It’s All in the Game

170. Cilla Black (Accompaniment directed by Johnny Pearson) – You’re My World (Il Mio Mondo) (1964)

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Three months since her first number 1, Anyone Who Had a Heart, Cilla Black was at number 1 again, with You’re My World. This ballad was an English language version of the Italian Il Mio Mondo, written by Umberto Bindi and Gino Paoli. The original was not a hit, but George Martin saw enough in it to commission it as Black’s follow-up.

The new title and lyrics came from Carl Sigman, who specialised in rewriting lyrics and turning them into UK hits, several of which – Answer Me, It’s All in the Game and The Day the Rains Came – went to number 1.

I think I made my feelings towards Cilla fairly clear in my last blog on her, while at the same time being pretty complimentary about Anyone Who Had a Heart. I couldn’t deny the quality of the song and considered Black’s performance stronger than the Dionne Warwick original. However, You’re My World (Il Mio Mondo) is inferior, and shows up Black’s weakness as a singer. Although this actually worked in her favour last time around, my ears weren’t so keen this time.

Black starts low, which is manageable, but at about a minute into the track, her voice explodes into what sounds like a impression of a caricature of her voice – the kind you’d get on Spitting Image in the 80s. Lyrically, You’re My World (Il Mio Mondo) is nothing to write home about – not compared to a Bacharach and David song, anyway. It’s your average overblown love song in which the singer bigs up her lover to be some sort of godlike figure. As average as it is, it’s saved by an epic George Martin production, which builds from stabbing strings at the beginning (which do suggest Cilla may be some sort of deranged obsessed lover/murderer) into full-blown orchestral loveliness courtesy of Johnny Pearson and female vocal trio The Breakaways. Her future husband and manager, Bobby Willis, also sang on the recording.

You’re My World (Il Mio Mondo) helped firmly establish Cilla as the country’s biggest female singing superstar, and it was a huge hit in several countries. However, despite the fact she had many other smashes in the UK, and is the country’s biggest-selling female solo artist of the decade, it was her final number 1.

She divided opinion even then. In 1965 Randy Newman called her version of I’ve Been Wrong Before the best cover anyone had ever performed of his material. The same year, when her version of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin was beaten to the top by The Righteous Brothers’ cover, The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham took out an advert in Melody Maker to deride Cilla’s performance.

Nonetheless the hits continued, including, among others, her theme song to the film Alfie, written by Bacharach and David. By the end of 1966 she had begun making inroads into television, with her own TV special and an appearance on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only But Also. Epstein had arranged for Black to star in her own series for the BBC shortly before his death in August 1967. Relations had become somewhat strained, with Black feeling Epstein had stopped giving her career the attention it needed. Bobby Willis took over as her manager, and her career improved in 1968 with the number eight hit Step Inside Love, written by Paul McCartney as the theme to her series Cilla.

Other than Cilla, and some attempts at comedy (seeing her attempts at being funny on TV when growing up, I can imagine these were pretty bad), the 70s were relatively quiet for Black. Bill Cotton asked her to consider becoming Bruce Forsyth’s replacement on The Generation Game in 1978, but Black declined and Larry Grayson got the job. She may have subsequently regretted doing so, as the early 80s saw her reduced to cabaret shows.

However, an appearance on Wogan in 1983 went down so well, she found herself in demand once more. Many of the generation that had grown up buying her music were now parents and in need of Saturday night entertainment in front of the box. It’s the Cilla that presented Surprise Surprise from 1984 and Blind Date from 1985 that I grew up with. Ironically, when Blind Date was in development, camp comedian Duncan Norvelle presented a pilot in 1985, but John Birt had reservations about Norvelle’s humour. He clearly wasn’t as open-minded as Bill Cotton in 1978 when Larry Grayson took on The Generation Game.

I was an avid TV viewer as a child, and would watch anything put in front of me, but despite enjoying both shows, I was firmly on my dad’s side in being irritated by her catchphrases and singing, even as a six-year-old. But the fans outweighed the critics and Black became a national treasure and the highest-paid female performer on British television. My mum even appeared in the audience on Surprise Surprise once, and my cousin also featured and won on Blind Date. My main memory of that is of us visiting her house shortly afterwards and discovering her parents had a parrot that liked swearing.

