JOHNNIE RAY – "Yes Tonight Josephine"

Monumentally silly and catchy as hell. I love this, it condenses the corn and melodic joy of Guy Mitchell’s hits and throws them into a nascent rock arrangement. Quite audibly, you can hear the camp and sass that Elvis drew from Johnnie.

I know Tom’s take is how the music stands up in the 21st century, without contemporary context. But I’ve often wondered how audiences – allegedly the first teen screamers – reacted to Ray’s stage act, so I bought, for research purposes, his 1954 Live At The London Palladium album. The answer? They ooh and aah and gasp as if they were watching a saucy circus act, sex presumably being rather new in Britain seeing as it wasn’t officially invented until 1963.

And, finally, they scream for Such A Night, which he reprises, and reprises again, like James Brown throwing off the cape. And he does this until you can hear girls shout “Johnnie!!” At which point, modern Pop begins.

Johnnie Ray is a strange transitional and hard to categorise character between Sinatra of the mid 1940s bobby-soxer era and Presley of the mid 1950s. He’s not really a crooner and he’s not rock’n’roll, but at his peak he could drive an audience to hysteria just like the other two, crying and breaking down on stage – so that he was known as the “Prince of Wails” and the “Nabob of Sob”. It’s nice to see that he has 3 number one songs in these charts with largely favourable comments from contributors. He also had major hits in 1951 before these charts began with “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud that Cried” (Johnnie was always crying).

Are there many original nicknames in rock/pop? Off the top of my head I can only think of lazy, obvious ones like the King of.., the Godfather of.., the Queen of.., the Princess of.., the First Lady of.., the Boss and Macca. They should be reasonably widely-known nicknames, as the Nabob of Sob was in its day.

Is Sting a nickname?

I like that. Perry Como inevitably leads to Dean Martin. His best-known “nickname” Dino was of course his real name, but according to the usually unreliable internet sources he was also called King Leer – which is at least an original take on the stale King of..etc categories, although I don’t think it suits the amiable Dino persona. He was a boxer in his younger days and at that time had the nickname Kid Crochet, based on his real surname Crocetti.

Is Flip, Flop and Fly the only song recorded by both Johnnie Ray and Pat Boone? Given the penchant for cover versions in the 1950s, there’s got to be more.

I can remember a classmate of Billy Bunter’s called The Nawab of somewhere or other, who was routinely racially abused by Bunter. Bunter, a simply dreadful fellow, was also, as I recall, unspeakably rude to the boy who arrived at Greyfriars from an unspecified place in Lancashire on a scholarship.

Billy Bunter would have lasted about twelve seconds at Stockwell Manor including the count.

#11 – Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur, a.k.a. “Inky.” The Lancashire scholarship boy was Mark Linley.

You say somewhat randomly, but if I had five guesses who’d written a song that mentioned him, J.Cope would surely be in the top three.

So that’s who he is… not any old Teardrop Explodes song, but the one that wrecked their Smash Hits profile; Colours Fly Away, a top 54 at the tail end of ’81.

On an ’81 tip – Wattie, the Nabob of Gob.