Chart entered : 20 October 1966
Chart peak : 46
Adam had weathered the Beatles storm a lot better than many of his contemporaries. Most of his singles continued to chart albeit in lower positions. By 1966 though, it appeared that the game was up. None of the three singles immediately preceding this one had made the charts.
"Cheryl's Going Home" was written by Bob Lind and was originally on the B-side of his transatlantic smash Elusive Butterfly. It was also recorded by Sonny and Cher and The Cascades but Adam's is the only hit version. It's a regretful song. Cheryl's had enough and her man is running hopelessly behind the train taking her away, wanting her to hear some explanation. Adam's voice has improved somewhat so that this sounds like David Soul sings R Dean Taylor although Adam has Anglicised the lyric slightly. Producer John Woodman gives it the standard mid-sixties pop production although the acoustic guitar deserves a mention ( I don't know who it is ). It's a decent farewell note.
His first single of 1967, "What More Can Anyone Do" was written by Chris Andrews ( whose own brief run of hits also ended in 1966 ) and is a bright piece of sunshine pop , lifted by the mariachi trumpet but let down by an indifferent vocal. Adam's declining interest in recording is indicated by the presence of a 1964 album track on the B-side.
His next single didn't come out until September. "Cowman, Milk Your Cow" was written by a couple of new kids on the block, Barry and Robin Gibb although it sounds more like The Byrds' psychedelic pop. Its curiosity value is high , its musical value limited. "To Hell With Love" was a John D Loudermilk song. Its a pleasant piece of pop whimsy with an arrangement deserving of a better singer. His last single for Parlophone in March 1968, "You Make My Life Worthwhile " written by jazz bassist and session man Joe Mudele, is old-fashioned MOR schmaltz that could have been in the first chart. It's one of Adam's better vocal performances but it sounds like an admission that his time as a pop star was up.
As we'll see that wasn't quite the end of Adam's recording career but music yielded to his other activities from this point. He turned back to acting, initially in the theatre and in 1969 had the lead role in a touring production of Billy Liar. He also did some Shakespeare playing Feste in Twelfth Night . He got a big break in 1971 as the title character in Budgie , a lovable petty criminal whose scams always end in failure partly due to his association with a shady entrepreneur played by Iain Cuthbertson. My mother had a curiously visceral hatred of Cuthbertson; her involvement in a few Am-Dram productions in Littleborough in the 50s apparently made her an infallible judge of actors and whenever he appeared in anything, she would sound off about what a terrible ham he was. I digress ; Budgie was a big TV hit which ran for two series from 1971 to 1972. A third series was being considered when Adam was nearly killed driving into a tree in August 1973 ( shortly after a similar accident almost claimed the life of Slade's Don Powell ) and his first, irrational response was to declare he was giving up acting.
By that time he and his friend David Courtenay were involved in managing former busker Leo Sayer. This brought instant rewards first through Roger Daltrey's Giving It All Away album which was largely written by Sayer and then Sayer's own run of huge hits beginning at the end of 1973. Sayer's success both prompted and facilitated Adam's own return to the studio. He got a deal with Warner Brothers to make an album "I Survive" co-written with Courtney , largely inspired by his recovery from the accident.
The lead-off single "I Survived " starts with a long guitar solo from Ritchie Blackmore amidst an orchestral overture and ends with a piano solo from Russ Ballard. In between is a genial acoustic guitar and piano pop song not a million miles from ( though pre-dating ) Steve Harley's Make Me Smile . However the liberally used gospel singers can't mask how poor the central vocal performance is. There are a lot of complimentary reviews of the album on Amazon but I don't know how they can ignore the fact that Adam sounds like a battered old pub singer, off key and hardly able to make himself heard. Actually, when there's less clutter , as on the plodding follow-up single " Star Song " , it's even worse , the song's clumsy cynicism getting lost in the sheer wretchedness of his vocal.
Thankfully that was his last single. He can be heard on a soundtrack album from the Budgie stage musical in 1988 ( not a success ) but otherwise his recordings end there. He was persuaded by David Puttnam to play David Essex's manager in Stardust in 1975 and received excellent reviews.
Sayer's career reached its peak in the mid to late seventies which kept Adam out of mischief though he did take the odd film role. In 1983 he presented Video Video , a cheap and nasty review programme typical of the early days of Channel 4. It was only notable for Adam's chronic inability to read from the autocue in..... a. ...fluent ...manner, a bizarre failing coming from an experienced actor. Unsurprisingly it didn't get a second series.
Two years later. the hits having dried up for him too, Sayer sued Adam for withheld royalties and won substantial damages in an out of court settlement. The revelation of his financial canniness didn't do Adam any harm and, after recovering from open-heart surgery in 1986, he reinvented himself once more as a financial advisor with a column in the Daily Mail. Things went well on the surface for a couple of years but he was associating with Roger Levitt. ( I remember sharing office space with the Levitt Group in 1989 because the authority I worked for was the lead authority for the Greater Manchester Superannuation Fund and invited them in as consultants but I think we got out unscathed ). When Levitt was exposed as a fraudster in 1990, Adam suffered both reputational and financial damage as did some celebrity friends ( e.g. Michael Winner ) he had encouraged to invest with Levitt . He also lost money as a Lloyds Name in the nineties
Adam returned to acting and got another TV break in 1992 with Love Hurts where he played a self-made Cockney businessman romancing middle class and right -on Zoe Wanamaker. He was essentially playing himself but with great charm and the series was a hit. I caught a couple of episodes because they featured an actress I was following called Arkie Whiteley ( now sadly deceased ) and it wasn't really my cup of tea but it ran for three series. A couple of years later his autobiography Act of Faith sold well.
But Adam wasn't finished with the financial world yet. Eager to get in on the dot.com bubble, in May 1999 he invested heavily in a new digital channel The Money Channel with himself as a presenter dispensing financial advice. His questionable record in the field, publicly highlighted by a less than forgiving Winner at the time of its launch , doomed the venture from the start and it closed in June 2002 with heavy losses. He was declared bankrupt shortly afterwards.
At the same time his new BBC1 comedy series The House That Jack Built with Gillian Taylforth was getting slated and shedding viewers with each episode. The last one ( of six ) wasn't even aired. Nonetheless he dusted himself down to appear on It's The Number One Party on New Year's Day 2003. Celebrating fifty years of the charts, Adam represented the fifties and performed "What Do You Want". It was pretty ropey but he looked happy to be up there again.
He then went out on tour in Love And Marriage and was reportedly ruminating over doing another series of Love Hurts when he was taken ill after a performance in Stoke-on-Trent on 7 March. He died of a heart attack the following day. Fittingly , for the first TV-launched pop star his last words were a pungent critique of Channel 5 : "all shit isn't it ? Christ, the crap they put on there. It's a waste of space".
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