It is unavoidably the seventies now, the G-Plan/Formica
seventies, complete with tiled bathroom flute to mask sobs to the sofa.
Bacharach and David wrote “One Less Bell” for Keely Smith in 1967, and Rosemary
Clooney made the Easy Listening charts with her version a year later, but The
Fifth Dimension’s producer Bones Howe was reminded of the song in 1969 and reckoned
it would be a good song for the group to cover. It is essentially Marilyn McCoo’s
record, with the rest of the group mere Gregorian ghosts in the distant
plainchant background (the “no more laughter”s are worthy of the closing
section of Fauré’s Requiem), and she
does a fine job of conveying domestic loneliness; the clenched suburban pain
underlying the silent Nixonian majority – who else but Hal David (except
perhaps Martin Fry) would have thought of rhyming “fry” with “cry”?
McCoo sings the lament as though living Kubler Ross stages
in reverse – first, the resigned acceptance, then depression, followed by
bargaining (“Somebody tell me please”), then anger (“Where did he go? Why did
he go?”), crowned by a terrible denial (“Tell me, HOW COULD HE LEAVE ME?”). The
record’s success was in great part aided by its inclusion in an episode of the
television series It Takes A Thief,
whose star, Robert Wagner, recently turned eighty-eight beneath a grim and
serious cloud. Given its time, however, one could interpret “One Less Bell” in
this setting as a requiem for the departed sixties – “Tell me, HOW COULD THE
SIXTIES HAVE ENDED?” In other ways, however, it could be asking when do the nineties begin since, as Lena observed, the record's use of space, echo and fatigued, dissolute despair foreshadows Portishead.
Date Record Made
Number Two: 26 December 1970
Number Of Weeks At
Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “My
Sweet Lord/Isn’t It A Pity” by George Harrison
UK Chart Position: None
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