This cropped up on a random play earlier.
A big international hit in 1962, apparently.
Quite a nice tune, but blimey those lyrics and the sickly singing style. Pass me the sick-bucket.
The poor sad soft bugger will not be seeing his teen sweetheart for a whole summer of unalloyed misery. Woe is him.
“Yes, it’s going to be a long lonely summer, but darling I promise you this.
I’ll send you all my love every day in a letter.
And seal it with a kiss.”
In early-’60s suburban white America you could get away with such drippiness. In Doncaster or Huddersfield I feel expressing such utter wetness would have been seen as good reason to get yourself a kicking.
There were a lot of Bobbies and Brians around in those pre-HJH days….songs like “Venus” or “Dream Lover” are sonic saccharin sufficient to give any musical diabetic a hyperglycaemic fit.
The youngsters today have no idea, have they? The radio was all we had and hours were spent listening to oceans of fluff like this waiting for Ray Charles or Roy Orbison. That is precisely why I know every word of Seal It With A Kiss and other such songs burnt into my memory cells.
Oh yes…my poor addled brain is full of this sort of stuff. We didn’t know any better, and once heard it could never be unheard. For instance:
or
https://youtu.be/8HIHdCJA8f8
You must stop this now! My wife slumbers peacefully on blissfully unaware that her husband will be singing Tell Laura I Love Her (including backing vocals) all the day long.
Bom bom bom bom…
… though clearly not wimpy enough to prevent Jason Donovan having a no. 1 with it in the dire 1980s.
I recall John Peel playing this rendition around the time of Jason Donovan’s hit.
I first heard that as a young teen on the soundtrack to That’ll Be The Day and liked it I’m not ashamed to admit. Here is some much darker pop from the early ’60s.
The Jaynetts – Sally Go Round The Roses
Yes! Once you start digging, there are loads of hidden gems like that, eg
This one springs to mind. I don’t hate these twee dittys and it’s certainly true they take up residence in your head for the day once heard, but rather like most of the Beatles catalogue I know it by heart and have no need to ever hear it again.
You bastard! Looks like divorce….
The corduroy condom song!
I love this, unironically.
I guess we we were all waiting for the tide to turn, with the aggressive outburst of youthful rebellion taking the world by storm. Yup, thank christ for the Moodies and BJH….
⬆️ Arf!
In 1960 The Shirelles released “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” A timeless piece of genuinely tough songwriting, straight from the heart of being a teenager.
In 1961 Tony Orlando released an answer “Not Just Tomorrow, But Always.” And it’s wimpy as FUCK.
Did I hear you get a namecheck on the latest Remainiacs podcast?
*blushes* Yers…
So who’s Bertell Dache? Is that a weird Tony Orlando pseudonym? The interwebs is no help – although you can hear Carole King on backing vocals apparently.
Answer songs were quite the thing for a while – quite often new lyrics to the same tune. I’ll spare you Tell Tommy I Miss Him, but here’s Carole King’s riposte to Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol – more than a little of the piss being taken here…
That is great fun, Mike. Carol King must have had a blast doing it.
Ah, strapping six-foot prop-forward Timi Yuro ( ©The Afterword) showing us how a REAL MAN deals with heartache… er….
https://youtu.be/rHhzLfk_DJE
An early Willie Nelson composition, fact fans.
Also a staple of Hank Wangford’s live sets. Played a little bit faster without the strings, choir or sobbing.
Nellie would of sung it different.
With his usual weary resignation. None of the look-at-me self pity of big old Timi there.
For sure.
Willie sang it with a certain amount of vicious satisfaction that a comeuppance was surely waiting.
After the self-consoling of the early part comes this:
“The world looks on with wonder
And pity at your kind
‘Cause it knows that the future
Is not very pretty for your kind
For your kind
Will always be runnin’ and wonderin’
What’s happened
To hearts that you’ve broken
And left all alone
But we’ll be alright in a little while
But you’ll be permanently lonely”
Not really a wimpy song at all, actually.
I am confuse!
You can all consider yourselves outwimped. Sickbags at the ready, please.
Paul and Paula?!?! What makes it worse is that they are actually brother and sister!!😬 (unless I am thinking of someone else…..Nino Temple and April Stevens possibly)
Oh, I rather like Sealed With A Kiss. This comes from a period when I was just starting to listen to the radio a LOT, so is burned into my memory. If this makes sense, it is pure nostalgia and I would probably never play it from choice, but enjoy it if I hear it.
Oh, I rather like Sealed With A Kiss. This comes from a period when I was just starting to listen to the radio a LOT, so is burned into my memory. If this makes sense, it is pure nostalgia and I would probably never play it from choice, but enjoy it if I hear it.
The comment about the film That’ll Be The Day is interesting – I probably never heard it between 1962 and that film because ‘oldies’ just didn’t get played on the radio in the 60s.
I think SWAK prompted me to want to learn the harmonica. It was on the “That’ll be the day” sound track which my mate’s sister, a huge David Essex fan, had bought then discarded as “David” isn’t actually on it.
Not the same era but Barry Manilow on “Mandy” sounds like a wimpy, needy little twerp. If I was Mandy, I’d be running for the hills.
Perhaps he had similar feedback at the time because Barry changed direction a few years later with “I wanna do it at you” which was wayyyy too overboard. With him it’s either “l love the thought of holding your hand…” or “let’s try anal sex tonight”. He really needs to find some middle ground.
Not The Nine O’clock Barry:
I own a wonderful Ace records compilation of death discs. Despite the morbid subject matter, most of them have a real nursery rhyme quality when it comes to the lyrics:
“Please wait at the gates of heaven for me. Terry.”
“He rode into the night. Accelerated his motorbike.
I cried to him in fright.
Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
A slightly cheesier clone of The Shangri-Las magnificent “Leader Of The Pack”.
I first remember hearing SWAK in 1975, when it was a top 10 hit again as a re-release, and I’m not ashamed to say I like it, but it only occurred to me last year when it popped up on shuffle, that I didn’t have the faintest idea what Brian Hyland looked like, and that I had no remembrance of ever seeing him perform the song, which I maintain is quite weird for a fairly-acknowledged classic hit…
Those early-’60s fresh-faced singers all looked and sounded the same, so it’s quite possible to have seen any one of them on TV and to have completely forgotten them 10 minutes later. This was disposable pop in excelsis.
Singers like Brian Hyland went into a studio for a three-hour session (over three hours on a session and the union decreed the musicians went onto a higher rate) and two songs (A side & B side) selected for them by their manager/assigned producer/label were knocked off.
Then the next artist came in for their 3-hour session.
There was also a long-running feud between the US and UK Musicians Unions. Not many US singers got onto UK television because the unions demanded reciprocal coverage and UK acts weren’t getting US hits pre-Beatles, so they weren’t wanted over there.