Do you, like me, find it annoying when you go into a restaurant for a quiet meal and find out there is some tribute act coming on who think they can sing like Frank Sinatra, Freddie Mercury or even Amy Winehouse? Why do they bother? It’s quite rare that they actually sound like who they are supposed to be. At least when the contestants who appeared on Stars In Their Eyes, they often did have more than a passing resemblance to their idol. Elvis Presley is arguably the most imitated celebrity, but it’s been going on for years. Many have made an entire career out of ‘being’ the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, so much so that two of them actually made the UK chart in the 1960s. One was Terry Stafford who charted with Suspicion 12 years before Elvis even though Elvis recorded it first and the other was Ral Donner who made number 25 in 1961 with You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It). Noodlehendon asked of the latter, “What ever happened to him?” Well, let’s find out.

The first thing to say is that he hasn’t done anything recently and that’s because he died in April 1984 and the young age of 41. He was born Ralph Stuart Emanuel Donner on 10 February 1943 in Chicago, Illinois. Ral was a talent in his own right who happened to sound like a post-rock ‘n’ roll Elvis, so he capitalised on it. He had a great start because he had three older siblings and both his parents loved music and encouraged their children to listen if not necessarily follow it. At the age of 13, a young Ralph fell in love with the new rock ‘n’ roll sound that began sweeping America and particularly Elvis’ debut hit, Heartbreak Hotel in 1956.

At school, Ral formed a band called The Rockin’ Five, began playing at the high school hop and then decided to record a cover of a Little Richard track called Miss Ann. They even backed Sammy Davis Jnr on a local television show in Chicago. He set off on a journey to Memphis with the hope of getting an audition with Sam Phillips’ at Sun records, but sadly, didn’t, but the journey wasn’t wasted because he met a couple of songwriters called Fred Burch and Gerald Nelson who, together, had written some songs for a couple of Elvis’ films as well as his UK number 38 hit The Love Machine. Burch, in addition, had written songs for Perry Como, Brenda Lee, and Patsy Cline. The pair were impressed with Ral and offered to produce for him and then wrote his first hit That’s Alright With Me and its B-side Tell Me Why which was only released in America.

In 1960, Donner travelled to Chicago to record some demo tracks. He cut eight in total, four of them were Elvis songs and it included The Girl of My Best Friend which was on Elvis’ album Elvis Is Back. In an interview with Goldmine magazine in 1979, Ral explain what happened next, “My brother-in-law, who was like my manager, got a line on a studio in Florida with a guy who had something to do with Stay by Maurice Williams in some capacity. I played for him our demonstration copies of Beachcomber, the tune Conway Twitty did, and The Girl Of My Best Friend which we all did as The Gents in Chicago. The guy flipped over The Girl Of My Best Friend and suggested we recut it, since it was number one by Elvis in England, and RCA hadn’t released it over here. I told him, ‘You can’t do an Elvis tune, nobody else has done it,’ but he talked us into it. The guy who helped produce the sides, Jan Hutchins,  took the masters to New York and tried to get them leased. Columbia said even if the tunes didn’t make it they would be interested in me. As it turned out, Jan landed them with Gone Records, owned by George Goldner. The next thing I know is we’re on the charts with The Girl Of My Best Friend.

His second hit was You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It) which was written by Paul Hampton and Dorian Burton originally for the girl group, The Angels who are best remembered for the hit My Boyfriend’s Back. Donner said, “That tune was also taken as a mistake, I think it was submitted for a girl group, the Angels, but as we were going through demos it popped up. It said something like ‘meant for girl group’. We all started laughing, but we liked the tune. Artie put it out anyway and it went to No. 4 in the nation.”

Donner had befriended another American singer, Linda Scott, who is best remembered for the hit I’ve Told Every Little Star, he said, “Linda Scott and I were pretty close, we had what you would call afternoon dates. Take in mind we were very young and chaperones were always around. We spent as much time as we could, we would have to send the chaperones off to a movie or something to be able to go anywhere or be by ourselves. But time as it was, with traveling and such, we really didn’t call it going steady. As Paul Anka said…I guess it was only ‘Puppy Love’.”

In 1963, he was gone from Gone over royalty disputes and signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label but after four singles and no success he left there too. He continued to record and released several singles on various label right through until 1980, but in the States, seven was his sum total of hits which is six more than he had in the UK. He remained an Elvis fan throughout his short life and in 1981, he was invited to narrate the documentary, This Is Elvis.

Did Ral ever get to meet his idol? “My brother-in-law and my promotion man were on Sunset Strip at a restaurant,” he explained in Goldmine, “There were some girls in the booth next to us, I guess they overheard us talking about music. They asked me who I was, and they remembered my name from the contest, they said they were friends of Elvis. I really didn’t believe them. They said they would call Joe Esposito and set it up for us to meet Elvis, so I just played along with them. They came back from the phone and said, ‘It’s all set, Elvis wants to meet you’. At this point I didn’t know what they were leading up to, I didn’t know whether they were gonna roll us or what. So it was Ernie Farrell and myself, my brother-in-law got cold feet so he didn’t go. They took us up to Bellaire and we were greeted by Joe, and he told us Elvis would be down in a few minutes. We waited about 10 minutes and he came down the stairs with Connie Stevens at his side, she was his date for the night. I couldn’t believe he was walking towards me, he looked great, we introduced ourselves and started talking about music. We got onto the conversation of The Girl Of My Best Friend and said when he first heard it, he was in the back of his Caddy when it came on the radio, he said he jumped up, ‘You guys up there, shut up, turn the radio up full blast’. He said he knew it wasn’t his, but he thought the rendition was great and sincere, we mostly talked about music the rest of the night. ”

Ral Donner died of lung cancer on 6th April 1984, in Chicago.

This week’s singer has to be one of the most underrated of the 70s, 80s and 90s. A talented song writer, producer and singer in many different genres, yet UK radio, typically, only seem to play one song, Addicted To Love. Robert Palmer began playing blues and over the next 25 years had included rock, disco, electro, pop, soul and even a bit of crooning. It’s a good way not to pigeon-holed, but he should have been more appreciated than he was. Today’s choice is one of his disco/electro track, Johnny and Mary, but who were they?

