Filed under: music | Tags: gene pitney, helen shapiro, poopchutes, the sixties
My itunes randomizer just popped up with Gene Pitney’s Not Responsible, a song that’s wonderfully catchy and has amazingly weird backup vocals, despite the fact it’s also very creepy in the “ha ha this is actually maybe about date rape” sort of way that was alarmingly common in sixties pop music. That’s why I’m much more at ease listening to the 1963 version by the fabulous Helen Shapiro. Shapiro was a white Jewish soul singer who had her first hit when she was fourteen. (I’m surprised there wasn’t any revival of interest in her when Amy Winehouse got all popular, actually, because visually they’ve got a lot in common.)
On Shapiro’s first headlining British tour, the Beatles were the opening act, but Melody Maker declared that her a has-been at sixteen and, chartwise, she was. Her biggest hit was called Walking Back To Happiness and finally somebody uploaded a performance of it to Youtube last month:
