Just wondering if anyone can help me out here. I’m struggling to determine exactly what genre/style of music Do you Mind?, by Anthony Newley is. I’ve tried Google, wikipedia and various sources, so I thought I’d ask ya’ll.
I’m specifically interested in what music journalists/commentators/academics would describe it as.
Thanks.
When I think Anthony Newley, the first thing that comes to mind is show tunes or lounge music. This one sounds like 70s pop to me.
A little down tempo but has kind of a Rockabilly sound.
I suspect that it’s a specifically British genre (Trad Jazz, Skiffle, Music Hall) that have no mirror in American music. It sounds similar to the pop music that came out of Broadway musicals in the late 50s-early 60s. The delivery is very accentuated and “showy”.
That’s sort of what I got out of it too. I have no idea when that song is from, but if you said the 1950’s, I’d call it ‘rock and roll’ along the same lines as Buddy Holly or Bill Haley. Let me rephrase that, it sounds like a 50’s ballad from a 50’s rock and roll person. The song itself isn’t rock and roll, but it sounds like it’s done by a rock and roll band.
According to the person who posted it on YouTube, it was recorded in 1960. I’m inclined to agree with both you and Nunzio. The guitar has, to me, a rockabilly/50’s-rock-and-roll-ish sound.
It’s written by Lionel Bart, who did songs for stage & screen, and it comes from a movie. Others who’ve done the song are Andy Williams, Sandi Shaw and Engelbert Humperdinck. If that’s rock ‘n’ roll, it’s in the same sense that West Side Story or Bye Bye Birdie is rock ‘n’ roll.
I was going to say it sounds a lot like early Cliff Richard and The Shadows, and apparently Lionel Bart wrote Living Doll, arguably one of Cliff’s best known hits. Also sounds a little like like Ferry Cross the Mersey by Gerry and the Pacemakers. But other than calling it early 60s British Pop (influenced by Skiffle and US Rock), I’ve not really heard a collective name for the genre.
There was a slew of songs with a similar feel during the early 1960’s, its pre-Beatles Brit pop. You could check out Mike Sarne, some Cliff Richard, Joe Brown, Billy Fury. This particular number has the same sort of swing as ‘King of the Road’.
There was something of a dead zone between rock and roll playing out and the arrival of the Beatle/Merseysound - in the US you can instantly pick out that sound, it has a certain sort of twee sound - especially in the backing vocals - as if R’n’R had been corporatised.
The UK had a similar period, but since we got to R’n’R later than the US the music was a little different and only had a couple of years before it all changed rather than the five or six year gap in the US
Thanks for all your responses, they’re really helpful. And intriguing, especially this:
I’m going to come clean and admit that I asked this because it relates to my dissertation. I’m specifically studying pop-song pronunciation (it’s a linguistics degree), and I’ve been looking at the patterns of American pronunciations (or lack of) by non-American artists in the UK charts. Anthony Newley is unusual for the 1960’s in that he doesn’t appear to be style shifting towards the USA-5 model (a set of phonemes that are/were widely seen as stereotypically American). My findings seem to point towards accent style shifts being largely down to musical genre, style or scene.
The fact that although it seems to be played by a rock and roll band, but definitely doesn’t sound rock and roll appears to fit with the rest of the data. By not singing like say, Cliff Richard (who definitely style shifts towards the USA-5), Anthony Newely has sort of placed himself outside of this genre. We’re kind of forced to call it ‘Brit’ pop, and discuss it in terms of how it isn’t American, etc. Interesting.
Just to make up a category, I would call it Denmark Street. This is the British equivalent of the American category Tin Pan Alley:
It’s the music that originated in Broadway (or in the U.K., West End) productions, movie and TV themes, and miscellaneous popular music in the mid-twentieth century. By the time of that song (1960), it was getting pushed out by rock and roll. Note that the Denmark Street entry even mentions Lionel Bart. It was an older music style trying desperately to adjust to newer styles just enough to stay relevant without quite turning into that newer music. It sounds like it’s right on the edge because it is.