Palmer was born in Batley in the West Riding of Yorkshire in January 1949 and because his father worked for the British naval intelligence, the family moved to Malta where he spent the first 12 years of his life and grew up listening to jazz and soul music which he heard on American Forces Radio. After moving back to the UK, the family settled in Scarborough and when he was 15, he joined his first band called the Mandrakes. His first real break came in 1969 when he was invited to join the Alan Bown Set as a replacement singer for Jess Roden. His tenure there was short-lived and he left to join a band called Dada which featured Elkie Brooks and her then-husband Pete Gage but after a year they evolved into Vinegar Joe where Palmer played guitar and shared lead vocals with Brooks.

Palmer used his time in Vinegar Joe to hone his song writing skills, “I was getting more confident about the songs I was writing but with the supposed democracy of a band they were like pieces you’d handed in. By the time the group finished with it, it was turned upside down, lost the mood and everything.” he explained to Robert Sandall in 1988. After the group split in 1973, Palmer went off to the States to learn from the American players he admired. He watched them and copied them and learned some of the songs on Motown and Stax before they were heard over here.

In 1974, he signed a record deal with Island records and with the full support of the label and its owner, Chris Blackwell, he recorded his debut album Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley, with all the top musicians including Lowell George and Michael Jackson’s guitarist David Williams and it was all headed by Aretha Franklin’s musical director and drummer Bernard Purdie.

In 1978, hit fourth album Double Fun which contained his first UK hit single, Every Kinda People which was written by Free’s bass player Andy Fraser, which Fraser had recorded but never released, so when Palmer heard it he decided to cover it. It was a minor hit but has since been covered by numerous people including Mint Juleps, Randy Crawford, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Kym Marsh, Joe Cocker and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was also used as the theme tune to the Michael Barrymore TV series My Kind Of People. The following year he released the more rock-orientated album Secrets which contained his second UK hit, a cover of Moon Martin’s rock classic Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

Come the 1980s and the electro era, Palmer had recently produced some songs for one of his teenage hero’s, Desmond Dekker and it led him to start using prototype sequencers and, “inadvertently”, he said, made a name for himself as a “techno-brat” much showcased on Secrets and the follow-up, Clues. He said of it, “The technology was so primitive that you spent most of the time behind the machine with a screwdriver.”

Clues’ first single was Johnny and Mary which peaked at number 44 but, was none the less, his biggest hit to date at the time. He told Daryl Easlea, “I’d bought a Spider which was another prototype sequencer which plugged into a wasp. It was black and yellow and battery powered. I was fooling around and that was it, it was just me and my drummer Dony Wynn.” Palmer had moved to the Bahamas and was living in its capital Nassau when he wrote the song. The song is generally about a fictitious couple going through the motions with ‘Johnny’ living in a bit of a make-believe world and ‘Mary’ just going along with his ideas. There were a lot of British ex-pats living in the Caribbean at the time and Palmer said, “Lyrically I was dealing with my exposure to ex-patriots adding, I’d never seen such contrived formality before but Johnny and Mary obviously had. These are people who have fallen into life like a habit, there’s no struggle or romance in what they do.”

The song performed much better around the world than it did in the UK reaching number 21 in the Netherlands, one place higher in Australia, 12 in New Zealand, 11 in Sweden, 10 in Austria, eight in Belgium, seven in Germany, five in both Switzerland and South Africa and topped the chart in Spain.

The Clues album almost made the UK top 30 and spent a couple of months on the chart. Among the personnel, it featured the aforementioned Andy Fraser on bass, Talking Heads’ Chris Franz on bass drum and Gary Numan on keyboards. The car company Renault liked the sound and used Palmer’s version in their early TV adverts. In the 90s, they used other specially recorded versions of the same song and so, in 2002, Palmer said, “I play that song today and I can see people nudging themselves saying, ‘why is he playing the car commercial.'”

This week’s request came in from Andy Woollard, a Wednesday night regular in the Hot Nuts team, he wrote, “Hi Jon, going through my vinyl singles I came across one from the very early 70s called Sarabande by Beggars Opera. Apart from the fact I love it, can you shed any more light on it. Regards Andy.” Not impressed with my offer to take my torch one night to shed some light, I said I would see what I could find out. With plenty of research and an interview with one member of the band, let’s reveal all.

The band was formed in 1969 by Edinburgh-born guitarist Ricky Gardiner, Newcastle upon Tyne-born singer Martin Griffiths and bass player Marshall Erskine formerly of the The System, a school band which Martin Griffiths, Marshall Erskine and others originated. They had asked Ricky Gardiner to join after his time with the Glasgow band King Bees.

To earn some money to buy equipment, in the summer of 1969, the trio worked in construction helping to build the second section of the M40 motorway around Beaconsfield. Also, using a loan of £1000 from Gardiner’s uncle, they bought their first proper equipment. After heading back to Glasgow, they brought in keyboard player Alan Park, who had been the resident organist at the Locarno Ballroom and, after posting an ad in a local newspaper, drummer Raymond Wilson, formally of The Beings, was recruited too. They invited Virginia Scott, who had studied piano in Italy, to join the band and she became their composer as well as mellotron player and additional vocalist. Bass-player Gordon Sellar replaced Marshall Erksine after their debut album, Act One, in 1970 when he decided to leave.

Extensive rehearsing paid off and they got a regular gig on Saturday mornings at the Howff pub in Glasgow playing Beggars Opera original material and some prog rock covers. In 1970, they signed a four-album deal with Vertigo records. Beggars Opera toured the UK and Germany and even secured an appearance on the legendary Beat Club TV show which was often hosted by Dave Lee Travis.

Sarabande was Beggars Opera first single. “It was written by myself and arranged by the band,” Virginia told me in an exclusive interview. “The inspiration for the title came from baroque music, and the song just appeared from there. Ricky Gardiner learnt it and took it to the band who arranged and recorded it in the studio. The chunky guitar bit is especially cool.” She added.

