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voice. I am thrilled to death whenever the Love Affair appear on television, as I am with the Foundations, who are led by Clem Curtis in cheap-looking high-waisted trousers, smiling all the way through Back on my feet again with a chorus that never ends. Lazy Sunday by the Small Faces is an urgent investment, and their singer is Steve Marriott, another puckish working-class runt, yet naming Noël Coward as his hero, and the canvas for investigation broadens out. Sandie Shaw had a vacantly indifferent expression, not especially willing to please. I like her single You’ve not changed because of its barking brass and simple lyric. She, though, is almost lifeless – a Saturday afternoon girl at Marble Arch. Lulu trips up over her own niceness, with drama-school wide-eyes and cutely dimpled nods to the camera, rolling her Rs on I’m a tiger , a brilliant slab of froth. Mary and Rita own the most entrancing single in Heart by Rita Pavone, a boyish Italian girl with a rising belt of vocal power. The room spins and spins. Jeane favors Elvis Presley and Billy Fury, whilst Rita repeats the same as-I-peer-through-the-window-of-lost-time Supremes single over and over again – twenty times on any given night, until Nannie’s nerves erupt, disgorged and worn. Sometimes I dance around the room with Rita as I’m livin’ in s hame wags its finger, until the day Dad tells me I look embarrassing, so I stop. Rita writes ‘Wilson for ex-premier’ on all of her discs. The self-help manual passed around to all is The Best of Timi Yuro ,a long-player in a black sleeve from which the New York-Italian singer glares with petite toughness. Timi Yuro was born Timothy, and although she is not as well known as Dorothy’s beloved Shirley Bassey, Timi Yuro’s voice rattles the bannisters with little effort. I scramble from cheap record player to cheap record player. It is considered odd that a boy so young should care so much. At Norwood Road, Dorothy and Liam own a fancy stereo-cum-cocktail cabinet, misused, I thought, by the rack of James Last LPs. Here and there my eyes and ears are caught only by the solo singers; town-crying to all people at all times, television troubadours minus jingle-jangled nodding musicians. The song bears witness, the body weaves, and there are no camera cuts to blandly smiling session-players when all we want to see is the sculptured singer – alone, carrying all, sub-plot and sub-text, the physical autobiography; simultaneously, subjectively and objectively at the same time. There is no way out for the solo singer; introduction, statement, conclusion, quick death – all conveyed in the pop sonnet, with no winking glance over to guitarists in order to ease the setting. There are visions of divine things: Tommy Körberg sings Judy, my friend ,Matt Monro sings We’re gonna change the world and Shirley Bassey sings Let me sing and I’m happy. I still don’t know what it’s all about, but like the science of signs, I am called to, because the song is the art of using language as persuasion, and with that allowance and this hope, I want to cry. I am caught and I am devoted to a fault. Snobbery jumps in. If I can sing, I am free, and no legislation can stop me. Sacha Distel, of course, has everything except a strong voice, whilst Matt Monro has a propelling voice, but not the physical poetry. Shirley Bassey fires a certain bolstered timbre that lifts her out of the Rose and Crown, and the Maria Callas history-of-human-torturefacial expressions certainly appear to be additional value for money (even if, during brief interviews on television, she is unable to relax, as if desperate to conceal an extensive lack of personality). The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and no singing artist seems to be in possession of the complete bundle. Even the royal Elvis Presley does not write the songs that he sings – not that this matters much, yet it is noted how someone with such masterly vocal direction must await the