Review - Billy Fury: The Sound Of Fury (1960)
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.
REVIEW
So... Billy Fury, a name every bit as awe-inspiring as Johnny Thunder and just as solidly forgotten as the latter. Was this guy just a plastic imitation of American rock’n’roll, temporarily acting as a cheap local substitute on UK soil before the real thing, a.k.a. the Beatles and the Stones, came along? Or was he the real thing all along, whose only problem was the inability to carve out his own distinctive image? The question is in the same category as the one so commonly asked about acts like the Monkees on the other side of the ocean, meaning that there can be no objective answer to satisfy everyone. But an even more important question is — real or plastic, is there actually a single solitary reason to listen to any of his recordings today?
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.