Vertigo was a subsidiary of Phillips records and promoted a lot or progressive rock music, so the label was keen to promote Beggars Opera and offered them an album deal. Act One was the first of four albums with Waters Of Change following in 1971, Pathfinder in 1972 and Get Your Dog Off Me in 1973. They continued to tour around the UK and Europe and secured a live performance at the Great British Rock Meeting at Speyer in West Germany in August 1971. The song Time Machine was released from their second album and was a big hit in Germany. Check out their epic, yet faithful, version of Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park on Pathfinder. It’s also a minute longer than the Richard Harris version.

Their first two albums were produced by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter who had penned songs for the Troggs and Cilla Black as well as writing and producing a number of UK hits including Back Home by the England World Cup Squad and Forever and Ever by Slik. The New Seekers, both acts called Kenny and the Bay City Rollers also benefitted from their song writing skills. Additionally they wrote the UK’s 1967 Eurovision winner Puppet On A String for Sandie Shaw and our 1968 entry, Congratulations, the longest single worded title of a UK number one, for Cliff Richard. Alan Park later became Cliff’s musical director for many years.

Martin Griffiths left the band in 1972 and was replaced by ex of Savoy Brown member Pete Scott, but following a dispute during the Get Your Dog Off Me sessions at Phonogram Studios in London. Luckily, Linnie Paterson, the vocalist of the Scottish Prog Rock band, Writing on the Wall, took over. He later sang on Beggars Opera Lifeline a late Vertigo Germany release but sadly has since passed away.

Their music was still popular in Germany and in 1974, Gardiner was asked by Jupiter records to produce a couple more Beggars Opera albums, so he brought back Pete Scott on vocals, Gardiner on guitar and bass, Virginia Scott on keyboards and two session drummers Mike Travis on the first and the legendary Clem Cattini on the second and those albums were Sagittary (1974) and Beggars Can’t be Choosers (1976) respectively.

Soon after, various key members were involved in a prog rock opera project and Beggars Opera minus Ricky Gardiner released Lifeline for Vertigo Germany with Linnie Paterson, Alan Park, Gordon Sellar and others. Ricky Gardiner went on to play for David Bowie on the Low album in 1977 and with Iggy Pop on the Lust for Life album as well as his Idiot tour of 1976. He co-wrote one of Iggy’s best-known songs The Passenger. Martin Griffiths toured with, among others, Brian Auger and Osibisa.

I asked Virginia what she is doing at the moment, “​I compose and write and am still active with Beggars Opera and Ricky Gardiner Songs publishing. I curate Beggars Opera RGS recordings Beggars Can’t be Choosers and Sagittary and the new avant garde progressive rock Beggars Opera releases Close to my Heart, Touching the Edge, All Tomorrows Thinking, Suddenly Ahead Ahead, Lose a Life, Promise in Motion and Mrs Caligari’s Lighter, If we Couldn’t Speak and Doris which includes the Ricky Gardiner solo guitar archive: The Flood, Kumara, Auschwitz. The Passenger and Songs for the Electric, downloadable at www.beggarsopera.co.uk.”

As for the rest of the band, Virginia brought me up to date advising, “Alan Park lives in Australia and is still active as a keyboard player. I believe he is returning to the UK this year, Marshall Erksine lives in Amsterdam and still plays bass, Ray Wilson lives in Dorset with his family and Martin Griffiths lives in Germany and is still performing and he runs the https://www.facebook.com/p/Beggars-Opera-1969-1972-100055314857530/. Sadly, Gordon Sellar and Ricky Gardiner both passed away in 2022. “

A few weeks ago, I did a round in my quiz where I stripped the music away and left just the acapella vocals and it’s great to really hear the quality of the voices of the artists. Not all are great, but in this round, I featured Karen Carpenter singing Close To You, Linda Perry (of the 4 Non Blondes) singing What’s Up and Agnetha singing The Winner Takes it All which were all absolutely stunning. A couple of days later, I had an email from Steve, a regular attendee, who said, “Just note to say that it was a pleasure to hear just the vocals on The Winner Takes it All. My God, Agnetha can sing! Not my favourite ABBA track by any means but the quality of the vocals just blew me away. A classic anyway, it made me realise just how good the song is. There has been so much talk about the story behind the track that the raw emotion of it all gets a bit lost at times. This just reinforces just how good it, she, is.” So I asked if he would like it as a Single of the Week and he replied, “Sounds like a good idea, why not!” Love the enthusiasm Steve!!! Anyway, why not indeed, so let’s begin.

When you know what’s behind the story and you watch the video of Agnetha singing it, you can really feel her pain and anguish. Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus were the writers behind every ABBA song, and, like Lennon and McCartney, they were both credited as joint writers regardless of which one actually put the words and music down. In the case of The Winner Takes It All, it was Björn who wrote it about his and Agnetha’s marriage which was falling apart. The opening line ‘I don’t wanna talk about the things we’ve gone through, though it’s hurting me now it’s history’, summed up where Björn and Agnetha were in their relationship. Divorced. What made it even more ironic was that now Benny and Frida were starting to have problems of their own. The way they were writing songs at that point was Benny and Björn would compose a tune, then Björn would take the song home and play it over and over again until some lyrics came into his head and fitted the tune.

If you’ve ever been through divorce, it can usually be hard to deal with let along write a song about it. So, with all the emotion and possibly anger, how do you write a heartfelt song about the demise of your marriage knowing that your, now-ex-wife, was likely to be singing it? The answer? Get drunk. Björn had come home and opened a bottle of scotch and, as he recalled, “I was drunk and in a rush of emotion the words just came to me. Normally that doesn’t work because they look or sound good when you’re drunk and the next day they look awful, but this one actually worked.” He added, in a different interview, “It is the experience of a divorce, but it’s fiction. There wasn’t a winner or a loser in our case. A lot of people think it’s straight out of reality, but it’s not. Usually it’s not a good idea to write when you’re drunk, but it all came out on that one. By the time I wrote ‘The Gods may throw their dice’ the bottle was empty.” He had completed the song in just one hour.

