ESTHER AND ABI OFARIM – "Cinderella Rockefeller"

Wow, what the hell is this? I went and downloaded it out of curiousity, as I can assure you this one has not really made it into US oldies formats if it was ever a hit here at all. As a number one it’s a total failure (textures and motifs in search of a hook)…would love to know more about the context surrounding this. Were these people on the covers of magazines and stuff? Were people really excited about them? Was it selling to the people who bought old-timey records when they were new, or was it a post-“She’s Leaving Home” hipster old-timey? The only point of comparison I have is something like “Winchester Cathedral,” which makes much more sense as a hit…

I have to give this one credit for flat out weirdness in the context of hitdom. Look for it to show up as background music in some wacky sequence in a hipster movie, with an implied creepiness slid in somehow. The kids in Ghost World could have caught this on late-night TV or something.

Hi Tom, sorry, this comment is not connected with your post but I couldn’t find an email address… I’m looking for a pop quiz in London, & came across references to Poptimism in my search. I wondered if there will be any more Poptimism pub quizzes, particularly in September? (If not, maybe you or your readers know of another music quiz that you could recommend in London?) Many thanks.

(Annie the best pop quiz I’ve found in London is on Tuesday nights at a very good pub called The Rosemary Branch, which is off the New North Road, north of Old Street.)

How I managed to hear this in the US I can no longer recall, but somehow I have (twice, I think) in the past forty years. Twice was more than enough.

I had it pegged as something to do with the Avengers as a child in the 1970s – did they perhaps try and camply tribute Steed and Peel in a proto-promo? Also, I suppose I presumed that this kind of music was indigenous to the 60s, cf Bonnie & Clyde etc. I might also have liked their relationship: they seemed like Morecambe and Wise.

Resurrection Watch (should anyone care): only Lulu and Basil Brush spring to mind, though I doubt that was ever a single. Scott Walker fraternised with Esther (because of the commerical relationship Erithian mentions?) – on the TV show, I think, and on Til The Band Comes In, though the pair of them performing this song with melancholy strings remains a fantasy AFAIK. And Walk On Water, a movie about the friendship between a Nazi war criminal and a Mossad goon, uses the track for a disconcerting duet. No adverts spring to mind, which seems odd…

I think they parlayed Eurovision semi-succcess (they came second!) into pan-European light entertainment stardom

That seems to have been quite a conscious aim — this entry reminded me that when I was v small, my uncle had an E&AO 7″ of “Ack Värmeland, du sköna”, ie the “regional anthem” of the Swedish county Värmland. Yes, sung in Swedish.

The B-side was Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” if I’m not misremembering.

“Andrew Lauder, head of A&R at British UA, found himself in a meeting with Abi Ofarim, the latter clutching a copy of Can’s album – “… the first pressing of Monster Movie, which I thought was a tremendous record. We never heard from Abi again.””

Mason Williams, Smothers Brothers … makes sense somehow, in a “mainstream-edgy, cool-but-not-in-a-smoking-pot-way-except-maybe-with-Lou-Adler-at-a-key-swapping-party” way, if you get what I’m trying to say. Like, my mother would’ve hummed this while cleaning the house. Which means it’s pure shit. Anyone out there remember when the charts were peppered with “grown-up” hits, because moms & dads were occasionally buying singles? I mean, there was this, “Winchester Cathedral”, hell, ALL of Petula Clark, Matt Munro…Y’know what, tho? I’ll take that over today’s teen shit anyday. At least you knew where you stood.

top moment: When Abi sings “razzamatazz” with the jazz hands inflection in his voice, to which Esther repeats the line like she has no idea what it means..

I should imagine that a fair proportion of those keeping Popular afloat are parents.

#28: I can confirm that 100% of those keeping Popular afloat are parents!

I’m not a parent either! Not yet, anyway…

Well, you’re posting pretty darn regularly about entries as arcane as this one, and I’m guessing that’s what Tom meant. If ‘keeping afloat’ involves computer knowledge or stumping up wedge, guess you can count me out too.

Sorry, yes, I was taking “keeping afloat” to mean running the site! Obviously without the rest of you the good ship Popular would be a sad, Marie Celeste like affair, condemned to steer amidst the reefs of Louis Walsh boybands on a never ending ghost voyage.

It’s worse than that. It made #13. Sorry for earlier error.

I like this one too! I can’t believe you’re so down on it, I thought it was established that you were into yodelling back in Popular’s Frank Ifield era.

I have vowed to stop banging my Beatles drum, but even so, it offends my sense of fair play that stuff like Yellow Submarine and All You Need Is Love is allegedly for the ages, but Cinderella Rockefeller is some kind of near-unlistenable novelty record.

The Ofarims’ follow-up is completely worthless but this, yeah, I really do like it. Sweeps me straight back to a more innocent, summer-of-loving world.

I have wierdly very strong memories of this song, although in March 68 I was 4 and a half years old. I remember being quite morbidly fascinated even at that age by the strangeness of the song. It seemed to seep into my world at about the same time as I went to the cinema to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and have forever linked the two in my mind – the childcatcher and the “Cruella De Ville” strangeness of the vocals seemed to infuse my interpretation of the song itself….
And then I promptly managed to erase all this from my frontal lobes until today – when I stumbled upon this… you cruel people!!!

I have never heard this one either and I’m 47. I saw it on some website of UK No. 1’s or something.So I downloaded it. I don’t think it’s all that bad. Then again I listen to a lot of different type stuff.

A few belated notes

Abi Ofarim had nothing to do with his wife’s Eurovision success as far as I know, it was very much a solo effort.

They were sort of an Israeli Sonny & Cher, with her going on to far more considerable musical success after they split in 1970 than he did.

Despite the inherent naffness of this record, she has a beautiful voice and recorded what many people consider to be the definitive version of the BeeGees lovely composition ‘Morning Of My Life’,

http://youtu.be/PdvBRwYxkoA

Flicking through the comments, for some reason I thought #1 was mine. But as it is not, I shall enlarge: E&AOff were one of those ‘acts’ that I got tortured with, specifically the album “That’s my song” by Esther Ofarim and Abraham (as it was then), my parents’d play that and I’d yearn for the “Help” album instead. So, when this single became a hit, I enjoyed it in excess of reality because it was a bit funny. We bought this anyway.

Also, it was a sort of “double-single” as inside the sleeve was my own rendition of “I can sing a rainbow” on the exclusive bespoke pressing label “Calibre”. But the single went a wandering for twenty years, until some aunty of some uncle of ours eventually returned it to us.

http://www.45cat.com/record/nc167734uk is what they looked like.

Another single I’m afraid that I’m going to have to give 1/10 to.