Help!
The Dave Clark Five
The Supremes
Captain Beefheart and Zappa
Burt Bacharach
Starting Out: Cilla Black
Introduction: Scholastic Magazines published a book on British pop music back in 1966. The authors intended writing style was geared mainly towards the young adult reader who would be just ripe for fresh young minds interested in rock and roll. That said, this report by Caroline Silver does contain many candid remarks from Cilla Black regarding Liverpool's early beat scene as well as her rise to fame. The Ottawa Beatles Site sincerely hopes you enjoy reading the article.- John Whelan, Chief Researcher for the Ottawa Beatles Site, July 13, 2002.
Starting Out: Cilla Black
by Caroline Silver
Published in December, 1966 by Scholastic Magazines, Inc.
In October 1962 a new hat-check girl started work at the Cavern. She was seventeen years old, a slim five-feet-five-inches, with bright red hair and dark blue eyes. Her name was Priscilla Maria Veronica White, Cilla to her friends. She was a beat fan.
Cilla was born in Liverpool on May 27, 1945. She went to school at St. Anthony's Secondary Modern, where she became interested in acting. When she was nine she made her first appearance onstage in a school production of Little Red Riding Hood. Three years later she was in Julius Caesar, and end-of-term play.
In England, boys and girls usually go to separate schools. St. Anthony's was an all-girl school. On week-ends, boys and girls would get together to go to the beach or have a party. At a party in Liverpool, everybody must do a "turn" -- sing a number, recite a poem, do a tap dance -- even if he is not very good at it. Cilla's turn was always a song.
In 1958 she left school and took a secretarial course, then got a job as a typist with a cable manufacturing company in Liverpool. In the evenings she went the rounds to the beat clubs with her school friends, listening to many of the newly formed groups. All the Liverpool groups who were later to become famous -- among them the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas -- were playing in the Liverpool clubs in the late 1950's. Cilla knew many of them by sight, as they had gone to her local boys' school. Later, she got to know them all.
"In all these clubs you made a point of making friends with everybody," she says. "It was rather like a glorified YMCA. I used to collect a lot of autographs and watch a lot of performers because I was very much interested in show business. Deep down in my heart I knew I was going to be a singer."
By October 1962 Cilla was working at the Cavern in her lunch hours, hanging up coats for five shillings (60 cents) an hour. "That way I could listen to the music and get paid for it," she says. She was particularly friendly with a group called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. "We were part of a clique, a gang. We all used to go to the beach on Sundays. Ringo Starr was the drummer for them at the time."
Brian Epstein once described Cilla Black's arrival on the pop music scene as "Britain's most exciting new beat songstress. The gal with the bright red hair and the jet black voice". How true his words were...Cilla had a string of many hits: "Alfie", "Love of the Loved" "Anyone Who Had A Heart" and "Step Inside Love".
One day when Rory Storm was playing at the Cavern he handed the microphone to Cilla. "He asked me, for giggles, to get up on the stage and sing with them. They thought: 'Oh, Cilla's a bit of a case -- she'll do anything for a laugh.' And probably the lead singer wanted to have a rest anyway."
So Cilla got up on the stage and took up the lyric of "Fever" where Rory Storm left off, belting it out in her strong voice. Then they made her sing "Always" and some R-&-B numbers. Word of Cilla's performance quickly spread among the Liverpool groups, because at that time there were no girl singers in the city, so she was a novelty. In the weeks following, every time she went to a club she would be pointed out by somebody and would be made to get up and sing.
Soon a group called the Big Three suggested that, instead of Cilla's singing with everybody and not earning anything, she should sing with them only, and for pay. Shortly after this, and advertisement appeared in the local newspapers: "Come and see Swinging Priscilla at the Zodiac tonight."
"I've always been called Cilla," she says, "so it never occurred to me that the Priscilla in the advertisement might be me. After work, I couldn't wait to wash my face and put new makeup on to go down to the Zodiac and see who this 'Swinging Priscilla' was. When I got to the door -- it was marvelous. These clubs, because you'd go down to the cellar and it'd have a little trap, sort of an eye, like a cat door only about five feet up the door, and you'd knock three times and a piece of wood would slide back and they'd say, 'Who is it? -- and that night I said, 'It's me.' And they said, 'Oh, good. Glad you came tonight because we couldn't think how to get hold of you, and you're on in a half hour!' And I said, 'On?' I beg your pardon!' And they said, 'You're singing with the Big Three.' And I said, 'Oh no, I'm not!'
"They blackmailed me, actually. They said if I didn't sing with the Big Three I would be barred from the Zodiac. And to be barred from this particular club, which was at the height of its popularity, was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Without this club there was no other place to go, because although the other clubs were still going they weren't 'in' at the time; the Zodiac was the 'in' club of the moment. So I just had to do it.
