▪️ Cilla Black – 25th Anniversary Album (EMI Music for Pleasure 1988)
When I was growing up in the eighties Cilla Black was known to me as the colourful, avuncular presenter of the hugely popular TV shows Surprise Surprise and Blind Date. Looking very much as she does on the cover here, and promising in her thick Scouse accent “a lorra lorra laughs”, our Cilla was every bit the national treasure and family favourite. Though she sang on her shows, I was only distantly cognisant of her having once been a popular singer back in the sixties.
It was only years later I read of her connections to The Beatles. She was part of Brian Epstein’s roster of Liverpudlian talent, which meant her records were also produced by George Martin. Moreover, she covered Beatles songs and Paul McCartney even gave her songs to sing, including songs like ‘Love of the Loved’ and ‘Step Inside Love’, which The Beatles themselves never recorded.
Overcoming any lingering snobbery, your blogger picked up this 2LP compilation from a charity shop in 2017. What began as curiosity soon turned to love, however, not just because of the Beatles connection, but because this is exemplary pop music in its own right, full of all the sonic explosiveness and compressed high-drama that typifies the best pop of the period. For a rough and untutored working class talent, she makes a decent stab at some of the best material of the time, in particular as a wonderful interpreter of Burt Bacharach.
While not as refined or sophisticated as someone like Dusty Springfield, her voice nonetheless embodies the dynamic and daring informalities of that new generation of working class talent that exploded in the arts in the sixties, in fashion (Mary Quant), photography (David Bailey), cinema (Michael Cain). She has never had the same respect as her contemporaries, but Cilla Black belongs among them.
When I watched Edgar Wright’s 2021 horror film Last Night in Soho, the thing I ended up loving most about it was the fact that it took Cilla Black seriously as a sixties pop star. I had never seen anyone else doing that. She is long overdue for such a reassessment.
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