The next day he took the song, which he’d initially titled The Story of My Life, into the studio, “I sang a demo of it myself which a lot of people liked and said, you have to sing that. But I saw the sensible thing, of course, it had to go to Agnetha.”

What is Agnetha’s feeling towards it? “It’s actually my favourite ABBA song. Björn wrote it about us after the breakdown of our marriage. The fact that he wrote it exactly when we divorced is touching really. It was fantastic to do that song because I could put in such feeling. I didn’t mind sharing it with the public. It didn’t feel wrong. There is so much in that song. It was a mixture of what I felt and what Björn felt, but also what Benny and Frida went through.”

After Björn recorded the demo he played it Benny. He liked it and suggested they record another demo, so with Benny on keyboards and with the aid of session musicians Lasse Wellander on guitar, Mike Watson on bass and Ola Brunkert on drums, this first attempt at the song took them into a fairly uptempo arrangement: an insistent beat, punctuated by handclaps – a bit ‘stiff and metrical’, as Benny described it. It actually wasn’t a bad backing track and it could easily have formed the basis for an excellent pop song in its genre. A rough mix of this instrumental recording was copied onto a cassette tape for Björn and Benny.

The next day when they drove home from the studio, they listened again to the backing track and, according to the official ABBA website, still sensed that they were onto something with this tune, but they concluded that they hadn’t quite captured its full potential. “We felt that it was a really important song, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t ‘lose’ it”, Björn remembered.

On another listen, they decided something was needed to loosen it up, and, again, according to the website, it was Benny who found the key that would unlock the song: a descending melody line, played on the piano during the intro and then reoccurring throughout the tune. This simple yet effective device rubbed off the edges of the square, giving the tune a smoother flow: it was lifted out of the stiff and metrical territory and into a romantic French ‘chanson’ landscape. A new backing track was recorded four days after the first attempt, on 6th June, and it was certainly an improvement. The musicians were the same this time, with the addition of percussionist Åke Sundqvist, who no doubt contributed to the rhythmic elasticity of this second version.

In July 1980, 10 days after their marriage was dissolved, the group made their way to the town of Marstrand, on the west coast of Sweden, to shoot the promo video for the song. The video’s director, Lasse Hallström, purposely chose to have Agnetha’s role as the lonely abandoned woman as the lyrics describe. The video took five hours to complete. Things were a bit awkward, as both Björn and Agnetha had brought their new partners to the location. But it showed a genuinely heartbroken Agnetha talking to the camera whilst the other members of the group just stood around talking and laughing.

In 2008, Mamma Mia, the movie, was released with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Amanda Seyfried, and it was Streep who sang The Winner Takes It All in the film and did it in one take, but what did Björn think of it? He stated in an interview with The Telegraph, “She is a goddess. At first, we couldn’t believe that she wanted to do it. I was completely taken by surprise when I saw her performance in the movie. To hear her delivering the songs with all the emotion we put in the lyrics is more than we could have dreamed of.”

The song peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave ABBA their final top 10 hit over there, in the UK it went to number one where it spent two weeks and was their penultimate number one with the final one being the title track of the album where both songs were lifted, Super Trouper. It also went to number one in Belgium and the Netherlands, number two in Sweden, three in Switzerland, Austria and Norway and four in Germany. It has been covered numerous times by the likes of Beverley Craven, Hazell Dean, The Corrs, Michael Ball, Laura Branigan, Bruce Forsyth’s daughter Julie who was a former member of Guys ‘n’ Dolls, The Vaccines, Susan Boyle and lest we forget the cast of Glee, but nothing will top the emotion Agnetha portrayed because she really lived it.

Johnny Tillotson passed away on 1st April 2025 and, as usual, I paid tribute at my regular quiz nights and promptly played his biggest hit Poetry in Motion. A guy, who wasn’t taking part in the quiz, came up and queried my announcement about Johnny’s death saying, “He died years ago.” I said, no he didn’t he died yesterday at the age of 86. He seemed satisfied that I knew what I was talking about, shook my hand and as he walked away, muttered, “I have no idea what this song is about anyway.”, I called after him saying I’ll write about it on my website. I don’t think he heard me and doubt he will even read this, but I’ll write it anyway.

Tillotson was born in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up 60 miles away in Palatka. He got his break at the age of nine when he entered a talent contest called Young Folk Revue on a local radio station. He learned guitar and ukulele and enlisted in the University of Florida, but soon his musical ambition overtook the studies and he left to pursue a career in music. He later had a stint as a DJ on the radio station WWPF. He began singing and was discovered by Mae Boren Axton, the writer of Elvis Presley’s debut hit Heartbreak Hotel and the mother of Hoyt who wrote Three Dog Night’s Joy To the World and had a minor hit of his own in 1980 with Della & the Dealer. He appeared on the Toby Dowdy TV Show and later had his own TV show.

In 1958, Tillotson signed a record deal with Cadence records and was asked by the label’s owner, Archie Bleyer, to go to New York to record some tracks. He cut a number of songs and had the first of his 31 US hits later the same year with Dreamy Eyes. One of the songs he recorded was Poetry in Motion, but Tillotson wasn’t too happy with it and it was decided he should go to a recording studio in Nashville to re-record the track. The new recording was released and went to number two in the States and became the first number one of 1961 in the UK.  Like Bobby Vee, Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell, Johnny Tillotson was one of the good-looking, cool-dressed teenage idols who came along while Elvis was in the US Army.

In the sleeve notes of his Greatest Hits collection, Johnny recalled, “My mother had a dream of being a singer and dancer – she used to take me to see a lot of movie musicals. I told her I wanted to be a singing cowboy and she said, ‘Being a cowboy isn’t that easy, so why don’t you just concentrate on singing.'” and that’s exactly what he did.

