Review: Billy Fury - Billy Fury (1960)
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.
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.
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.