Cilla Black - Conversations (1969/ No. 7/ 12 weeks/ Parlophone)

Another ultra-vulnerable imagined love song about the carapace of self that we armour ourselves with. And another song by Cook & Greenaway, too! You know the sort of thing that I like, dear reader...

It starts with a barrage of questions, asked in a tone both hesitant and a bit blank;

Do you come here often?...
Have we met before?
Tell me your impression now...
Could you like me more?

Then, a little more assertively;

Could you even LOVE me?
Is it too early to tell?

Back down again, for where we know in our hearts that this is leading towards;

Who am I foolin'?
When I know too well -

The conversation is, of course, only happening in her head; it’s the protagonist of 'How Soon Is Now?' explaining why she goes to a club on her own and she stands on her own – “Make a move?/Try to speak?/Raise my eyes from the floor?” Like someone who’s forgotten how to do it, or has never done it, "losing my patience /Forgetting the lines".

Two ways of reading this song, both unhappy. Sometimes I think that the loved other is a specific man. The singer spending too much time musing about things in the abstract, so that they become more intimidating, taking on a strange unhelpful life of their own, with her playing out every scenario in her head without ever giving the man the chance to play his part.

In this instance, at least he does exist as a person, a possibility, even if their history is one of hesitancy on her part ("When we meet, will I act like I've done before?... Say "Hello", nothing more").

The other way of reading this is that he is so provisional as to be an abstract in his own right, not even a specific distant crush, which seems to fit in with the mannequin figure that the protagonist sees herself as being, crushed by a series of rituals that she can't find herself fitting in with.

Crucial to this ambiguity, as with 'Surround Yourself With Sorrow' is the one non-specific line;

I've still got to meet him.
Yes, I've still got to meet him!

Defiance? Purpose? A knowledge that she must undergo what she knows to be torment, but will? Or - A consoling illusion that she will meet a 'him', one day? It's the point in the single where everything gets ratcheted up, with the arrival of backing singers and where Cilla starts belting the song out.

Either way, this is a compelling and uneasy song, brilliantly performed.

Cilla Black - You're My World (1964/ No. 1/ 17 weeks/ Parlophone)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A_a1C0LdG8

 It's the combination of two factors that makes this single so thrilling for me; George Martin's arrangement and Cilla Black's performance.

 Martin's productions for the Beatles are forever and rightly lauded, of course: the great enabler, tactfully and modestly allowing the visionary music of the young mens' imaginations to be brought to life. But this thoughtful sense of how to make records emotive and artful worked in other places, too - most remarkably in The Goons' crazed hits of the 1950s, but also for more conventional pieces such as 'You're My World'.

 When we praise Cilla Black's music of the 1960s, we tend to talk about her breathier and more vulnerable moments - Step Inside Love, Surround Yourself With Sorrow - these are tremendous singles, but skirt around from acknowledging that her most celebrated ability was to absolutely belt out songs. Not even in a controlled and phrased Shirley Bassey manner either, but with the overflowing emotion of a very young woman very eager to impress and to please. This vocal approach certainly provokes a fingernails-squeaking-the-blackboard aversion on the part of many listeners, and how I respond to it or not is very much dependent upon which song she's attacking.

 'You're My World' is perhaps the ideal vehicle for a full-blooded Black performance. It has to be said that it is a pretty formulaic song - the premise of "I can't live without your love" swiftly established and then amplified to greater and greater levels of dependence over three minutes. This sense of formula is accentuated by the fact that 'You're My World' is a song in translation, starting life as 'Il Mio Mondo', a recent Italian hit for Umberto Bindi snapped up by Brian Epstein as a likely smash hit instant follow up to her chart-topping 'Anyone Who Had A Heart'.

 Martin and Black between them manage to make this old trope of a sentiment sound epochal. The single has the most brilliant introduction, a menacing seven seconds of strings, begging to be sampled;

TCHANG!! Tchangtchang! Tchangtchang. (tchangtchang)...
TCHANG!! Tchangtchang! Tchangtchang. (tchangtchang)...

