This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Billy Fury’s passing; a quarter of a century since his prematurely weary heart finally gave out, barely into his forties and on the verge of what might have been an exceptionally remarkable comeback. The danger of over-romanticising is already abundantly clear, but what has remained markedly less clear is the fact that Fury is the most important singer in the history of post-war British pop music – and if I were to extend the field to include pre-war singers, Al Bowlly might be his only rival.
The reasons for this are fairly simple to outline; Fury was a singer with the rare ability to convey both sides of his personality at the same time – he could be simultaneously exuberant and threatening, at one space reassuring and alienating, and whichever side of him was dominant, the other side never quite crept out of vision – and even though he was always at the service of whatever song he was given to sing, he is never either comfortably mainstream or extravagantly out of bounds; he never lets you forget that you are listening to and watching him, however many pullover masks he has to don.
As far as rock and roll is concerned, Fury was also the first British rocker really to mean it; while Larry Parnes’ self-assembled gallery of shy, distracted teenagers is finally not that far removed in theory or practice from Simon Cowell’s ring-road-mastery, Fury immediately penetrated beyond dreams of cheerful gayness. His debut single was self-penned - an extreme rarity in fifties Britpop – and all of his package tour colleagues, from Vince Eager to Jimmy Tarbuck, were taken aback by the mere presence of a guitar, let alone his writing of songs on it. There was the early Cliff, of course, but he was quick to exchange hip swivels for Lionel Bart singalongs as soon as his chart positions diminished, and his permanence is more the result of astute reading of the demographic weather; he has changed slowly and imperceptively but always decisively and is sufficiently astute to lob out the odd curveball – a “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” a “Some People,” a “What Car?” – in order to demonstrate that he’s still in the loop.
And the rock and roll, finally, never left Fury; The Sound Of Fury deserves its reputation as the first recognisable British rock album, and even when charting with tremulous, hugely orchestrated ballads later in the sixties he was still cutting sensuous, elongated readings of things like Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do?” – which brings me to Fury’s decisive X factor; he was the first British pop singer in the rock and roll era to introduce sex into our bloodstream. Listen to his highly sated sighs of ecstasy punctuating the wide open spaces of 1960’s “Wondrous Place” or, most sublimely, the irreducible and unwriteable plea-turning-to-growl on 1963’s “Like I’ve Never Been Gone,” whence he turns the “you” of his anxious “guilty for loving you” into a multisyllabic but wordless descent from humility to seduction. Was any other British singer of the period capable of such emotional or spiritual/carnal shifts – the preppy politesse of sundry Bobbys subverted into real blood and fluid? It’s little wonder that the Silver Beatles rushed to apply for the job of Fury’s backing band (though finally declined after Fury’s insistence that they get rid of duff bass player Stuart Sutcliffe) and that others included the nascent Blue Flames (with another Parnes protégé, Georgie Fame, on keyboards) and the Tornados.
Fury was quick to rise above his contemporaries, and the baffling absence of any number one singles in his chart record (though his energisation of “Halfway To Paradise” topped the NME lists) suggests a silent rebuke for not fully playing the game, for not indulging in cuddly hiccups like Adam Faith (whose chirpy run of hits always seemed to me like a test run for the more fulfilling careers of actor and City financier, not to mention an important training ground for his arranger John Barry) or fitting all sizes like Cliff effortlessly managed. Fury seemed too real for this all-round circus of wannabe family entertainment (though conversely this was also the age when getting married could kill your career stone dead, as happened with Marty Wilde – the attendant irony of his family helping to make him one of the least expected architects of New Pop a generation later need scarcely be underlined). The strangely familiar quiff and gold lamé jacket he sports in the film Play It Cool of course spell 1982 in retrospect – hello, Martin Fry – but also induces no small regret that Fury didn’t have a greater say over where his career was going; unhappy appearances in panto and TV variety shows confirmed a world which simply was not his, and certainly (to paraphrase the late Richard Cook) if Fury had been twenty years younger and starting up in the age of New Pop he would have been a figure equivalent to a Fry or a Weller or an O’Dowd, an icon of his own making (to think of what he might have accomplished with, say, Trevor Horn had he survived longer is heartbreaking to contemplate).
That having been said, he became a sturdily noble but quietly subversive balladeer, and his inescapable reality and appeal saw him well through the Beat Boom; he was still racking up hits as late as 1966 and still experimenting – his single “Don’t Let A Little Pride (Stand In Your Way)” from that year remarkably finds him absorbing ska and bluebeat. But finally the times overtook him; he switched from Decca to EMI to release an extraordinary sequence of singles, many of which absorbed psychedelia, and it remains a matter of regret that these have still not been satisfactorily compiled.
None of them made the charts, however, and his health was also beginning to suffer; several childhood attacks of rheumatic fever had rendered his heart extremely vulnerable and he was certainly more than aware of his potentially limited lifespan. This made his unexpected re-emergence as the fictitious Stormy Tempest (though many say based on real-life Merseybeat foot soldier Rory Storm) in 1973’s film That’ll Be The Day all the more astonishing; he does not appear for long, but every appearance is like a butterfly exploding into a colossus – he is so unquestionably real that he nearly embarrasses the rest of the film into exposure as a fancy dress party (and it is a superb film with fine and truthful performances by everyone from David Essex to ex-Rory Storm and the Hurricanes sideman Ringo Starr).
