Chart entered : 11 February 1965
Chart peak : 23
You have to give credit to Ronnie for hanging on until the middle of the sixties before the curtain fell.
Ronnie chalked up his sole number one with "No Other Love" in April 1956. His last top ten record was "Around The World" in May 1957. There was a near five year gap between "The Wonder Of You " in 1959 and "Don't Let The Rain Come Down" in 1964, neither of which made the Top 20.
I've no idea why Ronnie wanted to do a children's song at this point in his career or why it was released just after Christmas. I first learned this simple lullaby at my second primary school aged 9 and haven't heard it since so I guess it's fallen out of favour. I can't really review it objectively; Ronnie does a professional job making sure all the lyrics are clear, the arrangement is bright and perky and some kids join in near the end. Clean, innocent fun from yesteryear.
Ronnie stuck with the same writers , Rudge and Dicks, for his next single "A Hole In My Shoe". It's not the Traffic song; that's the only thing I know about it which is one more thing than I can say about December's "Rocky Old Boat". A year went by before his next single, a version of Kenny Young's "When Will The Good Apples Fall" almost a year before The Seekers's hit version. In July 1967 his last single for HMV was a cover of "If I Were A Rich Man" but forget that - on the B-side there's "The Laughing Gnome" surely the first Bowie cover . I found it on VAL.FM and it's beyond weird , slowed down with Ronnie Hazelhurst sitcom flourishes and Yorkshire accents. His 1968 single for Columbia "Happy Again" a waltz ballad with swaying accordions is quite pleasant in it old fashioned way.
By the following year Ronnie was reduced to working for the budget label Music For Pleasure bashing out cheap covers of film themes like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "The Arisocats" and a cheaply recorded new version of "Windmill..." He was also touring the northern club scene and appeared on Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club. At least he had the satisfaction of seeing his beloved Leeds United become a major footballing force and in 1971 recorded "The Ballad of Billy Bremner" a terrible pub singalong that probably didn't sell a single copy outside Yorkshire. I think I'm right in saying it's Ronnie's first self-penned single and on this evidence he was wise to stick to covers.
Terrible as it was, the football single seems to have given Ronnie a second chance at Columbia and in 1972 he released "One Life" a touchingly humble antidote to My Way and a good match of singer to material. I only know "Good Bad But Beautiful" from a very wobbly performance on Wheeltappers ( for which the house band may be partly responsible ); it probably sounded better on record.
In May 1975 he wrote and released "We're Gonna Win The Cup " in anticipation of
Leeds's European Cup victory which of course didn't happen.
The following year Ronnie had a stroke which hampered his activities thereafter and impoverished him . He acquired a shoplifting habit and was convicted on more than one occasion and suffered from depression.He made one more single "Imagine" ( presumably the Lennon song ) in 1982 on Fairview records. In the 1990s he hosted Radio Two's Sounds Of The Fifties show.
He died aged 75 in February 2001. The first sentence of the Telegraph's obituary says he was "probably best known for the novelty song A Windmill In Old Amsterdam" which doesn't say much for the rest of his catalogue. Indeed of all those we've waved goodbye to Ronnie does seem in the most imminent danger of being forgotten; I struggled to find any of his latter recordings on youtube or Spotify and there don't seem to be any fansites to his memory.
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