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Frying Tonight, Crying This Morning: “One Less Bell To Answer” by The Fifth Dimension

By Marcello Carlin



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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