Hello Britpop. When I was a teenage Bowie fan all the biographies mentioned how David’s early vocal style was indebted to Anthony Newley’s, but I’d never heard of or heard Newley before and didn’t get round to tracking his stu[…]

A Fifties pop simp whose time was fast receding, Holliday’s second shot at glory is gloopy but pleasant. The lullaby pace brings out the best in Holliday’s slow and low croon, but really this song belongs to the doo-wop girls backing him […]

Pop music owes several debts to Caribbean emigrants who built their own sound systems out of frustration or fun. This is one of the smaller ones: Emile Ford’s vocation was sound engineering, the music was a lucrative side project. He didn&#8217[…]

I’ll state the obvious: British pop is rarely if ever cut from whole cloth. The template at a given time is generally American; the attitude and voice tailored to local sensibilities. The question of accent is central to UK pop’s hybrid i[…]

Cliff and Hank Marvin share the honours here. Cliff snuggles in close again but stays on the humble side of smarmy. Hank is a model of restraint: tiny lick-lets of guitar (at 0’46” for instance) adding just a hint of colour and a delicate[…]

From dream lovers to an unpleasant wake-up call: Darin snaps his fingers and Kurt Weill ushers the spooning teenagers offstage pronto – one lovestuck girl remains and so Bobby sings her this nasty little song. Everything about “Mack The K[…]

At first glace Jerry Keller’s only Brit hit seems dreadfully badly timed: a breezy Hammond confection about the onset of Summer reaching No.1 in October. But when you hear the record it makes sense – contentedly wistful, this is a song fo[…]

Craig Douglas on the other hand makes Cliff seem like James Dean. On the cover of Cuddle Up With Craig he looks distinctly uncomfortable, and distinctly grown-up. He sings grown-up too. ‘Only Sixteen’ is a look back to a romance that coul[…]

The production on ‘Living Doll’ is pretty special – impeccably polite but amazingly intimate, Cliff sings like his lips are almost brushing your ear but Cliff being Cliff he wouldn’t so much as ruffle your hair without a chaperone[…]

1959 was the first high summer of teen-pop ‘ a catwalk of heart-throbs at the top of the charts. Their songs weren’t quite interchangeable, but there was definitely a certain pop style that was selling and they worked it well. The key was[…]