Tillotson explained to Spencer Leigh how he got the song, “Archie Bleyer brought me a song called Poetry In Motion, a few other singers had turned it down, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was such a perfect picture of the beauties of ladies on every level. I kinda felt we had a hit there. It was written by Mike Anthony & Paul Kaufman and a couple of years ago, just before he passed away, Mike wrote a number one country record for John Michael Montgomery, I Miss You A Little. He was the sweetest man and he never gave up. The whole Nashville A-team was playing on Poetry In Motion: Boots Randolph on sax, Floyd Cramer on piano, Hank Garland on guitar and Buddy Harmon on drums. The B-side, Princess Princess was one I wrote and it was how I felt about the girls in the audience.”

Archie Bleyer was not only the record owner and producer, he cared and nurtured his artists, very unlike today. Tillotson didn’t tour whilst Poetry was riding high, instead he continued perfecting his vocal style. Johnny explained what Archie did, “He had a theory that unless you had something that just flew out of the record shops, in other words, a song that couldn’t be stopped, you just had to go out and do every major record hop and meet every DJ to convince them to play your song and Archie said he didn’t want me getting into any bad vocal habits. Let’s just make records and it wasn’t until after Poetry in Motion that I began performing live. He taught me some important lessons I have never forgotten.”

In the UK he had further hits with Jimmy’s Girl which stalled at number 43, It Keeps Right On A Hurtin’ which fared better, reaching number 31 in 1962 in the UK but became his most successful song Stateside. He joined the U.S. Army in Fort Jackson, South Carolina for six months and on completion of his service he continued his career with a string of live appearances. Later in 1962, he recorded a cover of Hank Lockin’s 1949 hit Send Me The Pillow You Dream On and took it to number 21 and he closed 1962 with a cover of Hank Williams’ 1951 song I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You which Tillotson shortened to I Can’t Help It on the single but the EP version listed the full title. His last hit came in 1963 when the almost never-heard Out of my Mind stiffed at number 34.

He released a few more single, but all flopped in the UK and made little impact on the US single chart too. He decided to change his image and lose the teen-idol persona, after all, he was around 28 years of age and focused on being a crooner. He got a residency at the Copacabana Club in New York which was so successful that he became in demand in Miami and Las Vegas. The word spread and soon he was performing further afield in Germany and Sweden.

In 1968, he moved to California and tried his hand at acting, appearing as Dodo Bronk in The Fat Spy and 10 years later and even more minor part in The Call of the Wild where he portrayed a guitar player.

In 1979, the Lightning record label re-issued Poetry in Motion as a picture disc and listed it as a double A-side with its original B-side Princess Princess but it got no higher than number 67. Either way, it did better that the country singer Ferlin Husky’s parody cover, under the pseudonym Simon and Crum and retitle it Enormity in Motion which sunk without trace. In 2000 he came to the UK for a lengthy and very successful tour with Bobby Vee and Freddy Cannon. He said at the time, “I never walk through a show. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to each person in that audience. They come to be entertained and that’s what I attempt to do.”

When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1977, many fans claimed it was the end of both his and Genesis’ career. When Phil Collins took over as lead vocalist, there was very mixed reaction, but whichever way you look at it, it was a good career move for both as Genesis became far more commercial and far more successful and Gabriel had a lucrative solo career. Genesis’ first UK hit with Phil up front was Follow You Follow Me which reached number seven in 1978 and Peter Gabriel’s first solo hit was Solsbury Hill which peaked at number 13 in 1977. Three years later he released Games Without Frontiers which, with the help of his friend Kate Bush on backing vocals, went to number four. It wasn’t to be the last time they shared a recording studio.

Peter Gabriel is probably best remembered for his hit Sledgehammer with its clever, innovative video, but the the video that accompanied Don’t Give Up was in stark contrast. It was just Peter Gabriel and Kate in an embrace for six and a half minutes. Gabriel had been married to Jill for 15 years and their marriage was on the rocks and when it came to making the video Gabriel still wanted to ring his wife and get her permission to embrace his duet partner. In an interview with Q magazine, Gabriel said, “I thought that five minutes of groping Kate in front of the world was perhaps not the best thing for a dodgy marriage. At the time I felt I needed a blessing. Anyway, Jill was great about it.”

The song opens with, ‘In this proud land we grew up strong, we were wanted all along. I was taught to fight, taught to win, I never thought I could fail’ and instantly sounds desperate and that’s exactly what it was. It was Jill who gave Peter the original inspiration after she’d read a newspaper article about a woman who was so down that she jumped from a high rise building with her child and ended her life. In an interview with Songfacts, Jill said, “I gave it to Peter and it was the original inspiration and he was heartbroken to read it.”

Two other influences have been cited by Gabriel, one is a television programme about unemployment and the other was some photographs he came across in a book called In This Proud Land – hence the song’s opening line. The book was published in the Depression-era in America in the 1930s. The photos were taken by the New Jersey-born Dorothea Lange whose parents were second-generation German immigrants. What struck Gabriel was the parallel he drew between the tragic loss the farmers suffered and the people who were suffering from the economic downturn during Margaret Thatcher’s time as PM.

The song was a very personal one for Gabriel as he was very close to a nervous breakdown and wanted to write the song to express his thanks to his family for the help they have given him during this tough time. He said, “Basically, handling failure is one of the hardest things we have to learn to do.” Jill was there by his side and one of the expressions she’d regularly say when she could see her husband was going through the emotional struggles was, ‘don’t give up’. Jill added, “I think the song is really about us.”

The song wasn’t originally written as a duet but then decided it should be, so he adjusted the lyrics so it fitted for two people to sing. Kate Bush was not his first choice of duet partner despite the success they’d have five years previous. He originally asked Dolly Parton but she turned the offered down. He said, when I first wrote it there was a reference to American Roots music so it was suggested that Dolly should sing on it. Dolly was reported as saying she turned it down because the song’s theme and style didn’t suit her country music image. It’s something he was later thankful for in light of how well the song turned out with Bush’s vocals.

He told Spin magazine in 1986, “The sensitive way that Kate handled the back and forth on that song was very gratifying because it’s not just about a woman supporting a man in a tough relationship, the other thing dragging me down is unemployment which was really tearing apart the social fabric of England at that time. Without a sense of self-esteem, it’s impossible to function.” In a comment he made in the Daily Mail, Gabriel admitted, “Kate played a big part in my rebirth, that record helped me so much.”

A few years later, Gabriel and Dolly Parton’s paths crossed again and in an interview with Spinner magazine, Gabriel said, “What’s funny is, we met a couple of times after that, and she ended up asking me to sing it with her on her TV show, but we were never able to make it happen.”

The song has been covered a number of times in duet form firstly in 1993 by Willie Nelson and Sinead O’Connor and appeared on Nelson’s album Across The Borderline, in 1999 with Clannad’s Máire Brennan and Michael McDonald collaborating, Alicia Keys & Bono did it as a charity song for Africa in 2005 and Donny Osmond & Laura Wright did it in 2014. In a solo version, it was covered by ex-Shalamar singer Jody Watley in 2001 and Heart’s Ann Wilson in 2016 and there was even a three-way collaboration in 2010 between Herbie Hancock, P!nk and John Legend. Regardless of who sings it, the strong message of ‘don’t give up’ when life looks bleak remains strong.

The music business is a cut throat industry with many clandestine goings on and many musicians hate it because of the greed of the record label, executives and managers/agents alike. Many a court case has ensued due to some underhanded deal to make someone rich quick, none more famous than the Sony vs George Michael case of 1992 when George took Sony to court  claiming he had little control over his work, with the company treating him as “no more than a piece of software.” Unfortunately, George lost the case and then revealed in a documentary that he regretted taking them to court because it halted his career, thankfully, only briefly, but George, as always, bounced back. Tom Petty was another who was fully aware of what the ‘industry’ got up to and refused to be a pawn in their game. He had a court battle with MCA records and often stood up to greedy CEOs who tried it on. He also hated radio conglomerations, as do I, because radio has lost its individuality and sense of purpose. Petty’s song The Last DJ made his feelings known about radio and it followed in the footsteps of Mark Germino’s song Rex Bob Lowenstein. His song Into The Great Wide Open demonstrates his disregard for the music industry as a whole.

Six week ago, I wrote the story behind Scenes From An Italian Restaurant and the heart-warming story of Brenda and Eddie meeting, growing together and loving life, now I’ve been asked for the story behind Into the Great Wide Open with the opening verse sounding like it tells the same story, and a lead character with the same name, Eddie. In reality, it’s a very different story.

The song could be perceived as autobiographical because in the opening verse, it tells the story of Eddie who goes to Los Angeles, gets a tattoo, meets a girl in the tattoo place, she also has a tattoo, they moved in together and to earn money, he gets a job as a doorman in a nightclub and she teaches him guitar. He seems to learn quickly and soon gets to showcase his work in the club. The critics give him favourable reviews and he decides to get himself an agent and a roadie, records a song and hits the big time as it goes into the chart and the sky was the limit.

Then, along comes the record label executive or A&R men as they were called then, A&R standing for artist and repertoire, and seizes an opportunity to make money and thus says to Eddie, ‘I don’t hear a single’ meaning, I want something radio friendly and commercial that we can market in order to make money. After all, that’s what’s behind every big corporation despite that fact that they tell you their priorities lie elsewhere.

Tom Petty formed the Heartbreakers in 1976 and originally comprised keyboard player Benmont Tench, lead guitarist Mike Campbell, bass player Ron Blair and drummer Stan Lynch. Blair was replaced by Howie Epstein in 1982. Campbell’s guitar is at its most anthemic in the song’s chorus especially when Petty refers to Eddie being, ‘Out in the great wide open A rebel without a clue’.

One thing I personally hate when I’m watching a movie, is when it doesn’t have an ending. If I know that before I refuse to watch it. Finish the story, give us a proper ending. That’s very much the same with Into the Great Wide Open – we don’t learn what happens when the record company dump him because he hasn’t given them a hit single and we also don’t know how Eddie and his tattooed lady get on. Instead, the song ends on a repeated chorus.

The song’s video played a big part as it featured Johnny Depp as Eddie, the great Faye Dunaway as Eddie’s manager and Gabrielle Anwar as Eddie’s girlfriend, there was also appearances by Terence Trent D’Arby, Matt LeBlanc and Chynna Phillips. Tom, not only sings, he plays the part of a reporter, the tattooist and the road manager named Bart. He later said of it, “That was one of the first ones I wrote for the album. I really liked the video to that, one of the only times I’ve ever felt fulfilled by a video. The song was such a narrative that the video was a piece of cake to make. I even had people coming to me wanting to make it into a movie. I said, ‘It’s been done.’ I really think an entire movie would be more than is required. But it was a lot of fun. Very funny song and a very true song.” He managed to secure Depp during a break in the filming of Arizona Dream in which he starred with Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway. It was Depp who got Dunaway on board, he explained, “I got asked to do the video for Into The Great Wide Open and I called Faye and I said, ‘I’m going to do this video for Tom Petty, maybe you should come play the fairy godmother. And she became a teenage girl, squealing, you know, ‘Oh, Tom Petty!’ She was really into it.” The six and a half minute video closes with Depp revisiting the same tattoo parlour he had visited on his arrival in Hollywood and seeing himself as the tattooist, that being his own destiny and proving that the great wide open will close at some time.

Apart from also appearing in pop videos for Johnny Cash and The Lemonheads, Depp is also an accomplished guitarist and has played on songs by Patti Smith and Paul McCartney. He also played slide guitar on Fade In-Out, a track on Oasis’ album Be Here Now which was recorded whilst Depp and Noel Gallagher where both on holiday on the Caribbean island of Mustique.

Whenever the conversation arises about which singers can still sing like they used to, Cliff and Macca are often cited as those who can’t whilst Tom Jones and Roger Daltrey can, but one name that rarely crops on this topic is Van Morrison. Friends who I spoke to last year after they saw him live said, he sounds no different from how he did when he first came to prominence as the lead singer with Them in the mid-sixties.

