The singer and the song; death by strangulation

Del Shannon has a lot to answer for. No, I am not talking about the hurt pride of the Shildon workingmen's club steward who didn't want to let him in without membership cards. This is more altogether more serious.

If anyone in the world was responsible for making me believe I might be able to sing, it was Del.

You can at least admire my ambition. There were so many singers of the age whose hits I could have chosen and whose voices would have been a lot easier to copy, giving me a sporting chance of stringing together a few notes and staying in tune. But who did I have to decide I would try to mimmick? None other than the master of falsetto.

No wonder poor Paul Younghusband talks of never properly recovering from the ordeal of living next door when, years after my attempts to become a Del Shannon soundalike, I took to practising folk songs. "My poor ears," Paul reports in his response to my item on the club trip, "were never the same."

Billy Fury, I suppose, would have been in my stream of musical consciousness at about the same time as Del and must therefore share the blame.

Somewhere there is a photo (not this one) of me walking along the promenade at Great Yarmouth - why did people from Shildon always seem to take holidays there if they didn't go to Blackpool or the Isle of Man? - and fancying myself to be Billy.

And maybe Halfway to Paradise would have been a safer choice than Runaway. But my Billy Fury fixation never went quite so deep as the Del Shannon one.

It was on a day trip to Blackpool that I decided the time had come for the Colin Randall cover version. Does anyone else remember those little booths where you could make your own records? And if you had a go, were your results as embarrassing as my attempts to get the pitch right in the verses of Runaway, let alone the excruciating high, I-wonder-why bits of the chorus?

Rather more than 40 years on, I still wince when I think back to the strangled efforts I managed to get down on disc. Naturally I blamed the recording quality when I played back my feeble attempt at home. In truth, they knew as I did that any gaps and crackles had probably done me a favour.

But it didn't put me off, as it ought to have done. And the Younghusbands were later to be joined by unsuspecting souls at the folk clubs of the North East in being expected to endure the Randall vocal experience.

Again, I convinced myself I could master pretty much anything, from Cocaine Blues and Needle of Death - songs about the fatal consequences of drug abuse were much in vogue - to Irish rebel songs and Streets of London. Folk clubs could be tough places, but I found that as long as I got the standard of guest acts about right, people were broadly willing to indulge even the grimmest of floor singers on the basis that they surely wouldn't stick around for more than a couple of songs.

The singing career had two distinct lows to reach before it more or less petered out, to what I have always imagined must have been silent acclaim, in mercifully early adulthood.

The first came during a family holiday at what I remember as a drab hi-di-hi camp called Howstrake on the Isle of Man.

This holiday was memorable for three reasons. There was the chubby Yorkshireman who kept wittering on about "everybody moaning but still coming back year after year because it's actually very good' (wrong on all counts in my case, save for the moans), the pretty Ulster student with whom I had a fling lasting beyond the holiday into the winter. And the campers' concert.

It must have been the drink - theirs and mine - and the rollicking chorus, but at the first of these, the crowd seemed to lap up my version of The Wild Rover. "Just let them wait until next week," I thought to myself as I brushed up the chords to The Flower of Northumberland. "I'll really impress them."

In the hands of someone like the Irish group, the Johnstons, this was indeed a beautiful song. For the unfortunates of Howstrake, the simple joys of banging away to the No Nay Never chorus of a week earlier were forgotten as the long-haired northern oik ploughed through the trillion dirge-like verses of his dreary ballad.

"Why didn't you just do The Wild Rover again?" my sympathetic but honest lass from Newtownards wanted to know as I glowered into my Guinness afterwards.

There was no sensible answer.

I have told the story of my other singing disgrace at Salut! Live. Suffice it here to say that my one and only professional gig involved a sobering encounter with a hostile Guisborough crowd, despite the presence of Phil Steele, another Shildon lad and a fine guitarist as it happens, by my side. All they wanted was for the juke box back to be switched on again; I bet they jumped for joy on hearing we had paid ourselves off at half time.

Gruesome versions of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Ralph McTell, and pale imitations of blameless material picked from assorted traditional and contemporary songbooks and albums, have been known to escape my lips in the intervening years.

But the main sufferers have been my wife and daughters. It's best to keep these nasty little secrets within the family.

Comments

[Bill Taylor]

Perhaps we now know the real reason for Del Shannon's suicide in 1990. Bearing the responsibility for awakening such a musical force of nature must have been grave indeed. Mind you, I for one always enjoyed Colin's rendition of "Needle of Death." Less so "Streets of London" but there's a song that would have been better left unwritten, let alone sung.
Colin doesn't mention any influence Shannon (real name, Charles Weedon Westover) might have had on his desire to play guitar. Shannon's wonderful instrumental skills are often overlooked but none other than Mark Knopfler has been quoted as saying it was Shannon who inspired him to learn to play.
Has Knopfler ever headlined at Old Shildon Club? I think not. Not yet, anyway....

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