"I went off to a chemist's and got a lot of cough sweets because I thought they'd make my voice better. And I got terribly temperamental -- a thing which I'd never done in my life -- because I was going to sing. And I remember my tongue was black with all these black cough sweets when I was singing. But it was very successful night. I enjoyed it."
She sang for about twenty minutes. At the end of the session, to her great astonishment, the leader of the Big Three slipped three ten-shilling notes ($4.20) into her pocket. Cilla had become a paid performer.
So Cilla began with the Big Three as "Swinging Cilla," and became well-known among the Liverpool groups. Although officially a group member, she still used to sing with other groups. So did everyone else. Group members were always ready to split up and play with other groups for fun at clubs. Jam sessions were held in the evenings at the Iron Door, the Cavern, the Mardi Gras, the Black Cat, the Peppermint Lounge, and at many other Liverpool clubs, as well as the Zodiac. Cilla's favorite clubs were the Iron Door and the Cavern, but she always remained particularly fond of the Zodiac because it was the first club at which she sang regularly.
Then a local pop-music newspaper called Merseybeat wrote an article about Cilla and got her name mixed up. "They knew my name was a color of some sort, but they didn't know whether it was Black or White. So they printed it Black." The Beatles soon told their manager, Brian Epstein, that Cilla was a promising young singer, and Epstein became interested in managing her. He, too, thought her name was Cilla Black, and wrote it so in the contract he eventually signed with her. "When I told Brian my real name was Cilla White, he didn't like it much," she says. "Because by now everyone was so used to calling me Cilla Black that they couldn't imagine me Cilla White, so we kept it Cilla Black."
The color mix-up was characteristic also of Cilla's life at that point. Cilla White went on working during the day as a typist. At night, Cilla Black sang in the clubs, looking forward to making a record when Epstein had time to arrange it. The Beatles were becoming very popular in the summer of 1963, so their manager had his hands full and Cilla had to wait.
Her turn came in August, when she took her annual two weeks' holiday from her typing job. She went to London with Brian Epstein and was introduced to recording manager George Martin, who had already heard and liked tapes she made with Gerry and the Pacemakers. Cilla enjoyed it all; Epstein showed her off as his new talent, and this, plus the fact that she is naturally outgoing and friendly, made her not in the least frightened. By the end of the week she had got to know a lot of people in the recording world and was feeling sufficiently relaxed to go into a recording studio and make a record. "I was a bit nervous at first," she says, "because all the musicians in the studio were strangers, and so far I'd only sung with people I knew. But once I got started there was no turning back."
The song Cilla recorded was "Love of the Loved" by Lennon and McCartney. Those involved in the recording were so pleased with the result that Cilla no longer had any doubts about where she was going next. She went home and handed in her notice to her Liverpool boss. Two weeks later she began to call herself a professional singer.
"Love of the Loved" shot up the British pop music charts, and Cilla went off on a concert tour with Gerry and the Pacemakers. She returned to London in time to appear in the Beatles' Christmas Show at Finsbury Park, Astoria, London. Early in 1964, her second record made number one on the British Hit Parade; so did her third, which was released while Cilla was appearing in Star-time at the London Palladium.
Cilla played the Palladium from May to December 1964, and was chosen (as Palladian resident performers always are) to sing before the Queen in that year's Royal Variety Performance. Since then, she has made many more records, has toured Australia and New Zealand, has appeared in America on The Ed Sullivan Show and on Shindig, and has often been on British television. She has done cabaret performances in different parts of the world, including a three-week season in New York at the Plaza Hotel's Persian Room. And during the winter of 1965-66 she played Little Red Riding Hood on a London stage (which, she says, was nothing like her nine-year-old school performance).
Cilla is a splendid example of the amateur-made-good spirit typical of British pop in the early 1960s. "I've never had any training," she says. "Nobody told me how to sing, or what to do at a certain point of a song, how to introduce songs. Not even Brian Epstein, because Brian didn't know -- he was just as much an amateur as we were!"
Starting Out: Cilla Black
by Caroline Silver
Published in December, 1966 by Scholastic Magazines, Inc.
In October 1962 a new hat-check girl started work at the Cavern. She was seventeen years old, a slim five-feet-five-inches, with bright red hair and dark blue eyes. Her name was Priscilla Maria Veronica White, Cilla to her friends. She was a beat fan.
Cilla was born in Liverpool on May 27, 1945. She went to school at St. Anthony's Secondary Modern, where she became interested in acting. When she was nine she made her first appearance onstage in a school production of Little Red Riding Hood. Three years later she was in Julius Caesar, and end-of-term play.
