about the title: 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", leaving the title a total enigma. Was ‘bumble bee’ a slang term for
something offensive at the time in Britain? Is it something about the word
‘evil’? I have no idea. Alas, the rest of the songs leave rather faint memory
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 content and style: strings, strings, even more
strings, super-strings (okay, not really), and epic romantic vocalizing over
passable, ten-for-a-dime melodies, of which old Tin Pan Alley standards such
as 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 gentleman was the unofficial head of
Britain’s rockabilly scene — on ʽLet Me Knowʼ, the familiar Elvis-style «snap» reaches out from under the softcore
arrangement — but barely suggest
is the key phrase here. Overall, this is just for those who cannot 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 initially almost fell into the trap of «taming» and
«teenifying» their act by trying to saddle them with silly soft stuff like ʽHow Do You Do Itʼ). Then again, this stylistic reinvention is completely consistent
with the contemporary development of Cliff Richard’s career — and ultimately,
both were taking their cues from Elvis, whose UK facsimiles they were trying
to be. Come to think of it, neither Billy nor Cliff ever had their freedom of
choice: they started out as rockabilly imitators and predictably ended up as
soft-pop imitators, loyally taking the British musical scene in the same
direction where, it seemed to them, the American scene was heading. It had to
be the willpower of four scruffy lads from Liverpool to turn things around. |
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Album
released: Oct. 1963 |
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Tracks: 1) Sweet Little Sixteen; 2) Baby
Come On; 3) That’s All Right; 4) Wedding Bells; 5) Sticks And Stones; 6)
Unchain My Heart; 7) I’m Moving On; 8) Just Because; 9) Halfway To Paradise;
10) I’d Never Find Another You; 11) Once Upon A Dream; 12) Last Night Was
Made For Love; 13) Like I’ve Never Been Gone; 14) When Will You Say I Love
You. |
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The
most interesting detail here is that Billy is being backed by the Tornados —
who actually served as his touring band for much of 1962-1963, despite having
made a name for themselves with ‘Telstar’ and other Joe Meek-produced whacky
«sci-pop» instrumentals. If you have already heard any of them, you will
quickly distinguish Roger LaVern’s trademark cosmic organ and Alan Caddy’s
metal-ringing lead chords — both of which are quite refreshing to hear in the
context of a long chain of well known classic rock’n’roll and R&B tunes;
after which, approximately halfway through the album Billy switches gears and
gives us a long medley of his «sweeter» hits. Given
the tight and limited confines of Decca’s studio, the screaming girls are
nowhere near as overwhelming as if we were at Shea Stadium or Madison Square
Garden, but it is not quite clear which is actually better — an evenly spread
screaming background of tens of thousands, to which your ears eventually get
accustomed, or singular howls and yelps of dozens that come and go completely
at random. (The funniest moment is ʽWedding Bellsʼ, where all the
major screaming fits are triggered by the chorus of "wedding bells are
ringing in my ears..." — supposedly,
were polygamy to be allowed, Billy could have walked right out of that studio
prouder than a Turkish sultan). Anyway,
the rock’n’roll part is passable and sometimes even a little inventive. For
instance, ʽThat’s All
Right (Mama)ʼ starts out as
slow country, spiced up with organ flourishes, then gradually accelerates,
turning only about halfway into the classic Elvis version: a somewhat clichéd
way, perhaps, for us today to symbolically appreciate the roots and sources
of the rockabilly craze, but still a viable artistic move in 1963 when not
yet an entire decade had passed since Elvis inaugurated that practice at Sun
Studios. Meanwhile, ʽJust Becauseʼ subtly develops, with a key change, out of a short
«clap your hands» R&B baby-jam (curious, but unnecessary — Billy can do a
passable Elvis, but he is no single-handed match for the Isley Brothers).
The two Ray Charles tributes (ʽSticks And
Stonesʼ and ʽUnchain My Heartʼ) are duly charged with emotion and stuff and further prove that Billy
Fury was the biggest promoter of Uncle Ray’s genius across the Atlantic; unfortunately,
you’d have to have a throat (and an ego) the size of an Eric Burdon or a Joe
Cocker to do Ray true justice — Billy, on the other hand, isn’ much of a soul
singer. The
balladeering part, unfortunately, is quite skippable: the only reason to
listen to these songs in the first place is a willingness to take them in as
«pop confections» — the strings, the harmonies, the meticulously rehearsed
notes and modulations. In this quasi-live context, though, even a really good
song like ʽHalfway To
Paradiseʼ becomes limp
and unconvincing (and the idea of recreating the five-note string motif with
pseudo-martial drumming does not work), not to mention all the lesser ones,
whose titles all speak for themselves. Still,
in the overall context of Billy’s post-Sound
Of Fury career, We Want Billy!
is a relatively high point, and a much better swan song than the self-titled
album — the arrival of the Beatles and those who followed in their footsteps
pretty much put the man out of business, despite a few more minor chart
entries in 1964-65, yet at least he faded away on a relatively respectable
note, rather than continuing to pollute the artistic sphere with fluff. His
later years were unstable and plagued with health problems, ultimately leading
to an early death in 1983, yet surely that kind of obscurity was still
preferable to what happened, say, to Elvis in his twilight years. |
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