Review: Cliff Richard - Summer Holiday (1963)
Tracks: 1) Seven Days To A Holiday; 2) Summer Holiday; 3) Let Us Take You For A Ride; 4) Les Girls; 5) Round And Round; 6) Foot Tapper; 7) Stranger In Town; 8) Orlando’s Mime; 9) Bachelor Boy; 10) A Swingin’ Affair; 11) Really Waltzing; 12) All At Once; 13) Dancing Shoes; 14) Jugoslav Wedding; 15) The Next Time; 16) Big News.
REVIEW
Summer Holiday was not the first Cliff Richard soundtrack (the almost equally popular The Young Ones preceded it by about a year), and certainly not the last, but given that it was arguably the most commercially successful and yielded the largest number of hit singles, this is the one I have chosen to briefly touch upon as a representative sample of Cliff’s movie era, forfeiting the rest. In all seriousness, it is hilarious just how literally Cliff’s managers took to heart the idea that he should always function as the British shadow of Elvis — meaning that by early 1963, his career revolved almost entirely around acting and movie soundtracks, and even as the whirlwind of Beatlemania was shaking old-fashioned values to the core, they kept doing and doing it, even if the UK film industry was never in a position to catch up to the speed of Hollywood. Summer Holiday was followed by Wonderful Life in 1964, then Finders Keepers in 1966, establishing the «Cliff Richard musical» formula, and although in retrospect it seems like this decision at least helped Cliff establish a relatively firm and stable niche (and not go crazy from public oblivion or anything), it certainly killed off any hopes of getting him to somehow fit in with the times, one way or another.
The example of Summer Holiday is telling — both the movie and the album are pure sentimental fluff, typical British musical fodder whose melodies, even when they exist and are potentially attractive, are so choked up with ritz and glitz that you instinctively begin reaching for your top hat (even if, admittedly, Cliff never wore one in the movie). Tracks such as the opening ‘Seven Days To A Holiday’ simply put you on a vaudeville merry-go-round and tell you to dance the night, all your troubles, and anything that might remain of your brain away. Of course, there are moments in time and space when this style is acceptable, but coming from the artist behind the UK’s first rock’n’roll hit, it is generally depressing.
It gets a little better when the A.B.S. Orchestra and the Michael Sammes Singers go away — unfortunately, they come back way too often — and the Shadows step into the light: the title track, which was a real big hit, is a lightweight singalong pop ballad with nice lead licks from Hank Marvin, though still marred by excessive honey-drippin’ strings from the Norrie Paramor Orchestra. Alas, it gets best when Cliff disappears completely and the Shadows are left all alone for a few minutes: ‘Foot Tapper’ is one of their best instrumentals — their last #1, the future theme song to Sounds Of The ’60s, and just an overall fantastic tune whose lead guitar melody borrows a bit from the rockabilly lingo, the twist idiom, and peters out in pure pop fashion. The other two instrumentals, ‘Les Girls’ and ‘Round And Round’, aren’t half-bad either — the second one, in particular, has an almost gritty guitar tone for the Shadows’ standards, and while it’s on, those painful memories of the A.B.S. Orchestra recede deep in the back of my brain.
Only for a while, though, because once the Shadows’ three-pack is over, we are back in schmaltz territory. Fast forward a big chunk of the album, and you get Cliff back with the band for ‘Dancing Shoes’, a passable and catchy twist number with a funny alarm-bell guitar lead; ‘The Next Time’, a passable and catchy ballad with a bit of that oh-so-early-Sixties autumnal French feel; and ‘Big News’, a fast-rolling pop song with an annoyingly repetitive chorus. But at least all these three songs have signs of life to them, which is more than can be said for the rest. Actually, nothing much can be said about the rest, other than as far as British schmaltz goes, this is fairly high quality schmaltz — but I do not usually write about schmaltz, and even my forced poptimistic training of the 2010s has not led me to re-evaluate schmaltz as a potential artistic high for the pre-rock’n’roll era, rather than the outdated superficial muzak which it was rightly viewed as by people with good musical taste at the time.
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