Skip to main content

Come In Out Of The Storm, The Weather’s Nice Here: “Hey There Lonely Girl” by Eddie Holman

By Marcello Carlin



The seventies begin with a glance back to 1963, when Ruby and The Romantics made the Top 30 with their song “Hey There Lonely Boy.” Former child star Holman had been recording since 1962, had already amassed several useful records, including Northern Soul favourite “Eddie’s My Name,” and appears to have sung in early manifestations of The Delfonics and The Stylistics, but “Hey There Lonely Girl” was his moment, a fabulous, dreamlike rhapsody of romantic redemption, so flawlessly done that you don’t initially notice his extraordinary falsetto or wonder at all about androgyny. Yet Holman’s falsetto is one of the best there is, technically adept and emotionally satisfying, a clear precursor of Russell Thompkins, Jr., and in this context the song can be interpreted as an invitation to one battle-scarred casualty of a tumultuous decade to seek sanctuary in the (hopefully) better light of a new one.

Date Record Made Number Two: 21 February 1970
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Thank You (Falettin’ Me Be Mice Elf Agin)/Everybody Is a Star” - Sly & The Family Stone
UK Chart Position: 4 (1974 reissue)

Comments

  1. Allen Baekeland31 January 2018 at 20:23

    I remember Tony Blackburn and Emperor Rosko played it so much as an oldie that it had to be reissued.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Disaffection, Or Fight Against Same: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty

By Marcello Carlin
Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...
1 comment
Read more

“I Would Have Thought In The Middle Of The Atlantic In The Middle Of The Night That Rockets Must Mean Trouble”: “I’m Not In Love” by 10cc

By Marcello Carlin
"watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by." (Sylvia Plath, "Prospect," 1956) This story begins in 1954, before most people had really recognised anything called rock, and a pop record which is half-perfect. That record, which stayed at number one in our charts for ten weeks, was “Cara Mia” by David Whitfield with Mantovani and his Orchestra and Chorus. Now, Whitfield was never the most subtle of singers and his in-your-face bellowing is somewhat distracting – it is significant that he was the first British reality media star (not from television, because at that time Opportunity Knocks was only broadcast on Radio Luxembourg) since his climactic high C at the end of “Cara Mia” is like a display of gymnastics, or an athletic field event; can he do that triple loop or throw that javelin beyond the stadium? It proves that technical prowess can often render itself unlistenable. But the magic here lies in the extraordinary ...
2 comments
Read more

Hey Now, Hey Now Now, Burn This Corrosion To Me: “Fire” by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown

By Marcello Carlin
More so than “Born To Be Wild,” “Fire” marks the dividing line, where pop turns into rock, where psychedelia mutates into progressive, between fun for all the family and parents keep the hell out. Number one in Britain when I was four years old, it scared the shit out of me at the time. Even in a year which could already have been classified as pop in extremis – Dave Dee’s whip on “Legend Of Xanadu,” Jagger’s sympathetic Devil make-up on “Jumping Jack Flash” – Arthur Brown’s flaming colander crown and a Top Of The Pops performance of the song which appeared to show the band burning in forests of flame gave me genuine nightmares; not to mention the moment in the long-gone Vale Café in Tollcross when I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the jukebox and “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE!” roared out. Now I already had cause enough to have nightmares in 1968, for reasons with which I shan’t bore you here. It wasn’t that pleasant a year, even from my juvenile perspective. But the...
1 comment
Read more