Channelzine

Broken Wings by The Stargazers

This is a notable one! This is the first British song to reach Number One on the UK charts.  Unfortunately – did you know there would be one of those? – it’s a drab old choice.  The backing is some sort of organ playing very little in the way of music, and the harmonies are notably less harmonious than many of the American offerings of the time.  “With broken wings no bird can fly,” sing The Stargazers, prophetically, never to be heard of again.  

She Wears Red Feathers by Guy Mitchell

Aha. I am not sure where this falls on the racism scale, but let’s examine, shall we? 

• “She wears red feathers and a huly-huly skirt” seems to be a rather rash assumption of the clothing of the inhabitants of the Pacific islands.  I’m sure they wear other clothes when they aren’t, you know, being native. 
• “She lives on just cokey-nuts and fish from round the sea.” Well, I’m sure that isn’t true. I don’t believe that this could sustain life.
• When our narrator, an English Banker, travels to her island and asks for her hand in marriage it is granted. But there’s no wedding band! Instead, “Six baboons got out bassoons and played here comes the bride.”  I suspect that this might be poetic license. 
• To top it all off, people laugh at this native islander drinking tea when the Banker takes her back to London.  Well, what a life you have blessed her with, Mr Banker! Abject mockery and tea: that sounds like jolly old England!

The song itself could have come from the soundtrack of Bedknobs And Broomsticks.  Nowadays, the Daily Mail would be in uproar.  

Don\’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes by Perry Como

I sense that Perry wasn’t an astronomer, as he seems unsure of how big the stars are.  But that’s barely important! What matters here is his ability to play fast and loose with phrasing and tempo, and to really mess with the listener’s ability to predict what’s going to happen in the song next.  It’s like there is a chorus you keep expecting, but the ability to actually say when it is going to happen is next to impossible.  The song is a train, Perry standing on the back of one of the carriages, plucking stars from the sky – defying everything, music and science be damned! – and serenading all the women in the buffet car.  

Outside Of Heaven by Eddie Fisher

“I pass your house with misty eyes,” sings Eddie Fisher over cod-standard musical motifs, like some sort of mystical stalker.  I think he’s suggesting that he can’t have the woman he loves until they are both dead and, nowadays, we’d assume that he’s going to kill her to have her.  Are we cynics? Or is Eddie there already? We’re told that he watched the Her of the song on her wedding day, and “could hardly keep from crying out loud”.  Eddie, get a grip! She’s not interested etc.  Move on! “Why was I meant to walk alone outside of Heaven?” he asks as the song swells to its conclusion.  Well, I think I know: you scare women, Eddie.

Comes-a-long-a-love by Kay Starr

Well. Kay Starr was, I reckon, a handful.  Based on this, she entertained.  You know: entertained.  I can picture her, almost Liza Minelli-ish in her stage flirtation.  Whilst being neutered – God, could you be anything else in the early 50s if you sang pop music? – there’s something innately sexual about this. The beat is quick, the horns… well, they horn.  And there’s only so many times you can hear “Comes-a-long-a-love” before it sounds a bit sexual.  And the end! The song positively climaxes, with Kay singing her hardest as the horn section put a full stop after every single syllable. 

Phew.

You Belong To Me by Jo Stafford
A perfect contrast(ish) to the last one. Al Martino began things with his singing, and Jo Stafford – has there ever been a less assuming name for a pop singer? – instead leaps in with tuneful noises. “Waaa waaa weee waaa” she sings, with a chorus of voices, like some weirdly tuneful baby, whilst the music does that almost-Caribbean-sounding xylophone thing. There’s actually not much music here, just a steady beat, some occasional horns, those damned xylophones. Jo carries this, and the melody is always curiously familiar, just a little niggle at the back of the head. That chorus? I know it. Can’t tell you where from, but I do. And then the song ends, and there’s no second visit by the tuneful baby.

Here In My Heart by Al Martino

The first ever recorded UK Number One Single starts as these things probably should: with a swell of strings. “Here in my heart I just yearn for you, only,” sings Martino, and you believe him, in that way you always believe singers like him, singers for whom the only reason you don’t sing something louder is because you physically can’t. His song is like a wave, echoing that swell from the beginning, and there’s a moment at the 2 minute mark when it sounds like he, and the orchestra, are going to burst, when they play and sing louder, stronger. And how does it end? With him repeating the most repeated line of the song again, with more gusto, and the Orchestra playing the final notes of the film soundtrack that they’ve condensed into their three minute timeslot. 

I almost wish that this song was more symbolic of what was to come, that I could sum up the Beatles and the Queen and the Spice Girls that will follow over the next fifty years through it, but I can’t; and somehow that’s more appropriate, really. It works best that it’s nearly fluff, that it sounds like hundreds of soundtracks to Golden Age Musicals, that it sounds like the music played over the logo of a Film corporation, that it sounds like the closing performance at a show for Royalty. It’s fluff, but the most brilliant kind, the kind that stays there without you even noticing it.