Photo from The Hollywood News

I realised that giving the IMHO blog over to all reviews isn’t such a good idea after all and will be keeping it strictly music. To include anything that vaguely resembles a review would get into ridiculous extremes as it would include breakfasts among other things and would lose focus. What if I wanted to write about a gig in a café that took place early enough to order a fry-up while you watched? There would be too much crossover so I can’t be bothered. I like the freedom of being able to write what I like without fear that someone is going to remove parts of it or (even worse) make up bits that are then published with my name on. The Nottingham Evening Post (as I still call it), NottinghamLIVE, and Leftlion (who I have only written for on one occasion – the online version, they won’t ever put me or my name in the print edition that everyone in Nottingham reads, not even when a member of their staff co-hosted The Sunday Alternative on Trent Sound or when I started doing a Nottingham music show on American radio thus enabling some of our musicians their first overseas radio play) only really deal in the positive aspects, especially when it comes to Nottingham based reviews. Any slightly negative comments are snipped away making the whole thing look as if you never dislike anything.

Yesterday a new single was released to stream on Soundcloud by a female singer from Nottingham. This singer was tipped as the next breakthrough artist in 2011 but it hasn’t happened for her, although she did have a successful ‘comeback’ show at Rescue Rooms last year which followed a year away from the Nottingham music scene, albeit nothing since. She is a reasonably talented singer, not as talented as she thinks she is, but her minimal talent (there are better female singers) isn’t enough to back up her diva behaviour and delusional attitude. It is sad to listen to such a terrible song and reflect on what might have been. I will not name her (yet) as I am going to reserve judgment until I have listened to the whole EP that she is drip feeding onto Soundcloud and do a review of the whole thing in the optimistic attitude that this first song is the weak link.

On the subject of female singers (neat link, you can tell I work in radio), last night I watched the first part of Cilla. As a child of the 1980s I first came across Cilla Black as the nauseating host of Surprise Surprise and Blind Date, two Saturday night light entertainment big hitters. Although I was aware of her past as a singer, I didn’t really research it further as I wasn’t particularly keen on her based purely on these two inexplicably popular shows, there was also the small matter of there not being an Internet when I was a kid. The songs of hers I knew of, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ for example were chart friendly pop songs that made her a household name before she moved into television presenting.

My first thought was that Cilla Black was hardly a valid source for a three part drama based on her rise to fame, but I decided to watch it out of an interest in popular culture. The story started at the beginning of the 1960s in Liverpool. Unfortunately, nobody from Liverpool has ever become an actor, or so it would seem, which meant that ITV had to resort to using actors who couldn’t quite manage the accent and spent the whole hour dangerously close to saying “calm down, calm down”.

Rather than simply being a programme about Cilla herself, this was an interesting look at the Cavern Club era from a slightly different angle. We’ve all heard about The Beatles forming there and how Liverpool was the musical centre of the universe at the time, but Cilla has until now been a mere footnote. Assuming the sequences involving her jumping on the stage and joining in were accurate, she had a far more capable singing voice than history has written for her, as we saw Cilla (or to be more accurate the hugely talented Sheridan Smith) taking on the popular American influenced rhythm and blues sound and filling the room with it. The sad thing is that if she was to make an album today it would be dismissed as a novelty.

In a parallel world Cilla didn’t go down the light entertainment road, instead she carried on doing what she was doing and these days her name is mentioned in the same breath as Dusty Springfield. Respected by the music world she has survived changing trends to collaborate with Patti Smith, Morrissey, Bowie, and Amy Winehouse. Her headlining appearance at Glastonbury was the talk of the festival and the NME Godlike Genius award speech was greeted with a standing ovation before she closed the show with a storming duet with (insert name of whatever band the NME are championing this week).

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