Them were formed in Belfast in the Spring of 1964 after lead singer and saxophonist Van Morrison answered an advert for musicians to play at a new R&B club that was once frequented by sailors. They needed a band for the opening night and Van called in the troops and did the job. The main line up stabled by the time the hits came the following year and they featured guitarist and occasional singer Billy Harrison, bass player Alan Henderson and five different keyboard players and drummers.

They signed a deal with Decca records and released their first single Baby Please Don’t Go which had originally been recorded by Big Joe Williams in 1935. They went into Decca’s studios in West Hampstead and recorded seven songs in one session and one of them was Gloria which was relegated to the B-side of Baby Please Don’t Go. Van wrote the song when he’d just turned 18 and was still performing with his previous band, The Monarchs.

He had written about his latest infatuation as he growls and yells her name throughout a seemingly  innocent song about his relationship, but to find out more you’ll need to witness the performance live as Van turns it into and epic with his trademark ad-libs. The single version features a young session guitarist called Jimmy Page and has a fairly repetitive three-chord riff. It provides the perfect backing for Van to half speak and half sing, sometimes in an explicit way, the ins and outs of night-time visits by this teenage lust called Gloria.

In an interview with Niall Stokes, the editor at Hot Press, Van gave a further insight, “I remember I wrote it in Hyndford Street. It was pretty simple, because the idea came from two places – two sources. The chords came from the Everly Brothers. The words came from listening to Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley’s song I’m A Man – spelled M-A-N, so that was the idea of G-L-O-R-I-A. Also it was the same name as my cousin, who was thirteen years older than me. It wasn’t about her, but it was her name. The third musical idea, in the solo, was a riff that was inspired Little Walter instrumental. So those three components were how I wrote that song. I wrote it in one sitting. It was pretty simple.”

In 1966, Them had a residency at the Whiskey A-Go Go and one night towards the end of their tenure, the lead singer of their support band, The Doors, saw the Morrison’s – Van and Jim – launching into a call and response version of the song. Thereafter, it became a staple favourite of The Doors at their live shows. Fans who went to see similar garages bands in the States like The Kingsmen, The Beau Brummels and the Castaways often requested Gloria, and it became so popular that the record label began promoting Gloria the following year and it went to number 71 on Billboard. In 1974, Morrison released a solo version of the song to little interest. Fans still preferred the Them version.

Gloria had been covered by numerous acts including Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders, David Bowie, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Simple Minds, but it has been a UK hit once – in 1993, when Van re-recorded it with the blues giant, John Lee Hooker in a five and quarter minute version which reached number 31.

When asked his opinion of it in a Rolling Stone interview, Van said, “I was just being me, a street cat from Belfast. Probably like thousands of kids from Belfast who were in bands.” In the States, the biggest hit version was by Shadows of Knight who covered it just one year after Them and that went top 10. The same year, Morrison decided to go solo and left the band. Without his distinct tones, further success was not forthcoming and so the band split…..into two new bands, one called Them which featured Alan Henderson and the other, formed by former (original) Them members Pat and Jackie McAuley, called the Belfast Gypsies. The latter’s debut singles was called Gloria’s Dream (‘Round and ‘Round) presumably to cash in on the success of Gloria, but it never happened. They tried one further single without success and gave up.

In 1967, Van released, his debut album, Blowin’ Your Mind! and, arguably his most famous song, Brown Eyed Girl – neither which troubled the UK chart. He followed it with Astral Weeks which many cite as his best album. Brown Eyed Girl has become a party favourite at every wedding and disco and eventually landed in the UK chart in 2013 where is stalled at number 60.

Bob Dylan has been a massive Van Morrison fan and at the 1994 Brits, Van was awarded for his Outstanding Contribution to Music and during the ceremony, Bob Dylan performing live in the States, stopped his own show to send congratulations to Van and whilst the pair were conversing, Dylan’s band began playing Gloria.

When I first heard this song in the late seventies, it was as part of a jingle Duncan Johnson used to play on his Saturday afternoon Capital Radio show which he called Afternoon Delight and never realised it was part of a song. When I delved deeper, it riled me because of what I thought was a grammatical error and I hate those. The line that follows the bridge is, ‘Thinking of you’s working up my appetite’ and I thought they were singing, ‘Thinking of you’s working up a appetite’ and it only took me about 30 years to realise. Not long after learning that, I also found out what it was about and, even more bizarrely, what it inspired it.

Afternoon Delight is sung by the Starland Vocal Band who were one-hit wonders really although in their native States, they did have three very minor hits on the Billboard Hot 100, but nothing anyone would remember. The band comprised two couples, Bill and Taffy Danoff who were already married and Jon Carroll (spelt John in Billboard Publications) and Margot Chapman who were soon to be married and were formed in Washington D.C. The Danoff’s already had some experience as they were both in a folk group called Fat City. In 1971, they wrote a song called Take Me Home Country Roads which was covered by John Denver with the Danoff’s backing him and it became Denver’s first US hit reaching number two. In the UK, it was only a hit for Olivia Newton-John where it reached number 15 and again in 2001 for the Hermes House Band under the title Country Roads and went to number seven. Fat City became a regular support act for John Denver and have the accolade of knowing their song, years later, would be adopted as the official state anthem of West Virginia.

Now, you hear of songwriters suddenly having a burst of inspiration and they start making notes on whatever comes to hand, Freddie Mercury began scribbling some words to what would become Bohemian Rhapsody on the back of a fag packet, and Squeeze’s Chris Difford sketched the lyrics to Tempted on a cigarette box in a cab on the way to Heathrow Airport, but how many do you know that have been inspired by a menu? That’s how Afternoon Delight came about.

One afternoon, Danoff was sitting in a bar called Clyde’s of Georgetown in Washington DC and they offered half price drinks in their happy hour which they called afternoon delight. He began attending the venue regularly, usually on Sunday afternoons, mainly to watch his home team, the NFL Redskins, play their home games and over the course of the next six months the song came together. In an interview with People magazine, he said, “All that energy coming out of the tube gets my creative juices flowing.”

That venue’s happy hour and the context of the song have nothing more in common. It’s not difficult to work out what was probably going on in Danoff’s mind when he wrote the song which opens with, ‘Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight, gonna grab some afternoon delight. My motto’s always been, When it’s right, it’s right, Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night?’ Yep, daytime sex.

