Charles Blackwell obit

Charles Blackwell, 1940–2024

 

He was not on the list.

I don’t know all that much about music. But the reason I know more than some people is because of actual physical records and the names you see printed on them. As a kid, if the song was written by someone different to the person singing it, I’d read the credits and make a mental note just in case I saw their name in a bargain bin elsewhere. And if it was on a record I’d never heard but was going for pennies, then it was worth taking a punt. Ditto producers, arrangers, bandleaders. Generally, it worked. I ended up doing that with a lot with records that featured Charles Blackwell’s name on them. But the first time I saw his name, it wasn’t in his customary role of arranger or writer. It was right there in the space reserved for artists. Released on the green Columbia label in 1962, a last centre-stage hurrah for bandleaders in a pre-Fabs pop scene, the A-side was called Freight Train and it was by The Charles Blackwell Orchestra.

Sitting in a 20p box in a junkshop run by a retired policeman down the road from my house, it seemed to me that any song called Freight Train might be worth a punt. Other recent purchases of mine had included Freight Train Rain by Austin Texas combo Zeitgeist and Freight Train by Kendra Smith and David Roback — both fantastic. So this Norrie Paramor composition felt like a safe bet. And so it turned out to be. A dainty pizzicato charmer that may conceivably have exerted a later influence on OMD when they wrote Talking Loud And Clear. Its swirling ascent into what, I guess, was the chorus was a moment of tummy-tickling joy, something perhaps akin to stepping inside one of those new-fangled elevators that had no buttons for the floors between 2 and 25. But it was the B-side – also written by Paramor – I fell hard for. Death Valley was a thrilling instrumental that rattled along with all the vertiginous abandon of a freewheeling boxcar. I loaded it alongside two dozen much more recent songs on my next C90 tape and, it more than held its own. If I shut my eyes on the Number 11 to Bourneville, I could have been trying to untie the ropes around me in time to leap to safety before the dusty orange canyon ahead lived up to its name.

The next time I found myself talking to someone about Charles Blackwell, I was a hundred miles south at the Record Detective Agency in Palmers Green, North London. Its owner Derek told me about the time he took receipt of a test-pressing of Those Plucking Strings, a long-play collaboration between producer maverick Joe Meek and Blackwell, then a 20 year-old aspiring bandleader. The pair had met by chance in 1957 in the offices of Essex Music on Denmark Street when Meek heard Blackwell play the piano and suggested they write together. In a rare lapse of judgement, seemingly unaware that the record had never properly been released, Derek sold his copy of Those Plucking Strings for a tiny fraction of its value. Some dealers would be consumed with bitterness about that. Derek genuinely found it funny. I told Derek about Freight Train and Death Valley. To my surprise he remembered the latter song and pulled out a Gene Vincent single, Held For Questioning, in which Blackwell had cheekily written a lyric over a melody that was basically Death Valley and changed the songwriting credit.

That same afternoon, Derek nudged another record my way. “You might like this.” It was an early single by Long John Baldry called How Long Will It Last. In this Rudy Clark composition, Baldry’s looking for commitment in the wrong decade, and from the wrong person. “I wanna know, I wanna know/How long will it last,” beseech Baldry’s tarry, forlorn tones. “But you keep on telling me/Hey sugar/Don’t get serious.” A low trombone parp for every bar and a busy beat-pop arrangement with plenty of drum fills seems to side more with the subject of the singer’s affections than the poor singer. The same year, Tom Jones finally found the song to launch his career with It’s Not Unusual — but it could just as easily have been this one.

How Long Will It Last chimed with the times — which, I imagine, is the reason it was chosen in preference to House Next Door on the flipside. But House Next Door could easily have been a standard. And the arrangement which — like How Long Will It Last — was put together by our friend Charles Blackwell, suggests that everyone had high hopes for the song. You can hear it in the sure-footed, stop-what-you’re-doing vocal intro, “I got to find lo-o-ve/I got to find lo-o-ove!”

From thereon in, the protagonist’s plight proceeds at a heartbroken half-tempo. “The house next door is a worn hole/I just don’t see how it can hold a soul/But the people living there are so close together/that that old house can hold any kind of weather.” Blackwell’s strings ascend in sympathy. Baldry is gazing from a window of his own swish pile. Life has ostensibly been kind: “My house is like a mansion/Standing so brave and tall/But for all the love that’s in it/It might as well fall.”

“It sounds like an American song to me,” said Charles when I tracked him down via Facebook and sent him an audio file — something I had to do because there was no way he could be expected to remember the thousands of songs he had arranged through the decades. He didn’t have to take my call, but he did and he was utterly lovely about it. We talked about the song’s co-writer H.B. Barnum, a former child star from Texas who went on to record with an early version of The Coasters, before scoring for Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin. We pondered whether its musical and lyrical resemblance to Garnet Mimms’ A Quiet Place was deliberate, a conversation that easily lasted an hour. I wish I’d recorded it.

In later years, two albums attributed to Charles came out in their own right. Released in 1967, Classics With A Beat (or, in America, Folklore With A Beat) saw Charles and his orchestra create a bunch of fun settings for a bunch of guitar instrumentals by legendary sessioneer Big Jim Sullivan, among them a gorgeous She Moved Through The Fair and the beautiful 19th century piano piece Schwarze Augen.

Sullivan played on an astonishing 59 chart-topping British hits, and many of those will have also featured Charles Blackwell. When you listen to the heart-stopping melodrama of John Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me, your emotions are being buffeted by the twists and turns of Charles’ arrangement. Charles is also the reason Tom Jones’ What’s New Pussycat swings like an elephant boarding a sailboat. If the waltz-time pleading of Michel Polnareff’s Love Me Please Love Me dissolved your defences on impact, that’s because Charles set the temperature. And if Britain has seemed like a less friendly, more isolated place since the referendum, it’s a comfort to learn that, thanks to Charles, a small part of us has remained in the EU. Every time European Parliament convenes to sit, it does so to a 70-piece orchestral version of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy that Charles orchestrated and conducted.

Perhaps best of all, Those Plucking Strings finally managed to get a release in its own right. Not, it should be added, that Charles himself seemed all that happy about it. In 2014, addressing the crowd at a Joe Meek-themed show in London, he joked “If you’ve never heard it, don’t buy it. It’s crap!” However, I’d beg to differ. This sound –once rendered obsolete by everything that came after it — now radiates a playful optimism. Numbers like Puttin’ On The Style and Last Train To San Fernando sound as smooth and shiny as patterned formica in an age where Elnett and Brylcreem made tonsorial self-determinism an affordable luxury for everyone. When you listen to Those Plucking Strings, you’re still listening to the future. It just happens to be a different sort of future to the one that actually happened. And because of that, there’s also a slight tinge of sadness. It’s not quite Wonderful Land or Telstar, perhaps something more akin to a newly-built Locarno, just smart enough to house the modest expectations of the young lovers who go there on a Friday night.

Those songs weren’t designed to outlast the courtships that they soundtracked or, indeed, the ballrooms in which they were played. But they have done. And happily, Charles Blackwell — who passed away aged 84 this week, surrounded by his loved ones — stuck around long enough to see that happen.

Charles Blackwell, 1940–2024, RIP