CND

466. Kelly Marie – Feels Like I’m in Love (1980)

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The Intro

‘BOO BOO! BOO BOO! BOO BOO! BOO BOO!’ It’s cheap. It’s tacky. It’s the arse-end of disco. But I love Kelly Marie’s Feels Like I’m in Love and I’m not ashamed of it.

Before

By 1977, Mungo Jerry’s fame was drying up. It was seven years since In the Summertime, six since their last number 1 Baby Jump, and they hadn’t charted in the UK since Long Legged Woman Dressed in Black peaked at 13 in 1974. But they still had a following in Europe, and singer-songwriter Ray Dorset hoped that Elvis Presley might record a demo of his called Feels Like I’m in Love. Dorset impersonates Presley here, so you can easily imagine what a fleshed-out version would have sounded like.

Unfortunately of course, ‘the King’ died that year, and Way Down became his last new number 1, signposting a move to disco that was never realised for Elvis. Mungo Jerry recorded Feels Like I’m in Love and it was relegated to a B-side for their Belgian single Sur Le Pont D’avignon. Two years later, Scottish singer Kelly Marie chanced across the song in a music publishing office.

Marie was born Jacqueline McKinnon in Paisley, Scotland on 16 October 1957. She wanted to be a star from a young age and her parents were happy to help, entering her at voice and drama school at the wee age of 10. Two years later she was singing in competitions and at 15 she made her TV debut. Aged 16 she was appearing on Thames Television’s popular ITV talent show Opportunity Knocks. As Keli Brown, she won four times with her cover of I Don’t Know How to Love Him from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

The exposure led to her signing with Pye Records in 1976 as Kelly Marie, and she went to number 1 in France with her debut single Who’s That Lady with My Man. She also featured on Joe Dolan’s number two hit in Ireland, Sister Mary. But despite a few hits in South Africa and Australia, including most notably Run to Me in 1977 and Make Love to Me in 1978, it didn’t look like she was ever going to trouble the UK charts. Singles came thick and fast in 1978, including Loving Just for Fun, a prototype for Feels Like I’m in Love, even including a very similar synth-drum sound. Nothing charted.

One day in 1979, Marie and her producer Peter Yellowstone were in the Red Bus Music office, where they came across Dorset’s tune. They saw its potential and set to work.

Review

These days Feels Like I’m in Love is laughed at. A low-budget, throwaway, cheesy disco track sung by a very ordinary looking club singer with a distinct lack of subtlety. Coming after classics like The Winner Takes It All, Ashes to Ashes and Start!, it simply doesn’t hold up. Balls to all this is what I say. Least of all, the detractors of Marie’s appearance – there’s no need, and fair play to her for adopting the early 80s boiler suit look.

OK, cards on the table – nostalgia plays an important part in the personal appeal of Feels Like I’m in Love. One of my very earliest memories involves playing this at my Nanna and Granddad’s house. I was very young, but it must have been a few years after it was number 1, as I was born in 1979. But in my head, it was this moment in which I fell in love with pop itself – the title had a very literal meaning for me.

Hearing that effervescent, bouncy backing, complete with the infectious ‘BOO BOO! BOO BOO! BOO BOO! BOO BOO!’ synth drum, was like downing a bag of sugar. Everything was turned up to the max, including Marie’s voice. I remember thinking that being in love sounded brilliant. The instrumental break was exciting and I lost myself in it, and by the time the grand finale, with the ‘ahhs’ comes in, I felt sick with happiness and excitement. I felt alive. Hearing that swirling intro unexpectedly still takes me right back to that moment.

So yes, it’s very hard to be objective about something that had a personal impact like Feels Like I’m in Love. However, I’d still defend it as a very catchy example of cheap and cheerful late-period Brit disco. Marie of course gives it the welly it deserves, but the star here is Yellowstone’s production.

The video also turns up the camp, with Marie on a ship with two sailors, who go off on a tour of London, performing in front of mostly non-plussed people. At the end the sailors are back on their ship, waving off Marie who’s now on a tiny boat, heading for London Bridge.

