DON CORNELL – "Hold My Hand"

This may be the first no.1 that started life as a b-side. The original top side was I’m Blessed (“because I have two ears to hear you”??) which is similarly icky, but at least Cornell stays on the croony side when he could plump for operatics. Pleasant but unspectacular, and quite quite sexless.

No.2 alert – Nat King Cole’s gorgeous Smile. Damn.

Hold My Hand is from a film called Susan Slept Here, a comedy with Debbie Reynolds playing a juvenile delinquent who causes chaos on Christmas Eve. I’m off to the video shop.

“hold My Hand” is a wonderful song. It itroduced me to Don Cornell; I was born in 1969. I love old movies and saw Susan Slept Here and fell in love with the song and then my Mom told me about Don cornell and his hits like “It Isn’t Fair”, etc.

I can tell you that this record was actually banned by some radio stations simply because the first line comprised of “So this is the kingdom of heaven” and it was felt that this could greatly offend Christians. Blimey, how times change! Nowadays the BBC makes an industry in doing just that at every available opportunity. On the other hand, can you imagine just what the 1954 bosses would have made of “Highway to Hell”?!

Well, it has all the right ingredients for a smash hit in the pre-rock days – very “souped-up and melodramatic”, as my old English teacher remarked of Frankie Laine. That little classical section in the middle is rather nice; the song itself is quite good “of its type”, as the NME would have said.

I’m getting a kind of foreshadowing of Elvis in the way Don slurs the last note of each line – never heard the song before tonight and quite enjoyed it. I thought I’d heard of Cornell but realise now that I was thinking of Don Cockell, the Balham blacksmith who lost a world heavyweight title fight to Rocky Marciano a few months after this was number one. Wonder how many others had them confused at the time?!

Don Cornell, Frank Cordell, Kim Cordell… it’s a pre rock minefield.

…and Sid Waddell. Daddy Cool. Geddit?

Okay, coat.

Re 8: Well, Don certainly drops the light operatics on Teenage Meeting.

Guests at the party go by the names of Lilly Pop, Bubblegum and Old Man Thornton, and Don’s main concern is to put the cat out before the rockin’ begins.

God, I love the ersatz when it sounds this screwy.

I’m also very fond of Ronnie Harris’s The Story Of Tina. The punchline is telegraphed, but it’s so sweetly sung. I’ve been looking for an original 45 of it for years.

…and there I was thinking that “The Story of Tina” was about a fling between Ron and Bobby Moore’s missus. The claim was rubbish, of course, although they didn’t call him Chopper for nothing!

Worth it just for the ‘portal’ / ‘immortal’ rhyme? Some high-quality crooning, but another 4/10.