Review: Billy Fury - Billy (1963)
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.
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.
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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