Really Into Somethin' - Brit Girl Sounds and Styles 1962-1970 is an explicitly titled 89-track, three-CD clamshell box set.
Take one of its terrific tracks at random: Adrienne Poster’s “The Way You do the Things You do.” A February 1965 B-side, it’s a cover version of the Temptations’ US hit. Recognisably a British production it, at this remove, sounds like a UK chart certainty. There had, though, already been a British adaptation issued a month earlier by Elkie Brooks, hence the B-side status for Poster’s version. Neither single was a best seller.
It’s emblematic of the world occupied by the formidable Really Into Somethin': one where non-hits sound like hits; one where the obscurities are as good as what charted by Petula Clark, Billie Davis, Lulu, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield and more.
Such an outlook isn’t wholly revisionist, more a recognition that the pace pop was running at during this period was so swift that not everything could click with record buyers. Even a single by someone as well placed and well known as Jackie Trent, whose classy October 1965 aural drama “It’s All in the Way You Look at Life” is heard here, didn’t always smash the Top Ten. In this continuum, Hungary’s Sarolta Zalatnay (pictured below left) – her feather-light, nonetheless powerful, May 1969 UK-only, Denmark Street-recorded B-side “A Change of Heart” is on Disc Three – barely had a chance of finding a niche a in the UK market. Pity.
In keeping with this, barring the odd album-track exception, what’s compiled – most of which has not been on CD before – missed out on major sales. Or minor sales. Disc One kicks off with “Really Into Somethin'” by Susan Shirley, a name which isn't widely celebrated. However, this August 1970 top side is a fantastic, moody driver with an instantly memorable chorus and some edging-towards-heavy guitar. Shirley was born Susan O’Doherty, and was from Liverpool. An ultimate obscurity is Disc Three’s penultimate selection: “Remember my Name” is receiving its first-ever release. The recording was recovered from a 1966 acetate disc , and it is unknown who it is by or who the songwriter is. The disc came out of Denmark Street’s Regent Sound studio and is a finished recording, probably made to shop to a label rather than to demonstrate the song’s potential. A mid-tempo, soul-inclined yearner along the lines of The Kinks’ “I go to Sleep,” it is superb.
Contrasting with the lesser knowns and unknowns, star names assembled include PP Arnold, Cilla Black and Dusty Springfield. Yet what's here by each will most likely only be familiar to deep diggers. Black's amazing, dramatic version of Van McCoy’s ‘Some Things You Never Get Used to’ was recorded in 1965 and was first issued on a multi-CD set in 1997. PP Arnold’s “A Likely Piece of Work” was a studio version of a song she’d performed in the musical Catch My Soul, a rework of Shakespeare’s Othello. Springfield’s pulsing "If it Don’t Work Out” was an October 1965 album track – a song written for her by Rod Argent of The Zombies, who she’d toured with earlier that year.
The enviably consistent, nicely presented, diligently annotated Really Into Somethin', with its thoughtful introductory essay and track-by-track commentary, is the latest in a steady stream of compilations looking into female-sung British pop from (mainly) the 1960s. 1986’s Girl Zone LP has a claim on being the first sympathetically assembled collection dedicated to this territory. Back then and on that album, Adrienne Posta – also credited on record labels as Adrienne Poster – cropped up twice. Now, forty years on, here she is once more with another essential side from a single which missed out on the charts. Again, a continuum.
Unexpectedly, and despite the predecessor collections, Really Into Somethin' - Brit Girl Sounds and Styles 1962-1970 stands on its own, head held high – a valuable box set which can be taken as an entry point into the rich musical seam it draws from. Unreservedly recommended.
- Next week: The fascinating Promise Me Delight - Italo Disco And European Pop From The Golden Age
- More reissue reviews on theartsdesk
- Kieron Tyler’s website
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