Chart entered : 20 November 1959
Chart peak : 1
Number of hits : 24
Adam's appearance opens up a new chapter in the British pop story, the teen idol who couldn't sing particularly well. America already had Fabian ( who made barely a ripple here ); now we had our own version.
Adam was born Terence Nelhams-Wright to a working class family in Acton in 1940. His first job was as a silk screen printer but he switched to being a film cutter hoping that would help him into the acting profession like his idol James Dean. In 1957 he joined a skiffle group The Worried Men. They became the resident band at the 2is coffee bar in Soho and from there appeared on the music show Six Five Special. Jack Good the producer liked him and arranged a solo contract for him with HMV under the new moniker Adam Faith.
His first single for them in January 1958 was "Heartsick Feeling" recorded with Geoff Love and his Orchestra who must have wondered if they were part of some practical joke so bad is Faith's singing. It seems to get worse as the song progresses dissolving into the sort of indecipherable murmuring not heard again until REM started out. At the other end of the year his second release was a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis's "High School Confidential" which has some nifty guitar work and an improved ( it could hardly have been worse ) vocal from Adam but it was no competition for Jerry.
HMV cut him loose and he went back to being a film cutter but he had made contacts and John Barry invited him to audition for BBC1's new Drumbeat show. Adam got the gig and was introduced to Barry's manager Eve Taylor who got him a new deal with Top Rank . His single for them "Ah Poor Little Baby" had some heavyweight help with Barry arranging and Tony Hatch producing but its release coincided with a national print strike and made it a hat-trick of failures. It has a rough charm but Adam was never going to make it as an Elvis impersonator.
Adam was saved by his success on Drumbeat which led to the offer of a film role in Beat Girl, a dated but still decent film where Adam plays the leader of a gang of beatniks who lead a young ingénue astray. Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed ( as "Plaid Shirt " ) are also in it. Barry was invited along to do the score. This enabled Eve Taylor to get them another deal with Parlophone. Adam and Barry had a re-think; the rockers weren't doing the business nor did it seem fruitful for Adam to get involved in the competition for covers so they picked a song by a lesser light on Drumbeat Johnny Worth ( writing as Les Vandyke for contractual reasons ) and Barry arranged it in the pizzicato fashion of Buddy Holly's posthumous number one "It Doesn't Matter Anymore".
Here's the Popular link Adam Faith, a very good review from Tom actually. It's perhaps notable that when BBC did a Top Of The Pops special to mark 50 years of the charts in 2002 this was the only 1950s number to be performed on the show. It wasn't long before Adam's death and naturally his singing wasn't very good but it was good to see him up there.
Adam is the last significant artist to emerge in the fifties; we close out the decade with three farewells.
No comments:
Post a Comment