After

Feels Like I’m in Love was released in 1979 but didn’t make a mark anywhere other than South Africa. But upon re-release a year later, it was gaining traction in the discos of Scotland, and then England. Climbing the charts, Marie achieved what must have felt unthinkable only a year previous. For two weeks in September, she was number 1, and she was a hit all over Europe too.

The success was short-lived. Marie rushed out a re-release of Loving Just for Fun, but it sounded like a pale retread of her biggest single, and it peaked at 21. Hot Love in 1981 was her last charting single, reaching 22. UK disco was on its way out, to be replaced by Hi-NRG, which you could argue was exactly what Feels Like I’m in Love was an early version of.

Marie continued releasing singles and performing at clubs throughout the 80s and 90s. In 2005 she appeared on the ITV talent show featuring stars of yesteryear, Hit Me, Baby, One More Time. She lost out to Chesney Hawkes.

The Outro

There were two inferior remixes of her number 1 in the 90s. Stock Aitken Waterman may have been responsible for many Hi-NRG classics in the early to mid-80s, but by 1991 they had run out of steam, and their version is a pale imitation. The 97 remix is even worse.

The Info

Written by

Ray Dorset

Producer

Peter Yellowstone

Weeks at number 1

2 (13-26 September)

Trivia

Deaths

14 September : Fashion journalist Alison Settle
17 September: Enid Warren
18 September: Antiquarian Edward Croft-Murray/Opera singer Walter Midgley
22 September: Labour politician Raymond Dobson/Town planner JR James
23 September: Cricketer Geoffrey Latham/Linguist Alan SC Ross
24 September: Novelist Jacky Gillott/Mycologist Clarence James Hickman
25 September: Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham

Meanwhile…

13 September: Hercules, a popular TV bear, which had gone missing on a Scottish island while filming an advert for Kleenex toilet tissue, is found.

21 September: The CND hold a rally at RAF Greenham Common for the first time.

24 September: 34-year-old Singapore-born doctor Upadhya Bandara is attacked and left injured by Peter Sutcliffe in Headingley, Leeds.

83. Russ Conway – Side Saddle (1959)

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The Intro

By the spring of 1959 it had been three years since Winifred Atwell had last topped the charts, with The Poor People of Paris. Despite the changes in musical tastes since then, there was still a market for jolly old honky tonk instrumentals that you could have a knees-up to. Who could fill that gap? Step forward, Russ Conway.

Before

Born Trevor Stanford (the name his self-penned songs would be credited to) on 2 September 1925 in Bristol, his mother had been a pianist but died when he was only 14. His two brothers had formal musical education, but no real talent to speak of, whereas Conway was the opposite.

He served in the Navy during World War Two, where he was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for ‘gallantry and devotion to duty’. During the war his many health problems began, which saw him discharged due to a stomach ulcer. He had lost one of the tips of a finger in an accident with a bread-slicer, but that didn’t stop him taking his friend’s advice, and upon his return, Conway agreed to stand in for a holidaying club pianist. He then began performing in pubs and clubs, before being spotted by the choreographer Irving Davies. He signed to EMI’s Colombia label, where he would play piano for stars including Gracie Fields.

Eventually Conway made it on to The Billy Cotton Band Show, and it was Cotton who was instrumental in persuading Conway to loosen up and develop the style that made him a solo star. His first solo single, Party Pops, was released in 1957, and was a medley in the vein of Atwell’s 1954 Christmas number 1, Let’s Have Another Party. However, it was by composing that he made his breakthrough. When writing a score for a TV musical version of Beauty and the Beast, Conway was asked at the last minute to write a tune for a ballroom scene. He hastily came up with one and called it Side Saddle.

Review

This has to be one of the strangest number 1 singles so far. I’m really struggling to grasp how it happened. At least with Atwell, her number 1s were covers of familiar tunes played at a manic pace. I’ve now listened to Side Saddle several times and I can’t remember the tune, let alone work out how it spent a month at the top. It has a certain quaint charm I guess and will have reminded the oldies of the time of their youth, perhaps. That’s the best I can manage, I’m afraid.

