January 20, 2003 - published in The Times second
section
Billy was my hero By Bob Stanley Billy Fury, who died 20 years ago, was a perfect but vulnerable pop star, says this lifelong fan |
IT’S BEST NEVER TO
MEET your heroes, David Bowie once said, “that way they
stay intact.” There’s little chance of me crossing
paths with my all-time pop hero, Billy Fury, as he died 20
years ago this month. He was the first and greatest
British rocker — only the Beatles, Elvis and Cliff
scored more hits in the Sixties — yet he never had a No
1: his best-remembered song, appropriately, was Halfway
To Paradise.
Fury records were all yearning, brooding, drenched in
melancholy. Always, he was sad. Lost or unrequited love
were recurring themes; When Will You Say I Love You,
Jealousy, Margo Don’t Go. The desperately
handsome singer was also desperately shy, and, like his
songs, riddled with self-doubt. I discovered Billy Fury
when I was 16. How could I not become obsessed?
As a kid he was a loner, writing poems, going out
bird-watching after school. He would often fall into a
river or pond and, rather than face his Mum’s wrath,
stand outside in his wet clothes until they dried. At the
age of seven he contracted rheumatic fever (the illness
that was to bring about his early death, from heart
failure, in 1983 at age 42) and doctors reckoned that his
heart was so weak that he would die before he was 16.
When he did reach his teens, he joined a gang in
Dingle, his Liverpool stamping ground, rewarded with
cigarette burns on his cheeks. He bought a flick knife
with his first pay cheque. Maybe all of this is true,
maybe not, but it was a perfect exercise in myth-making.
He may as well have had “outsider” tattooed on his
arm.
The pop era into which he was launched in 1959 was
gaudy and dimly lit, obsessed with novelty, but rooted in
parochial, postwar austerity. Looking back, the British
Fifties pop scene seems fantastically seedy, akin to
pre-censorship Hollywood, with managers like Reg Calvert
and Larry Parnes and their stables of boys. Parnes was a
ration-token Warhol. He re-christened his superstars:
Marty Wilde, Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Dickie Pride,
Billy Fury. Most of them made reasonably good records but
Billy had the gold lamé suit, the perfect golden quiff.
Plus he had a voice to break your heart.
A perfect pop star, yet he always seemed so vulnerable.
Herein lay his appeal. He was nervous around other
singers. “Jet Harris (the Shadows guitarist) would walk
into a room and he’d want to fight you,” remembers
Kenny Lynch. “Billy walked into a room, the lights went
out. He’d sit in a corner and hope someone would come
and talk about rock’n’roll.” Billy Fury’s true
contemporaries weren’t pop rivals Cliff Richard and Adam
Faith, but fictional characters: Arthur Seaton, Billy
Fisher, Jimmy Porter.
“He was strange.” says the pop writer Nik Cohn.
“When he talked, he mumbled and stared at his hands.
‘I’m an introvert and an extrovert’ he said,
‘I’m an exhibitionist on stage but I can’t tell
anyone about myself, I freeze up. I don’t want anyone to
know.’ He was tense and, in some odd sense, genuinely
innocent.”
Only one of Fury’s hits, the incongruously chipper In
Summer, could really be described as upbeat. The Evening
Standard’s Maureen Cleave cornered him in 1963 for a
piece called Last of the Teenage Originals. Why
didn’t he sing more cheerful songs, she wondered? “I
never feel cheerful enough,” Billy replied. On stage he
sang a maudlin ballad about an orphan called Nobody’s
Child — when he got to the part that went
“Sometimes I get so lonesome I wish that I could die”,
girls screamed “Don’t die Billy!”. In the late
Sixties he confessed to having a death wish, writing off
cars, and, according to Kenny Everett, taking “LSD by
the bucketful”.
Billy’s legend in rock history is ensured by The
Sound of Fury, a ten-inch album recorded in 1960.
It’s an extraordinary record, not least because it is
entirely self-written — pre-Beatles this was unheard of.
The producer Jack Good captured what he called “the soul
of Billy Fury”. It was reviewed as a country album but
later acknowledged for what it is — pure rockabilly.
Sparse yet tough, it documents one broken love affair
after another, with Joe Brown’s stinging guitar in
counterpoint to Billy’s echo-laden vocals. A CD released
this month on Castle Select documents The Sound of Fury
as a work in progress, and it’s still riveting.
But it was just as his chart career was winding down,
around 1965, that Billy Fury started to make what are
arguably his greatest, most individual records. It is
common for rock historians to claim that Billy loved to
rock, and that he was coerced into recording ballads. Not
true. He loved the ghostly Wondrous Place so much
that he recorded at least three different versions, and in
the late Sixties he wrote and recorded a ton of
string-driven ballads, advancing the trademark Fury
atmosphere. Paper Aeroplanes, Fascinating
Candleflame, Communication — lonely, opulent
and beautiful. A midpoint between Roy Orbison and Scott
Walker. And most were never released. Billy’s estate
seems to have become a tug-of-war between his girlfriend
and his mother, the result being that anything beyond his
hitmaking period with Decca is out of bounds.
Once the hits had dried up, Billy bought a farm in
mid-Wales, where he had a bird sanctuary and raised
horses. For a while he lived in a caravan in Cornwall
where he helped to rescue birds caught up in an oil slick.
People would bring him sick and injured animals —
“foxes, badgers, birds of prey, anything”, he
marvelled in the Seventies. “It’s my idea of
heaven.”
Songs from this period have titles like Outside,
No Trespassers, and Lazy Life. He also
became an active hunt saboteur. Just for fun, he took a
role in David Puttnam’s 1973 film That’ll Be The
Day, as Stormy Tempest, a pin-thin rocker singing in a
band with Keith Moon. It was a fine coda to his pop
career.
Obviously he made mistakes, the odd bad record and a
couple of poor films. It doesn’t matter. “In
modern-day parlance this was bedsit music,” says the
writer Mick Houghton, “and Fury, ever the pessimist,
always insecure, was the first in a tradition that would
later include Scott Walker, Neil Young, Tim Buckley and
Morrissey.” There’s no box-set planned (yet) but a
double CD of his Radio Luxembourg show is out in the
summer. In a couple of weeks there’s a get-together in a
church hall in Mill Hill where diehards will gather to
reminisce. I don’t think I’ll go. Other fans never
quite get it the way you do. I’m glad none of my
friends get Billy Fury the way I do. Heroes, after all,
are very personal. |