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[Blair N. Cummings]

I`ll be interested to hear Laura`s version (however brief) of "When Sunny Gets Blue." It has always been one of my favorite "standard" melodies. Perhaps significantly, Barbra Streisand had recently included it on an album and, although I`m not a "Babs" fan, the arrangement on her version was very good. I`m sure Laura heard it and (maybe) allowed it to influence her own interpretation. I wish she had recorded the whole song.

[pljms]

Tony Hatch's orchestral version of his most famous song starts off quietly but it eventually captures some of the excitement of his arrangement for Petula Clark's hit recording.

I don't think Tony Hatch ever recorded an instrumental version of one of his and Jackie Trent's greatest songs, 'Don't Sleep In The Subway', but I recently came across this video of Matt Monro performing the song live on TV with Hatch conducting the orchestra. Apparently Hatch ingeniously cobbled together the music to this song from three separate unfinished pieces, the first and second half of the verse and the chorus. This is taken from a show originally broadcast in October 1968 entitled 'Mr and Mrs Music', a Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent special which if memory serves me correct also featured The Searchers, Scott Walker and, inevitably, Petula Clark.

[Blair N. Cummings]

This was always my favorite by that team (although I can`t say I much care for this rendition).
Nevertheless, if the melody was a pastiche of three unrelated pieces, that would account for the chord changes that are unusual even by Hatch standards. Great song, still...but it really needs an upbeat tempo (IMO).

[pljms]

I couldn't agree more about the tempo and maybe it's because it was Matt Monro singing it that inspired Tony Hatch to give the song more of a ballad arrangement.

I've been checking out the various covers of this song but no one's is a patch on Petula Clark's original recording. However, for a change here's a live TV rendition by her from the 60s that more than does the song justice:

[Sara D]

It was Tony Hatch's 82nd birthday yesterday and the DJ on the local radio station played several of his best known songs plus a Petula Clark single from the late 60s that must have completely passed me by at the time. It has a great arrangement by Tony Hatch and I'm surprised it wasn't a hit in the UK.

[Blair N. Cummings]

I remembered this as receiving respectable airplay in the US but it peaked at #37 in July of `68.
By contrast "...Subway" made it to #5 in June of `67.
Audiences are fickle.

[pljms]

And never were they more fickle than in the UK, or so it seems and more than fifty years later it still surprises me that Petula Clark's 'Colour My World' completely failed to chart here. I believe Jackie Trent blamed it on the use of the sitar for alienating some of Petula Clark's core fan base.

[Blair N. Cummings]

These are among the reasons I could never understand Burt`s slavish attention to "the charts." No one knew the business better than he and he surely knew not just the fickleness of the audience but the sheer impossibility of every "good" song becoming a hit.

[Martin Johnson]

I believe Jackie Trent always regarded herself as a singer who just happened to also write songs and perhaps it's a shame that the performing side of her career took a backseat after she started having success as a songwriter. There isn't much film footage of her performing and the best video I could find is of her lip-syncing on British TV in 1966 to her single release of the Mann, Weill and Spector song, 'You Baby'. Tony Hatch produced and arranged this track which I'm reliably informed was a big favourite with the Northern Soul crowd. She certainly had the big voice to go with her reputed larger-than-life personality.

[blueonblue]

Jackie sings Bacharach....
I wonder if Tony borrowed the children's chorus from Burt ?



'blue'

[pljms]

When it comes to the music of Burt Bacharach I think Tony Hatch must be as big a fan as the rest of us, the difference being that he can write a sublime arrangement of one of the great man's classic songs.

[grooverider]

The Beach Boys "Walk On By":

[grooverider]

Jill Jackson "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself":




Jill Jackson was the "Paula" in Paul and Paula's "Hey Paula" from 1962:

[Sara D]

After hearing it on a French radio tribute to Bacharach the other day a friend alerted me to a version of 'Wives And Lovers' by Ella Fitzgerald with Duke Ellington which is from a live album recorded in Stockholm in 1966. Listening to the arrangement I can't imagine that it is by Duke Ellington himself.

[blueonblue]

Rare footage from 'The Bacharach Sound' a UK TV Special from 1965....

'blue'