The opportunity for him to prosper again was very clearly marked. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, follow it through; there were further heart scares and surgery and he eventually settled for a quiet life in the country, breeding horses and sheep and becoming active on the conservation front. However, in 1981 there came the real chance of a musical comeback; Stuart Colman, producer and mastermind behind the belated success of Shakin’ Stevens, persuaded him back into the studio, and in 1982 his name began to reappear in the lower regions of the charts. He did a few well-received concerts, participated in the Channel 4 nostalgia series Unforgettable (again with such natural power, even in diminished health) – but it finally proved too much and suddenly he was gone, the same age as Elvis.
“Run To My Loving Arms” was one of the melodramatic ballads in which Fury tended to specialise towards the end of his initial chart run; it comes from 1965 and wasn’t an especially big hit, but for its time it still sounds remarkably contemporary, with Ivor Raymonde’s expansive arrangement easily joining the dots with Dusty and the Walkers. What distinguished Fury as a ballad singer was a kind of not-quite-ruined dignity; in songs like “I’m Lost Without You” (“You’re My World” in negative, down to the repeated bassoon figure) he does not seek to impress his immense internal grief upon the listener but merely sings of it, as best he can, without melismatic fireworks. He is down but never ever quite out, and thus able to assert the slightly desperate reassurance of “Run To My Loving Arms” – slightly desperate because he elides over phrases like “filled with tears” as though his own eyes are raining, and yet he is singing of his wish to shield and comfort his would-be Other. Somehow he manages it – Frankie Laine is not often cited as a comparison but Fury certainly deploys some of Laine’s tendencies here; the rolling-verging-on-shrill vibrato in the choruses, again the Victor Mature-type tower of strength liable to be knocked over by the littlest of fingers. And Fury inhabits the song as though determined to prove that he is for real – the extended question mark pause of high unison violins which follows “They’ll take you in and make things right” (as if to enquire “are you really strong enough to see this through?”). But Fury finally rides his steed of hope; note how in the final chorus the tympani and drums double up as he approaches her more and more closely, how the bass suddenly brightens into octave-leaping bounds, and – finally and purely – his final “arms” which come down in four stages as he bends to embrace her, such that the abrupt mid-song ending does not feel like losing one’s toehold astride the Grand Canyon (unlike, for example, Kenny Carter’s “Showdown”) but more like a happy ending, a consolidation, a bridge built. It was one of the few happy endings he was to receive. But who would now be big and small enough to want to be Billy Fury?
The reasons for this are fairly simple to outline; Fury was a singer with the rare ability to convey both sides of his personality at the same time – he could be simultaneously exuberant and threatening, at one space reassuring and alienating, and whichever side of him was dominant, the other side never quite crept out of vision – and even though he was always at the service of whatever song he was given to sing, he is never either comfortably mainstream or extravagantly out of bounds; he never lets you forget that you are listening to and watching him, however many pullover masks he has to don.
As far as rock and roll is concerned, Fury was also the first British rocker really to mean it; while Larry Parnes’ self-assembled gallery of shy, distracted teenagers is finally not that far removed in theory or practice from Simon Cowell’s ring-road-mastery, Fury immediately penetrated beyond dreams of cheerful gayness. His debut single was self-penned - an extreme rarity in fifties Britpop – and all of his package tour colleagues, from Vince Eager to Jimmy Tarbuck, were taken aback by the mere presence of a guitar, let alone his writing of songs on it. There was the early Cliff, of course, but he was quick to exchange hip swivels for Lionel Bart singalongs as soon as his chart positions diminished, and his permanence is more the result of astute reading of the demographic weather; he has changed slowly and imperceptively but always decisively and is sufficiently astute to lob out the odd curveball – a “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” a “Some People,” a “What Car?” – in order to demonstrate that he’s still in the loop.
And the rock and roll, finally, never left Fury; The Sound Of Fury deserves its reputation as the first recognisable British rock album, and even when charting with tremulous, hugely orchestrated ballads later in the sixties he was still cutting sensuous, elongated readings of things like Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do?” – which brings me to Fury’s decisive X factor; he was the first British pop singer in the rock and roll era to introduce sex into our bloodstream. Listen to his highly sated sighs of ecstasy punctuating the wide open spaces of 1960’s “Wondrous Place” or, most sublimely, the irreducible and unwriteable plea-turning-to-growl on 1963’s “Like I’ve Never Been Gone,” whence he turns the “you” of his anxious “guilty for loving you” into a multisyllabic but wordless descent from humility to seduction. Was any other British singer of the period capable of such emotional or spiritual/carnal shifts – the preppy politesse of sundry Bobbys subverted into real blood and fluid? It’s little wonder that the Silver Beatles rushed to apply for the job of Fury’s backing band (though finally declined after Fury’s insistence that they get rid of duff bass player Stuart Sutcliffe) and that others included the nascent Blue Flames (with another Parnes protégé, Georgie Fame, on keyboards) and the Tornados.
