Chart entered : 20 April 1961
Chart peak : 37
Even if Alma hadn't been mentioned in the previous post the linkage between this one and the last would be unmissable. You could hardly have a clearer example of a "Changing of the Guard" moment in pop as one Jewish girl singer enters and another, now in her thirties , departs.
It would be unfair to pin responsibility for Alma's commercial demise on Helen , or Brenda Lee for that matter. Alma's chart positions since the mid-fifties tell a clear enough story of steadily declining popularity long before their arrival. Ironically this final hit was her first release on Columbia records after her HMV contract expired, making her Helen's labelmate for the rest of her career.
"Cowboy Jimmy Joe" was an English language cover of a recent German hit by Lolita, written by the same guys who wrote "Sailor", a recent monster hit for both Anne Shelton and Petula Clark. This tale of a homesick cowboy sounds very similar to that despite the whiny steel guitars in Geoff Love's arrangement ; you can certainly sing "Sailor" over the top of it. Alma's vocal is fine but it's wasted on a dreary cliche of a song.
Although tragically cut short, Alma's post-chart career is interesting, partly because like Bill Haley she found some compensatory success in other territories and partly because of the company she kept. Her next single "With You In Mind" was an awful mistake, a painfully slow Ornadel-West ballad with no real tune for which Alma didn't really have the voice. Alma had the galling experience of watching it flop just as Helen Shapiro smashed her record for youngest female chart-topper with You Don't Know.
Her next single "All Alone" was a pop treatment of Irving Berlin's song with enthusiastic "yeah yeah yeahs" from the Rita Williams Singers but a rather disinterested vocal from Alma herself that suggests she'd be happier washing her hair than taking a call. Perhaps this reflected her own preference for being a showbiz hostess at her flat rather than a wife to anyone.
1961 was a good year for Alma in Japan with big hits with "Train Of Thought" and Danny Jordan's teenypop classic "Pocket Transistor".
"She's Got You" is a cover of a Patsy Cline US hit about the inadequacy of physical momentos compared with actual possession of the guy with Alma trying a new breathy lower register vocal style. I actually prefer Alma's version with Geoff Love's de-countrified version but the public decided differently and gave Patsy a first UK hit instead. India liked it and gave her another top 10 hit there.
"Goodbye Joe" is a quite bizarre mash-up of a rather dated upbeat song of the sort that made Alma's name in the fifties backed up with throbbing Eddie Cochran-style rhythm guitar and very loud jazzy organ playing. I can't find too much information on the record's personnel but I could easily believe it was Manfred Mann or Rod Argent . Obviously it didn't work commercially but that's a pity.
At the beginning of 1963 she recorded a version of The Exciters' "Tell Him" a singer-proof song that's been a hit for four different artists but Alma now had more teen pretenders to combat and her version was trounced by newcomer Billie Davis, the original being a minor hit in her wake. You can't really make a case for Alma's version which sounds flat and lumpy - particularly the bassline - by comparison. Alma was reportedly particularly disappointed by this failure but was compensated by its B-side, her bossa nova treatment of "Fly Me To The Moon" reaching number one in Israel.
She tried again with one of her own songs in June 1963 , "Just Once More " her first attempt at a "beat" record and not a bad one actually with well-placed handclaps and some nice piano work although the tune owes a fair bit to When My Little Girl Is Smiling. .
In March 1964 she roared back into action scoring a big European hit with a Spector -ish ( c/o Charles Blackwell ) treatment of Patti Page's "Tennessee Waltz". The simple ballad of losing one's partner at a dance is beefed up beyond recognition and although Alma sometimes sounds in danger of being drowned out by the superb soul backing vocals it's by far her best record to date. It was number one in Sweden for five weeks and a top 20 hit in Denmark. When Alma obligingly re-recorded her vocal in German it went Top 10 there too.That same year she had some new guests at her shindigs , four young Scousers who were starting to rack up the hits. There are rumours , backed up by her actresss sister Sandra Caron ( n for playing Richard O' Brien's Mum on The Crystal Maze that she had a brief affair with Lennon and they looked happy enough flirting on Ready Steady Go ( Alma having had a pretty startling makeover from the picture above ) . She was one of the first artists to cover "Yesterday" which Macca had written on her piano but it was never released as a single. There were limits to the association. Macca said of her "I never took her seriously musically, she was old school showbiz" and EMI would not let her capitalise on it by recording an LP of Beatles covers
Alma's next single "It's You" was a co-write with her arranger Stan Foster containing the intriguing line "Johnny calls me every day, says he'll never go away". It's not a strong single with uncomfortable shifts in tempo from big dramatic ballad verses to a breezy pop chorus and back again. The B side "I Knew Right Away" has the only verified instance of a Beatle contributing to her music ( Paul McCartney on tambourine ) She had another German hit with "Hillbilly Boy" ( largely in German despite the title ) in April 1965.
After some difficulty persuading Columbia to persevere with her Alma released "Snakes And Snails" in July 1965 which had been specially written for her by Searchers drummer Chris Curtis ( who also produced and did backing vocals along with a quite recognisable Miss D. Springfield ) a noisy, exciting rocker about acquiring a love potion from a gypsy. Predictably enough the drumming is excellent . However not every one of her new peers was willing to give her a leg up and the song's cause wasn't helped by Keith Richards declaring it one of the worst records he'd ever heard in a guest review for a music paper ( Melody Maker I think but I'll stand correction on that ).
That same summer she returned to the top of the Swedish charts with a brash cover of Jewel Akens's US hit "The Birds And The Bees" which also made the Top 10 in Denmark and Norway.
Alma's next move was a Beatles cover, "Eight Days A Week" slowed down and turned into a torch song. It's interesting rather than essential and it's questionable whether Columbia were putting any promotional muscle behind her records by this stage. Alma had begun to think her weight might be the problem and accepted some highly experimental injections to get her size down.
Alma next cut "Now That I've Found You" another co-write with Foster a big torch ballad produced by Andrew Loog Oldham but Columbia didn't like it and obliged her to re-record it. It wasn't released until after her death.
At the beginning of 1966 she collapsed after two dates on tour in north east England and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer but carried on working. She and Foster wrote "I Only Dream Of You" for Joe Dolan and "Wait For Me" for Ronnie Carroll ( neither of them hits ). They also moonlighted on Pye as Angela and the Fans with "I Love Ya Illya" a novelty tribute to David McCallum's character on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which became a pirate radio favourite but not a hit.
In the summer she went to Sweden to promote her current hit there "Hello Baby" ( a close cousin to Don't You Just Know It ) but collapsed again and had to return home. Billy Cotton from the BBC visited her and determining that she was still well enough to perform gave her a last opportunity to appear on International Cabaret in September singing a silly channel-advertising version of "Let There Be Love". She deserved better.
She was hospitalised shortly afterwards and three weeks later she was dead. Her funeral was one of the showbiz events of the year. Columbia released "Now That I've Found You" and let Foster and friends complete the album "Alma" which was released in 1967 but not even death was able to restore Alma to the charts. It just seemed as though the UK public wanted to lock her into the fifties and were deaf to any attempts to get out of the box .
Alma's had a troubled afterlife. There are plenty of fans who want to keep her memory alive. In 1991 Gordon Burn won the Whitbread Book Award his novel Alma Cogan which posits an elderly Alma looking back on her life but it outraged Caron both for its portrayal of their mother and the decision to put a photo of Myra Hindley opposite Alma's on the cover. When the BBC broadcast a radio play in 2002 based on the novel which accentuated those aspects most offensive to the family , Caron took her case to the Broadcasting Standards Commission and won. She has also had to deal with an obsessive fan Stephen Woods trying to buy his way into directing any commemoration of Alma and taking out ads in The Stage to denounce Caron for blocking him.
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