The sixties was a significant period of change for music and society. As Marianne Faithfull said, ‘it was the time when society changed from black & white to technicolour.’ However, this wasn’t always reflected in the charts. Guitar bands and solo male singers achieved high chart placings, but this wasn’t always the case with female vocalists. While some went on to establish themselves and become household names — Dusty, Lulu, Cilla — and some had had singing careers before the sixties — Lita Roza, Petula Clark — few made the impact or became as iconic as American female singers like Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Women who had something to say about issues like independence, empowerment and liberation, and who said it freely and out loud.
Really Into Something follows on from RPM’s 90s/00s Dream Babes series. It’s a three CD set consisting of 89 tracks which features several well-known artists, but mainly it’s a showcase for many female vocalists who recorded in the sixties but who, for any number of reasons — too young (Christine Holmes was taking exams when recording her first single), bad luck, poor management, given weak material — didn’t make the charts and, in some cases, their songs weren’t even released.
In the sixties, women had very little control over either their careers or what they were given to sing. For every Cilla, who was looked after by the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, there were many talented women singers managed by Svengalis whose best interests weren’t necessarily in ensuring their clients’ wellbeing. Even Dusty Springfield, when going solo at the ripe old age of 24, was initially considered to be too old. Happily, this situation is much less prevalent now, where singers like Polly Harvey can sustain careers without getting anywhere near the charts.
There really is some quite delightful stuff on this set, and it’s bewildering why some of these tracks didn’t make the charts. Paula Parfitt‘s ‘Give You Back Your Ring,’ Laurie‘s ‘I Want Him’ and Heather‘s ‘I’ll Come Softly’ are all gems and deserved to have been hits, especially when you consider that during the same period Lulu was having a hit with the utterly dreadful ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang.’ There are also some extremely good cover versions, particularly Lita Roza‘s take on Ruth Brown’s R&B classic ‘Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,’ and Adrienne Posta‘s version of Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do.’ Both of these also deserve to have been hits, although Debbie Lee‘s cover of Darlene Love’s ‘Today I Met (The Boy I’m Gonna Marry)’ was somewhat ill-advised.
Several of the artists included here went on to make names, albeit mostly away from the charts. Sharon Tandy fronted Freakbeat band Fleur de Lys, Julie Driscoll played in the Brian Auger Trinity, PP Arnold was backed by The Nice (featuring Keith Emerson), Dana Gillespie recorded with David Bowie and Marc Bolan, while Madeline Bell sang in hit parade outfit Blue Mink. Others, such as Ayshea Brough (Lift Off with Ayshea) and Julie Covington (Rock Follies) went into TV.
This is an extremely worthwhile collection of female singers, many of whom remain unknown outside of a small coterie of diehard fans, and if only those ‘stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song’ (pace Joni Mitchell) had been broader minded, many of the songs included here may well have seen chart action.