Fury was quick to rise above his contemporaries, and the baffling absence of any number one singles in his chart record (though his energisation of “Halfway To Paradise” topped the NME lists) suggests a silent rebuke for not fully playing the game, for not indulging in cuddly hiccups like Adam Faith (whose chirpy run of hits always seemed to me like a test run for the more fulfilling careers of actor and City financier, not to mention an important training ground for his arranger John Barry) or fitting all sizes like Cliff effortlessly managed. Fury seemed too real for this all-round circus of wannabe family entertainment (though conversely this was also the age when getting married could kill your career stone dead, as happened with Marty Wilde – the attendant irony of his family helping to make him one of the least expected architects of New Pop a generation later need scarcely be underlined). The strangely familiar quiff and gold lamé jacket he sports in the film Play It Cool of course spell 1982 in retrospect – hello, Martin Fry – but also induces no small regret that Fury didn’t have a greater say over where his career was going; unhappy appearances in panto and TV variety shows confirmed a world which simply was not his, and certainly (to paraphrase the late Richard Cook) if Fury had been twenty years younger and starting up in the age of New Pop he would have been a figure equivalent to a Fry or a Weller or an O’Dowd, an icon of his own making (to think of what he might have accomplished with, say, Trevor Horn had he survived longer is heartbreaking to contemplate).
That having been said, he became a sturdily noble but quietly subversive balladeer, and his inescapable reality and appeal saw him well through the Beat Boom; he was still racking up hits as late as 1966 and still experimenting – his single “Don’t Let A Little Pride (Stand In Your Way)” from that year remarkably finds him absorbing ska and bluebeat. But finally the times overtook him; he switched from Decca to EMI to release an extraordinary sequence of singles, many of which absorbed psychedelia, and it remains a matter of regret that these have still not been satisfactorily compiled.
None of them made the charts, however, and his health was also beginning to suffer; several childhood attacks of rheumatic fever had rendered his heart extremely vulnerable and he was certainly more than aware of his potentially limited lifespan. This made his unexpected re-emergence as the fictitious Stormy Tempest (though many say based on real-life Merseybeat foot soldier Rory Storm) in 1973’s film That’ll Be The Day all the more astonishing; he does not appear for long, but every appearance is like a butterfly exploding into a colossus – he is so unquestionably real that he nearly embarrasses the rest of the film into exposure as a fancy dress party (and it is a superb film with fine and truthful performances by everyone from David Essex to ex-Rory Storm and the Hurricanes sideman Ringo Starr).
The opportunity for him to prosper again was very clearly marked. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, follow it through; there were further heart scares and surgery and he eventually settled for a quiet life in the country, breeding horses and sheep and becoming active on the conservation front. However, in 1981 there came the real chance of a musical comeback; Stuart Colman, producer and mastermind behind the belated success of Shakin’ Stevens, persuaded him back into the studio, and in 1982 his name began to reappear in the lower regions of the charts. He did a few well-received concerts, participated in the Channel 4 nostalgia series Unforgettable (again with such natural power, even in diminished health) – but it finally proved too much and suddenly he was gone, the same age as Elvis.
“Run To My Loving Arms” was one of the melodramatic ballads in which Fury tended to specialise towards the end of his initial chart run; it comes from 1965 and wasn’t an especially big hit, but for its time it still sounds remarkably contemporary, with Ivor Raymonde’s expansive arrangement easily joining the dots with Dusty and the Walkers. What distinguished Fury as a ballad singer was a kind of not-quite-ruined dignity; in songs like “I’m Lost Without You” (“You’re My World” in negative, down to the repeated bassoon figure) he does not seek to impress his immense internal grief upon the listener but merely sings of it, as best he can, without melismatic fireworks. He is down but never ever quite out, and thus able to assert the slightly desperate reassurance of “Run To My Loving Arms” – slightly desperate because he elides over phrases like “filled with tears” as though his own eyes are raining, and yet he is singing of his wish to shield and comfort his would-be Other. Somehow he manages it – Frankie Laine is not often cited as a comparison but Fury certainly deploys some of Laine’s tendencies here; the rolling-verging-on-shrill vibrato in the choruses, again the Victor Mature-type tower of strength liable to be knocked over by the littlest of fingers. And Fury inhabits the song as though determined to prove that he is for real – the extended question mark pause of high unison violins which follows “They’ll take you in and make things right” (as if to enquire “are you really strong enough to see this through?”). But Fury finally rides his steed of hope; note how in the final chorus the tympani and drums double up as he approaches her more and more closely, how the bass suddenly brightens into octave-leaping bounds, and – finally and purely – his final “arms” which come down in four stages as he bends to embrace her, such that the abrupt mid-song ending does not feel like losing one’s toehold astride the Grand Canyon (unlike, for example, Kenny Carter’s “Showdown”) but more like a happy ending, a consolidation, a bridge built. It was one of the few happy endings he was to receive. But who would now be big and small enough to want to be Billy Fury?
