Chart entered : 9 December 1989
Chart peak : 71
This very minor hit has a significance as it makes Max the last member of the original chart cast to score a new hit in their lifetime. That's a record he's likely to keep unless Doris Day does something very surprising in the next few years.
Like most of his contemporaries, Max was chased out of the charts by The Beatles in the early sixties but had made the odd return since, most notably with "Deck of Cards", a number 13 hit in 1973 and his last chart entry prior to this one.
Max deconstructs the old standard with a deep house version... well no of course he doesn't. Max does a Disney version, throwing the kitchen sink into the production with a leading role for a downhome harmonica and liberal use of echo to mask the decline in his 67 year old voice.
This was almost Max's final release. He made one more medley album "The Singalong Years" in 1990 before calling time on his recording career. For the next two decades he cut an increasingly forlorn figure; having outlived the great bulk of his audience and not enjoyed his two year stint as host of Family Fortunes he had nowhere to go on TV bar the occasional appearance on chat shows. He kept in touch with the declining number of his contemporaries, visiting the ailing Ruby Murray in her last years. He published a couple more volumes of memoirs and spent a lot of time overseas, entertaining ex-pats in South Africa and Australia. His last TV appearance was on Today With Des And Mel in 2003. That same year, he and his wife moved to their daughter's home in Australia,. He was soon suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He died in 2012, a year after his wife, aged 89.
And with that we say goodbye to the eighties too.
No comments:
Post a Comment