By the turn of the century, both long-running shows were struggling with viewing figures, and Cilla left London Weekend Television. She appeared on many panel shows and had a cameo in ITV comedy Benidorm. 2013 saw ITV celebrate her 50 years in showbiz with a one-off special, The One and Only Cilla Black, hosted by fellow scouser Paul O’Grady. In 2014, Sheridan Smith starred as the singer in the well-received three-part ITV drama Cilla, focusing on her relationship with Willis, who had died in 1999.

In 2014 Black stated she wanted to die when she reached 75, as she couldn’t stand to suffer into old age like her mother did. She was already suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, and her eyesight was failing. She was 72 when she fell and died of a stroke at her holiday home near Estepona, Spain on 1 August 2015.

Her funeral was a star-studded affair, with Cliff Richard singing at the service and a eulogy from O’Grady. As her coffin left the church, the Beatles song The Long and Winding Road was played. Paul McCartney, who had been instrumental in bringing the girl-next-door-turned-national-treasure to the public eye, believed Cilla’s 1972 version of his song was the definitive one.

Written by: Umberto Bindi & Gino Paoli/Carl Sigman (English lyrics)

Producer: George Martin

Weeks at number 1: 4 (28 May-24 June)

Births:

Actress Kathy Burke – 13 June 

Meanwhile…

16 June: Keith Bennett had turned 12 only four days before he went missing. He was on his way to his grandmother’s house in Longsight, Manchester when Myra Hindley pulled over in her Mini and asked Bennett for help with loading some boxes, in return for a lift home. Her friend Ian Brady was sat in the back when he got in. They drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor, where Bennett walked off with Brady. The following day, yet another missing persons investigation for a child opened in Manchester.

79. Jane Morgan – The Day the Rains Came (1959)

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The Intro

The new year began with no change at the top for some time, as Conway Twitty’s It’s Only Make Believe kept its grip at number 1. This finally changed on 23 January when US singer Jane Morgan toppled him with her version of The Day the Rains Came.

Before

This was a cover of a French song, Le Jour où la Pluie Viendra, written by lyricist Pierre Delanoë and singer and composer Gilbert Bécaud. The duo were responsible for some of France’s biggest hits of the time, but this was their first to be translated into English and become well-known. The lyrics to The Day the Rains Came were by Carl Sigman, who had a formidable reputation for adapting music from overseas and turning them into UK hits (see Answer Me and It’s All in the Game, number 1s in 1953 and 1958 respectively).

Morgan was a beautiful bilingual singer who performed in English and French, and was the perfect performer for this new version. She even threw in the French version on the B-side.

She was born Florence Catherine Currier on 3 May 1942 in Newton, Massachusetts. Born into a talented musical family, at the age of five she was taking piano lessons and singing. Her mother taught her Italian and French. As she grew older she was accepted into New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Music, and intended to become an opera singer. To pay her way she began singing in nightclubs. Orchestra leader Art Mooney hired her, and came up with her stage name Jane Morgan from two of his other singers, Janie Ford and Marian Morgan.

Morgan’s knowledge of French came in handy when bandleader Bernard Hilda hired her to perform two shows a night at his new club near the Eiffel Tower in 1948. She began with US songs but quickly took to performing French songs as her language skills improved, and soon the audiences were flocking to her gigs. By 1949 she had her own television show in France, and later she moved between Europe, Canada and back to her own country, in the hope of becoming more famous, but agents feared her skills were too specialised.

Eventually she was signed to the fledgling Kapp Records and released her debut album, appropriately named The American Girl from Paris. Her cover of Fascination was released in 1957 and remained in the charts for over six months, and it became her signature song.

Review

The Day the Rains Came was one of those throwbacks to the pop sound of several years previous. My initial thoughts were of how similar it sounds to previous number 1, The Garden of Eden, by Frankie Vaughan, which sounded old-fashioned when it hit the top in 1957. This isn’t a criticism, as that was a serviceable enough tune and so is this.

