Review: Cliff Richard - Me And My Shadows (1960)
Tracks: 1) I’m Gonna Get You; 2) You And I; 3) I Cannot Find A True Love; 4) Evergreen Tree; 5) She’s Gone; 6) Left Out Again; 7) You’re Just The One To Do It; 8) Lamp Of Love; 9) Choppin’ ’n’ Changin’; 10) We Have It Made; 11) Tell Me; 12) Gee Wiz It’s You; 13) I Love You So; 14) I’m Willing To Learn; 15) I Don’t Know; 16) Working After School.
REVIEW
Arguably Cliff’s finest hour, and not just because of the genuinely funny pun: this was the first (and last) of his albums to feature mainly original compositions, though Cliff himself had little to do with them — his Shadows were more than silently happy to take on most of the job, with credits more or less equally spread between Hank Marvin, Jet Harris, Bruce Welch, and former member Ian Samwell. (Cliff himself only takes a humble co-credit for ‘I Love You So’ — probably for writing the truly unforgettable lyrics "I love you so / I’ll never let you go / I want you to know / That I love you so").
None of the Shadows were geniuses when it came to songwriting, of course, but the album, along with concurrent Billy Fury records, still remains in history as one of the earliest and most consistent attempts to introduce a «British school» of rock’n’roll songwriting, at least formally stripping the Beatles of that claim. With fast, pushy, rocking numbers like ‘I’m Gonna Get You’ and ‘Choppin’ ’n’ Changin’ (both of them symbolically positioned as A- and B-side openers), the Shadows are doing here for themselves and Cliff the exact same thing that the Beatles would soon be doing with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ — combining their own pop instincts with imported rock’n’roll energy. And, curiously, sometimes it feels to me as if the main thing holding them back was not even their inability to find that perfect chord change, but way too much dependence on Duane Eddy and early surf music — those thin, squiggly tones with their predilection for melodic symmetry and technique over all-out emotional excitement.
Then again, maybe not, because the chief weakness of an overall cool pop-rock tune like ‘I’m Gonna Get You’ is not so much the squeaky-fragile tone of its guitars as it is the disappointing resolution to each verse — after the first fast-poppin’ three lines, seemingly building up hungry frustration ("I’m acting like a crazy love sick clown... been looking for you all over town... it seems that you’re nowhere around..."), the verse breaks down on a stuttering, tempo-shifting "I’m gonna get you!" which sounds like the singer is temporarily stopping to catch his breath or something before resuming his doomed pursuit. Compare this to something like the Beatles’ ‘I’ll Get You’, with its similar message — that song is slower, poppier, happier, but each verse is rounded up with a positively triumphant exit, whereas ‘I’m Gonna Get You’ just suffers breakdown after breakdown — a classic case of good intentions marred by unsuccessful songwriting ideas.
’Choppin’ And Changin’ is the better rocker of the two, but, unfortunately, precisely because it contains almost no original songwriting ideas rather than the opposite — it is just a stereotypical fast-paced blues-rocker in the vein of ‘My Babe’, but at least the Shadows find the perfect pacing and Cliff is capable of singing it in a «dangerous» state of mind, building up from a menacing tone early on to a histrionic one, while Hank supports the frenzy with his own pitch-raising strategy. This is good stuff which you won’t actually get from the Beatles because of their typical aversion to strictly blues-based numbers; in fact, it sounds very much like a precursor to the classic angry garage sound of the early Sixties, and would not feel out of place on Nuggets or any other such compilation.
That said, this is as far as «menace» goes on this album: everything else ranges from friendly pop-rock to sentimental balladry, with the exception of ‘She’s Gone’, a Chicago-style mid-tempo blues-rock lament presaging some of the early Stones this time (do note the man’s versatility — all of these may be inferior blueprints, but they are blueprints for the early careers of, like, 90% of classic British Invasion bands). ‘You And I’ is a nice steady-rollin’ pop ballad in the vein of Buddy Holly; ‘I Cannot Find A True Love’ is something like a funny cross between ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘I Got A Woman’; and ‘Tell Me’ gets the dubious achievement of probably being the first British song by a major star that puts its full trust into the power of "whoah whoah whoah"’s and "yeah yeah yeah"’s — the verse melody is pure Everly Brothers, but the chorus is something which the Beatles must have picked up quite early.
Curiously, those of the songs which are not credited to the Shadows seem to have been commissioned from the same team of corporate songwriters which was handling Elvis’ career at the time — Otis Blackwell, Sid Tepper, Ben Weisman and Fred Wise, Aaron Schroeder, etc. Overall, this isn’t much of anything other than a symbolic wish to mold Cliff as Britain’s answer to Elvis, and they’d have made a much more wise choice if they turned to Leiber and Stoller instead. Still, the name of Otis Blackwell at the very least sounds promising, and, true enough, ‘You’re Just The One To Do It’ is quite a charming little ballad — this is a good example of how brilliantly you can resolve a three-line verse, one from which the authors of ‘I’m Gonna Get You’ could have learned a valuable lesson; and it is an excellent example of Cliff’s flexibility and charisma as a singer, as you watch him smoothly descend from cooing serenader on the three-line verse to suave baritone charmer on the one-line chorus. So maybe he does do this thing as a boy where Elvis would have done the same as a man, but now that we are no longer in the cold grippin’ hands of ageism, why should one necessarily be better than the other, right?
It could be tempting to speculate that an album like Me And My Shadows could have been a prelude to something great, but of course it could not: even with all the original songwriting, it is all about latching on to established formulas and modifying them with tiny tweaks here and there — no genuine signs of some sort of original vision, just enough of those little changes so as to be able to pocket most of the songwriting credits. Still, it is honorable enough that Me And My Shadows preserves a good dose of the rock’n’roll spirit, and that its pop inspiration comes from the likes of Buddy Holly and the Everlys rather than Pat Boone or Frankie Avalon: in that little interim era of teenage idols that separated classic Elvis from the Beatles, the presence of Cliff and the Shadows actually mattered. And out of all their records, this is the one which is still quite listenable and enjoyable today, regardless of historic context.