Chart entered : 30 March 1956
Chart peak : 20
Number of hits : 10
Beyond a vague idea that he was American ( incorrect ) and that he died early ( true ) I knew nothing at all about this guy.
Michael was actually a Liverpudlian named Norman Milne who won some regional talent contests ( including one in New York while he served as a merchant seaman ) and found work as a singer in Butlin's holiday camps. After turning 30 in 1954 he wrote to the BBC for an audition and he duly appeared on The Centre Show the following year. He was a big thickset guy with a marked resemblance to the American actor Clancy Brown ( the villain in the first Highlander film ). He was signed to Columbia by their A & R man Norrie Paramor on the strength of that appearance. He also sang the theme to a forgotten puppet show, Four Feathers Fall.
Like most of his contemporaries Michael competed with covers and he joined the scrum for "The Yellow Rose Of Texas " for his first single. Michael does his best Bing Crosby impersonation but it sounds pretty anaemic compared to the Mitch Miller version which reached number two ( his only hit as an artist ) with its enormous drum sound and massed choirs. Two other versions were smaller hits , Gary Miller's demilitarised pop version and Ronnie Hilton's where the vocal is less competent than Michael's but there's a lot of interesting things going on in the production. Michael's second single was a version of Merle Travis's blue collar anthem "Sixteen Tons" which isn't on youtube or Spotify at the time of writing and in any case was buried by Tennessee Ernie Ford and Frankie Laine.
For his third single Michael found this much more obscure song by a J. Parker and stole a march on the much more famous artist coming next by introducing the suicidal strain into chart pop. "Nothin' To Do" took me by surprise both in arrangement and content. Norrie Paramor arranges it as a Bavarian waltz with a tick tock rhythm and sparing accordion and acoustic guitar while Michael hits some thrillingly deep notes as he intones a litany of self-pity worthy of Morrissey. This isn't a break up song it's a cry of existential despair and I wasn't expecting lyrics like "I'm only human how much can I take ? " this early in the story. It didn't climb higher than its entry position so perhaps the mid-fifties public didn't know what to make of it either.
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