Usually in love songs, rain is used as a metaphor for loss, but Sigman’s lyrics take a different approach, comparing the beauty of rainfall bringing plants to life with the wonder of a developing romance:

‘The day that the rains came down
Buds were born, love was born
As the young buds will grow
So our young love will grow
Love, sweet love’

Morgan’s vocals are decent enough – she hits all the right notes, but ultimately there’s nothing about the song, lyrics or performance to lift this above average.

After

January has often historically been a quiet month for new number 1s after the madness of Christmas – it seems The Day the Rains Came may be an early example of this phenomenon. Nonetheless it brightened up that last week of the first month of 1959, in which the most dense fog to hit the country in seven years caused havoc.

The Outro

Morgan carried on releasing music into the 70s, and appeared on numerous TV shows over the years. She has also performed for five US presidents –  John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. Unlike many stars of the era she is still alive, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011. She celebrated her 100th birthday in 2024.

The Info

Written by

Pierre Delanoë & Gilbert Bécaud/Carl Sigman (English lyrics)

Producer

Vic Schoen

Weeks at number 1

1 (23-29 January)

76. Tommy Edwards – It’s All in the Game (1958)

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The Intro

Here’s a song with an unusual history. It’s All in the Game dates back to 1911, when banker Charles G Dawes wrote Melody in A Major. It soon also became known as Dawes’s Melody, and followed him into his political career, and he came to hate it over this time. Dawes eventually became Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge from 1925 to 1929.

Before

In 1951, Brill Building songwriter Carl Sigman decided to write lyrics to this melody. He had a knack for adapting songs, and specialised in writing English lyrics to songs composed in other languages. For example, in 1953 he wrote lyrics for that year’s Christmas number 1, Answer Me. Bizarrely, on the day Sigman took his finished work, It’s All in the Game, to Warner Brothers publishing executive Mac Goldman, Dawes died of a heart attack. Goldman quipped that Sigman’s lyrics must have killed him.

In a strange political link, Tommy Edwards, who made the song a hit, was born Thomas Jerreson Edwards in Richmond, Virginia on 15 October 1922. He began performing at nine years old, but it was in 1946 that he began a recording contract with MGM. He began making inroads into the charts three years later, before hitting number 18 with his waltz-time cover of It’s All in the Game. By 1958 however, MGM were ready to drop Edwards. In a last-ditch effort to save his career, he hit upon the idea of re-recording  his hit in a doo-wop style. One of the first stereo singles to ever be recorded, the new version struck gold.

Review

On the whole, 1958 has been the year with the highest quality of number 1 singles I’ve covered so far, which makes It’s All in the Game seem lacklustre by comparison. It’s serviceable enough though. Edwards is being philosophical to some poor broken-hearted girl, informing her that love is all one big daft game and all will be well eventually. I don’t want to sound cynical, but I think his optimism might be slightly misplaced. If her beau doesn’t call once in a while, he’s not necessarily soon going to be by her side once more. A harsh dose of reality might be better advice.

It’s very well produced – it’s great to hear a stereo recording finally, and the doo-wop style serves the song well, but the problem is, Edwards kept his vocals largely the same as his 1951 version, so they sound a bit too mannered and old-fashioned for my liking, and it drags the whole thing down.

After

Edwards tried to repeat the trick and re-recorded other past songs in the same style, and they did okay, but not well enough. It’s All in the Game was later covered by acts including the Four Tops and Cliff Richard.

The Outro

Edwards died ion 23 October 1969 of a brain aneurysm, believed to have been brought on by alcoholism. He was only 47.

The Info

Written by

Charles G. Dawes & Carl Sigman 

Producer

Harry Myerson

Weeks at number 1

3 (7-27 November)

Trivia

Births

25 November: Model Kim Ashfield

Deaths

24 November: Lord Robert Cecil

Meanwhile…

10 November: Donald Campbell breaks the world water speed record in his Bluebird K7. This was the fifth time he had done so. Campbell seemed to be invincible, but eventually his luck ran out in the worst possible way.