ALMA COGAN: If Love Were All

The novel Gordon Burn named after the singer is as dully sober as one might expect - and that is not necessarily a pejorative, at least not until he ventures into misguided Tales From The Crypt territory. I am sceptical whether the real Alma would have settled for quiet, bitter retirement, since none of her fellow travellers in that remote pre-rock British pop universe seemed inclined towards it; on the contrary, most were obliged to continue struggling (relatively speaking) after rock had overnight rendered them redundant, and few of those stars seemed able to adapt - Ruby Murray, who at one point was popular enough to have five titles in the Top 20 in the same week, died in her early sixties, a forgotten alcoholic; David Whitfield, Britain's first reality show star (he came to prominence after winning Opportunity Knocks, then still on Radio Luxembourg), finally threw in the towel and headed for Australia, only to be felled by a fatal heart attack a couple of years afterwards; Dickie Valentine, Britain's highest paid male entertainer of the fifties and a sort of Jason to Alma's Kylie, was like many of his peers forced to downsize to the cabaret/social club circuit, and, tired out, was obliged to drive himself from engagement to engagement in a tight schedule, leading to the fatal 150 mph crash in Wales in the spring of 1971. Only those astute and flexible enough to change career went on to prosper; Dave King turned into a highly-respected actor, while Jimmy Young has defied all logic with his far more profitable forty-year career as a radio broadcaster and political interviewer.

Like Kylie, Alma was bubbly, forever smiling, always a trouper (though Burn's book suggests several potential Michael Hutchence figures in her life), sought to expand her musical horizons against the wish of her paymasters and contracted cancer; unlike Kylie, she did not survive and died in 1966 aged just 34. EMI had let go of her early the previous year - her chart career did not extend into the sixties - suspicious about such ventures as an album of big band Beatles covers (Lennon may have been a Hutchence figure himself) or working with such unlikely MoR figures as Joe Meek and Andrew Loog Oldham. In any case, she did not live long enough to develop any of these new liaisons properly, and I suspect it is our loss as much as hers.

Her "If Love Were All" was recorded in 1962, so we must dismiss any notion of a last will and testament about her performance. Yet it stands as the central island of her smilingly anguished sense of isolation - she was undoubtedly keen to embrace the new world as far as it would allow her. Noel Coward himself considered it the best version of the song that anyone had sung, including Judy Garland, and even though Cogan omits the first two verses from the introduction (those which begin, respectively, "Fate may often treat me meanly" and "Though I never really grumble").

Her version, in fact, begins with a huge sweep of operatic tragedy flourishes from the orchestra, as though Tosca has already toppled from his tower, before the waves recede and the music reduces to a single accordion, against which - out of the darkness - Cogan begins to sing: "I believe...in doing what I can." Her voice is not technically precise; she is striving but cannot quite reach the right scales. But she is clearly struggling, though at this point still smiling, as evidenced by her throwaway "hey ho."

The musical textures gradually thicken as she slowly unravels her essential loneliness - she falters movingly on "I think if only" but recovers, trying to giggle the line "someone affectionate and dear." Still, there is major doubt, and her naked fear is only partially concealed by courtesy as she utters the self-death sentence "But I believe that since my life began/The most I've had is just a talent to amuse," and she hangs onto her second "hey ho" with rather less assurance before the orchestra seeps back into the picture, trying to elevate her hopes by moving up a key. Yet if anything this encourages her to bring her hidden emotions out into the open; now she is barely preventing herself from breaking down with this "I think if only"; the "someone affectionate and dear" sees her bracing herself for the giant leap into only she knows what.

And with the final "talent to amuse" she loses any hope of hope; she shrivels into her own fears with the closing trio of "hey ho"s before she shakily sustains the last "all" - which is quickly faded into the ambience of the receding orchestra, cutting her off from civilisation, leaving her marooned, suppressed, eventually neglected or misreported, like a girl you remember seeing passing you in a fairground 40 years ago but can't quite place her being or relevance.