The Info

Written by

Trevor Stanford 

Producer

Norman Newell

Weeks at number 1

4 (27 March-23 April)

Trivia

Births

15 April: Actress Emma Thompson
17 April: Painter Peter Doig
21 April: The Cure singer Robert Smith

Meanwhile…

30 March: An early CND rally took place in Trafalgar Square that saw 20,000 demonstrators attend.

2 April: United Dairies merged with Cow & Gate to become Unigate. You might say, ‘So what?’, and it’s before my time too, but Unigate are fondly remembered for their ‘Watch out there’s a Humphrey about’ adverts in the 70s… My mind is wandering… can we have a number 1 I can understand next, please?

69. Perry Como with Mitchell Ayres' Orchestra and the Ray Charles Singers – Magic Moments (1958)

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The Intro

Michael Holliday’s The Story of My Life, a wistful easy listening ditty written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David in which a man looks back at his life with his loved one, was replaced at the top of the charts by – another wistful easy listening ditty written by Bacharach and David in which a man looks back at his life with his loved one. They both even contained whistling.

Before

Magic Moments, sung by mega-crooner Perry Como, is regarded as a classic of the genre, shot Bacharach and David into the big time as songwriters and reigned at number 1 for a full two months.
Perry Como had already had a number 1 here back in 1953 with the largely forgettable Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.

Since then he had charted highly in the UK with Wanted and Idle Gossip in 1954 and Hot Dog (Dog Ziggity Boom) in 1956, and by then he had begun donning his trademark cardigans for The Perry Como Show in the US. In 1956, a poll in Life magazine revealed he was considered to be the ideal husband material among young women. The ideal choice to perform a song as sweet and cosy as Magic Moments, then.

Review

It’s hard to review Magic Moments seriously, and it’s an easy target for spoofing and poking fun at now, but at the time it must have come as a blessed relief to older record buyers and conservative types who may have been put off by all the rock’n’roll that had invaded the charts.

Serene Dominic said this in his 2003 book, Burt Bacharach, Song by Song:
‘Combined with the quizzical bassoon, the whistling and the ghastly white shadings of the Ray Charles Singers, these distant recollections must seem like occurrences on another planet to later generations.’
It seems a tad harsh to me but I take the point. However, as far as this type of song goes, and compared to some of the others I’ve put myself through for this blog, I can’t help but like it. A bit. I take exception to this lyric, though:

‘I’ll never forget the moment we kissed the night of the hay ride
The way that we hugged to try to keep warm while takin’ a sleigh ride’

You can’t rhyme ‘ride’ with ‘ride’! And this is from two of the greatest songwriters of all time!

After

To me, Magic Moments means former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band hero Neil Innes in the 1980s adverts for Quality Street, lampooning Como, or brings to mind Terry Gilliam’s screen version of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) arrives at a Vegas hotel full of police with a large arsenal of drugs in his possession. But in 1958, it boosted Como’s image and success even further.

Whether it was music, film, radio or TV, he won many plaudits, including several Emmys and Grammys. Like most singers of his ilk, his career suffered in the 60s, but he enjoyed a revival of sorts in the 70s, with It’s Impossible in 1970 and And I Love You So and For the Good Times in 1973 all reaching the top 10 in the UK.

Como continued to perform for years after. The world mourned when he died in his sleep on 12 May 2001, just six days short of his 89th birthday.

The Info

Written by

Burt Bacharach & Hal David

Producer

Joe Weisman

Weeks at number 1

8 (28 February-24 April)

Trivia

Births

1 March: Singer Nik Kershaw
3 March: Actress Miranda Richardson
5 March: Singer Andy Gibb
8 March: Singer Gary Numan
18 March: Writer and composer Neil Brand
21 March: Actor Gary Oldman
12 April: Echo & the Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant
14 April: Actor Peter Capaldi
15 April: Musician Benjamin Zephaniah

Deaths

26 March: Cricketer Phil Mead
19 April: Footballer Billy Meredith

Meanwhile…

2 March: A British team led by Sir Vivian Fuchs completed the first ever crossing of the Antarctic, using caterpillar tractors and dogsled teams over 99 days.
19 March: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh officially opened the London Planetarium, the first of its kind in Britain.
23 March: Work began on the M1, the first full-length motorway in the country.
1 April: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, later responsible for such magic as the Doctor Who theme tune in 1963, was first created.
4 April: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, better known now as CND, began its first protest march, from Hyde Park, London, to Aldermarston in Berkshire.