Danoff confirmed it in an interview with Dennis Hunt at the L.A Times, “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song. I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex. It was one of those songs that you could really have a good time writing. If the song had been banned, it would have been a real injustice. The lyrics are subtle and sophisticated and not at all raunchy. It might have been banned years ago, but not today.”

Although it’s Bill’s song, Jon wasn’t too happy with it at the time explaining to Songfacts, “Afternoon Delight is not the kind of record for someone who wants to be perceived as a bad-ass rock and roller. It’s not cool to like that record, right? I was 18 when we recorded it, and it came out and I couldn’t believe that they chose it as a single. Of course, I’m an idiot, because I was 18.” He has since taken a different view.

The song barely made the top 20 in the UK despite much radio airtime, but it went to number one in the States in July 1976 making it the 438th US chart-topper and number one on America’s bicentennial. It didn’t suffer any type of radio ban because the lyrics are not raunchy nor suggestive enough to the authorities to notice.

It’s had its place in numerous movies including, Good Will Hunting (1997), Boogie Nights (1997), Arrested Development (2003) and the TV shows The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park.

Bill Danoff had obviously made a fair bit of money from the song and is generally happy, but one thing niggles him, “It’s always contextualized in some ridiculous way, which always pisses me off a little bit, but it also makes me aware that there’s something endearing about it,” he told Songfacts. “Of all the usages of it, my favourite was Malcolm In The Middle when they’re finally getting out of the house and the boys are finally sorted out and Mom and Dad are going out on their own. She’s got her leg up on the dashboard of the Dodge Caravan, and she’s shaving ‘it’. She’s all lathered up and the radio is on playing Afternoon Delight.”

A few weeks ago Paul Gambaccini, on his Sunday show, mentioned that he was having a conversation with someone and they were discussing singers who still have their voice many years after their career began and he said, that Tom Jones was probably the only one from the 60s. Well, I disagree, there are a few, Roger Daltrey, Paul Jones, Helen Shapiro and Mick Jagger immediately spring to mind. Another lady who began in the 60s, but didn’t find success until the 70s is the wonderful Elkie Brooks. I had the pleasure of seeing her in Bromley exactly two years ago and she was certainly as powerful as ever. Only last week I saw some footage of her at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival in 2024 and that was proof enough.

As a collector of original versions of well-known songs, it’s always riled me that I have never been able to get hold of the original version of this week’s suggestion, the reason being is that it was first performed in a Broadway revue show called Dance Me A Song and no cast recording was made. It was staged at the Royale Theatre between 20th January and 18th February 1950 with all the music and lyrics written by James Shelton. It was a flop, but one great song survived and recorded by many.

James Shelton was an actor, composer and writer and had appeared in Annie Dear (1924), New Faces of 1934 (1934), Who’s Who (1938), The Straw Hat Revue (1939), Mrs. Patterson (1954) and Almost Crazy (1955). In later years, as a writer, he contributed to The Victor Borge Show, The Jackie Gleason Show and his last known work was with The Honeymooners TV special in 1976. As a song composer, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonyms J. Skelton, James Hampton and Jay Shelton.

It was Hope Foye who sung it in the original show. Hope was a classically trained soprano as well as a folk and jazz singer. She was born Frances Hope Wainwright in Middletown, Connecticut on 2nd September 1921 and died on 5th January 2025 at the age of 103. In the 1950s, she sang extensively alongside Pete Seeger and the Weavers, so much so that she was often nicknamed the fifth Weaver. She also performed on stage with Paul Robeson at Madison Square Garden and gained international recognition after winning a singing prize at the World Youth Music Festival in East Berlin. Later in life she became a civil rights activist and moved to Mexico where she spent 10 years of her life and learned fluent Spanish. I was pleased to learn that she is survived by two daughters, four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

Lilac Wine is a captivating song that tells the story of a lost lover and how the protagonist takes solace in a potent wine that they have made from the lilac tree they sat beneath to mourn their loss. The song almost makes the wine take over your mind and soul, which, if you have enough of any intoxicating liquor can probably happen, but this is almost done on purpose knowing that with enough mind-altering alcohol, it will make them believe that the lover will return with its sweet and headiness being compared, in effect, to that lost love. Midway through the song, and as the song starts to build, she clearly begins to hallucinate his arrival in the distance, but too far away to be clear when we hear the line, ‘Listen to me, I cannot see clearly, Isn’t that he coming to me, nearly here?’

The first recorded version was by the distinctly wavy voice of Eartha Kitt in June 1953, her version is good, but doesn’t have the feeling that Nina Simone put into it when she recorded it in 1966. In my opinion, only Elkie Brooks can make you feel her pain and loss in her version in 1978, which is possibly the reason it’s been the only hit version…so far. In 1994, three years before his untimely death in 1997, Jeff Buckley recorded a sombre version faithful to Nina Simone’s. He once said, “A beautiful song I wish I wrote.”

The song has moved many people for example, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan said of it, “It’s having a dependency. It’s having a love – a true love that you feel and you know is there. And maybe that love at that particular time is a substance,” when he covered it in 2021 with his band the Soul Savers. One of my other favourite versions is by Jeff Beck with his haunting guitar and featured the delicate voice of Imelda May in 2010. Even Miley Cyrus gave it a go in 2012 at her Backyard Sessions. It seems whoever covers it, tried to make it their own and many succeed.

Surprisingly little else is known about the song’s author, James Shelton. All that seems to be available is that his middle initial was H, but not what it stood for. There is no known birth or death date for him or even where he was born. If you happen  to come across a picture of him, he bears a resemblance to the actor Peter Butterworth. Although there’s no definitive proof, as Songfacts points out, James may be been inspired by a passage from the 1924 book Sorrow In Sunlight by Ronald Firbank which reads, ‘Offering a light, lilac wine, sweet and heady, Miami circled, here and there’

In a nutshell, this song is a yearning for a lost love that is so intense it’s intoxicating.