 And an - as yet subdued - Cilla establishes what this song is going to be about;

You‘re my world, you‘re every breath - I take
You‘re my world, you're every move - I make

 Some up-down piano scales and sedately swoopy violins over the next two lines;

Other eyes see the stars up in the skies
But for meeee they shine with-in - your - eyes

 This is already swelling a bit, but its soo obvious that its about to burst... When and how is it going to happen?;

As the trees reach for the sun above...
TCHANG!! Tchangtchang! Tchangtchang. (tchangtchang)...

 (YES! Those scary strings are back! I KNEW that had to happen!)

So my arms reach out to you - for love
With your haaaaahnd res-ting in miiiiiihn
Hih feel a poooooow-er soh deviiiiiine -

 (YES! YES! Here it comes right NOW! - a great thunderburst of orchestration and vocals. We get the TCHANGTCHANG! but accompanied by trumpets this time - cueing in a Cilla unleashed -)

YOU'RHE MY WOORLD!
YOU'HRHE MY NIIIIIIGHT AN-D-AAAAAAAAHY!

 The trumpets have been joined by a full barrage of strings and some indecorously clumping drums;

YOU'RHE MY WOORLD!
YOU'HRHE EVRHY PRAHYER IH-PRAAAAAAAAHY!

 To support Cilla's all-encompassing feeling with some divine gravitas, a host of heavenly voices appear from out of nowhere. They are backing vocalists The Breakaways, and it sounds as though there are a hundred of them...;

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

 The effect is like a hi-fidelity Abbey Road Studios approximation of Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound. Trumpets offer a noisesome fanfare - DJANGDJANG! DJANGDJANGAJANG! - before Cilla reiterates the global scale of her love;

HIFHOURLOOOOOOOOOOFVE!!
CEYCSESTEWBEEEEEEEEEE!!
HTHENNITSTHEHENDHOHFOURLOOOOOOOOOOFVE!!-FOOOR MEE!

 The effect is then repeated over the remainder of the single, on a yet grander and louder scale. With a song like this, you really can't go at it half-cock. A vast canvas, suitable for two talents who enjoy achieving a big music.

Cilla Black - Surround Yourself With Sorrow (1969/ No. 3/ 12 weeks/ Parlophone)

Is their any figure in British pop history more unfairly maligned than Cilla Black? Admittedly, her lorra lorra 1980s incarnation as the face of LWT on Surprise Surprise and Blind Date might cast a retrospective shadow, but you only really need to listen to the records to forget that. Amongst stupider people, she seems to be condemned for the sin of not being Dusty Springfield, as if to admit the one into the rock canon, she had to have an obviously inferior rival. In fact, these are two of the greatest of pop voices, each unique and distinctive, leading the listener into a particular way of seeing and responding to the world. Cilla's voice is breathy and soft, and always seems to me to switch between vulnerability, hope and retreat into the self from line to line.

'Surround Yourself With Sorrow' is an impressively doomy song, somewhere between heartbreak and emotional blankness, buoyed along by an incongruously jaunty arrangement. A morse cose siren, a whirlwind of strings and a brass fanfare set up a verse that is not as euphoric as you might have been led to expect;

Watch the water falling down
Falling down outside your head
You do your best to turn the tide
But can't forget ev'rythin' he said
The pressure's getting far too great
The word together came too late

The singer against the world, powerless to affect external circumstances, be they the rain, the tide, or the perfidy of men. The idea of the observing but powerless head continues in the second verse ("Like a neon in your head/ The neon's flashing off and on/ Recalling ev'rything he said'). The chorus is both emphatic and ambiguous;

What do you do when your love breaks up?
Do you fall apart like a butter cup?
Forget about tomorrow (!/ ?)
Surround yourself with sorrow (!/ ?)

I couldn't tell you if the third and fourth lines are questions or decisions, if the singer is telling herself to pull herself out of this mood of desolate blankness or stay in it. It takes an exceptionally subtle and vulnerable voice to pull off an ambiguity like this. One of the great pop stars of her time, in fact.