Sidney's Place: BRITISH SONGBIRDS

Popular music thrives in so many guises but I am struck by the high success rate of female singers. In the US they have had Ella Fitzgerald or Whitney Houston hitting the highest of high notes, Germany and later the US were wowed by the throaty tones of Marlene Dietrich and the French were blasted out of their seats by diminutive Edith Piaf. Since the 1940s Britain has had her share of songstresses and I here celebrate four very different artistes, Vera Lynn, Alma Cogan, Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black.

Vera during WW2 and Vera at 100

Dame Vera Lynn (1917- ) celebrated her 100^th birthday on 20 March and has long been an “icon” in the words of the popular press. A well-known vocalist with dance bands in the 1930s she became The Forces’ Sweetheart during the war. Toothy and smiling she entertained the troops most famously in Burma and India, in the jungle around Kohima. Her strong penetrating voice illuminated classics like A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square, The White Cliffs of Dover and most of all nostalgic We’ll meet Again. My dear father adored Vera along with a million other fans.

Vera kept singing for decades after the War and had a notable hit with Auf Wiedersehn Sweetheart in the early 1950s. The daughter of an East End plumber, her image was wholly different from today’s pop divas. She spoke Home Counties English clearly, wore hats and adopted a middle-class lifestyle. A compilation album of her greatest songs topped the charts 5 years ago; she was revered by the military, hobnobbed with Mrs Thatcher and was showered with honours including the CH and being created a Dame. On 20 March her image was projected onto The White Cliffs in tribute. A National Treasure is an overworked expression but she has won that prize hands down.

Alma Cogan

Moving on to the 1950s and early 1960s, Alma Cogan (1932 – 66) was an ubiquitous presence in radio and TV shows and her records, principally covers of American artistes, sold very well. The pop-songs of her era were simple lyrical pieces which people hummed or whistled – Where will the Dimple Be?, Dreamboat or I’ve Got the Bell-bottom Blues are typical examples. Alma would give a lively rendition of these songs in her characteristic voice with a trade-mark giggly catch in it.

Alma was also renowned for her frocks. Huge hooped confections, unsparing of sequins and tightly busted showed off her ample charms and a high bee-hive hairdo completed the image. Alma was the daughter of observant Jewish-Romanians and her father was an itinerant haberdasher from Whitechapel. However Alma was educated at a Catholic convent school in Reading and was wholly secular. In her heyday, she shared a flat in Kensington High Street with her widowed mother and they threw showbiz parties patronised by the likes of Princess Margaret, Noel Coward, Bruce Forsyth, Michael Caine, Frankie Vaughan and other celebrities.

The advent of the Beatles and the transformation of the pop scene from 1963 made Alma look square and unfashionable and she lost her UK audience, although she remained popular in Sweden, Germany and Japan. Curiously she became very close to John Lennon, 8 years her junior. Visibly ailing in 1965, she died of ovarian cancer in London in 1966. She was only 34 and had given great pleasure in her short career.

Dusty Springfield

Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) was a more complex character. Born Mary O’Brien to a Scots-Irish tax accountant and a mother from Tralee, she was brought up in High Wycombe. The family were keen on music but was dysfunctional, a perfectionist father battling against a more easy-going mother. Dusty was a tomboy, suffering from severe mood swings. There were many instances of food and crockery being thrown around.

Entering showbiz in an all-girl quartet, The Lana Sisters, she joined up with her brother Tom and another to form The Springfields, who enjoyed some success in the folk circuit before Dusty went solo in 1963. Her husky soul-music voice became instantly popular and she produced a line of hits up to 1969 – I Only had to be with You, Wishin’ n’ Hopin’, You Don’t have to Say you love Me, Son of a Preacher Man. This was to be the apex of her career.

Dusty was a great admirer of US Motown black music and she went to Memphis to record an album which she hoped would break new ground. The album’s sales were disappointing although critically well-received. Dusty’s personal demons asserted themselves. With her career treading water, she took to drink and suffered psychological illness, self-harm becoming a problem. She was very reticent about her sexuality but she had passionate lesbian relationships, some ending in sinister violence and physical injuries.

She returned to the UK in 1983 and had a partial comeback singing with The Pet Shop Boys. Much praised as one of the finest female rock singers in the world, her diva persona frightened off record companies. In 1994 breast cancer was diagnosed and her last performance was in 1995. She lived her last years quietly in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire and died there in 1999. She was 59, her early promise largely unfulfilled.

Cilla Black in the 1960s

Cilla Black (1943 – 2015) was born Priscilla White in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool. She worked as a waitress at The Cavern, the venue much frequented by The Beatles in the 1960s. Her own impromptu performances were noticed and encouraged by the Fab Four and she eventually signed up with high-flying Brian Epstein as her manager. In 1964 she recorded her most famous song, a Burt Bacharach number intended for Dionne Warwick, which became Cilla’s trademark, Anyone who had a Heart. It was an enormous success and the flipside of the disc You’re my World was also a chart-topper.

Cilla toured the pop circuit until 1971. Personally I did not think Cilla’s voice matched Dusty Springfield’s nor was she as energetic a performer as Lulu but she did have oodles of warm personality which was to serve her well. Her version of the Beatles’ classic The Long and Winding Road was also much admired and she had a hit with another Bacharach song Alfie.

She might then have sunk into obscurity. She hosted her own BBC pop programme Cilla from 1968-76 and there was a doomed attempt to make her a comedy actress. Then LWT found the ideal vehicle for her in Blind Date which ran for 20 years from 1983 to 2003. This show tried to match up aspiring males with compatible girls and was decidedly down-market but was largely kept afloat by Cilla’s irrepressible Scouse good humour, her empathy with the contestants and her bubbly personality. These qualities were also in evidence in the other hit show she hosted Surprise, Surprise.

Cilla died of a stroke and a fall at her villa in Estepona, Spain in 2015, aged 72. Her Liverpool and North West England audience referred to her as “Our Cilla” in much the way Northerners dubbed Gracie Fields “Our Gracie” in the 1930s. This was a great and affectionate compliment.

My four singers were above all entertainers and they daily lightened the steps of their followers. Who could ask for anything more?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY Vera Lynn

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP5TsJAyFJc Alma Cogan

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uonH7CcextM Dusty Springfield

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUxn6JLwdDY Cilla Black

SMD

29.03.17