In England, boys and girls usually go to separate schools. St. Anthony's was an all-girl school. On week-ends, boys and girls would get together to go to the beach or have a party. At a party in Liverpool, everybody must do a "turn" -- sing a number, recite a poem, do a tap dance -- even if he is not very good at it. Cilla's turn was always a song.
In 1958 she left school and took a secretarial course, then got a job as a typist with a cable manufacturing company in Liverpool. In the evenings she went the rounds to the beat clubs with her school friends, listening to many of the newly formed groups. All the Liverpool groups who were later to become famous -- among them the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas -- were playing in the Liverpool clubs in the late 1950's. Cilla knew many of them by sight, as they had gone to her local boys' school. Later, she got to know them all.
"In all these clubs you made a point of making friends with everybody," she says. "It was rather like a glorified YMCA. I used to collect a lot of autographs and watch a lot of performers because I was very much interested in show business. Deep down in my heart I knew I was going to be a singer."
By October 1962 Cilla was working at the Cavern in her lunch hours, hanging up coats for five shillings (60 cents) an hour. "That way I could listen to the music and get paid for it," she says. She was particularly friendly with a group called Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. "We were part of a clique, a gang. We all used to go to the beach on Sundays. Ringo Starr was the drummer for them at the time."
Brian Epstein once described Cilla Black's arrival on the pop music scene as "Britain's most exciting new beat songstress. The gal with the bright red hair and the jet black voice". How true his words were...Cilla had a string of many hits: "Alfie", "Love of the Loved" "Anyone Who Had A Heart" and "Step Inside Love".
One day when Rory Storm was playing at the Cavern he handed the microphone to Cilla. "He asked me, for giggles, to get up on the stage and sing with them. They thought: 'Oh, Cilla's a bit of a case -- she'll do anything for a laugh.' And probably the lead singer wanted to have a rest anyway."
So Cilla got up on the stage and took up the lyric of "Fever" where Rory Storm left off, belting it out in her strong voice. Then they made her sing "Always" and some R-&-B numbers. Word of Cilla's performance quickly spread among the Liverpool groups, because at that time there were no girl singers in the city, so she was a novelty. In the weeks following, every time she went to a club she would be pointed out by somebody and would be made to get up and sing.
Soon a group called the Big Three suggested that, instead of Cilla's singing with everybody and not earning anything, she should sing with them only, and for pay. Shortly after this, and advertisement appeared in the local newspapers: "Come and see Swinging Priscilla at the Zodiac tonight."
"I've always been called Cilla," she says, "so it never occurred to me that the Priscilla in the advertisement might be me. After work, I couldn't wait to wash my face and put new makeup on to go down to the Zodiac and see who this 'Swinging Priscilla' was. When I got to the door -- it was marvelous. These clubs, because you'd go down to the cellar and it'd have a little trap, sort of an eye, like a cat door only about five feet up the door, and you'd knock three times and a piece of wood would slide back and they'd say, 'Who is it? -- and that night I said, 'It's me.' And they said, 'Oh, good. Glad you came tonight because we couldn't think how to get hold of you, and you're on in a half hour!' And I said, 'On?' I beg your pardon!' And they said, 'You're singing with the Big Three.' And I said, 'Oh no, I'm not!'
"They blackmailed me, actually. They said if I didn't sing with the Big Three I would be barred from the Zodiac. And to be barred from this particular club, which was at the height of its popularity, was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Without this club there was no other place to go, because although the other clubs were still going they weren't 'in' at the time; the Zodiac was the 'in' club of the moment. So I just had to do it.
"I went off to a chemist's and got a lot of cough sweets because I thought they'd make my voice better. And I got terribly temperamental -- a thing which I'd never done in my life -- because I was going to sing. And I remember my tongue was black with all these black cough sweets when I was singing. But it was very successful night. I enjoyed it."
She sang for about twenty minutes. At the end of the session, to her great astonishment, the leader of the Big Three slipped three ten-shilling notes ($4.20) into her pocket. Cilla had become a paid performer.
So Cilla began with the Big Three as "Swinging Cilla," and became well-known among the Liverpool groups. Although officially a group member, she still used to sing with other groups. So did everyone else. Group members were always ready to split up and play with other groups for fun at clubs. Jam sessions were held in the evenings at the Iron Door, the Cavern, the Mardi Gras, the Black Cat, the Peppermint Lounge, and at many other Liverpool clubs, as well as the Zodiac. Cilla's favorite clubs were the Iron Door and the Cavern, but she always remained particularly fond of the Zodiac because it was the first club at which she sang regularly.
Then a local pop-music newspaper called Merseybeat wrote an article about Cilla and got her name mixed up. "They knew my name was a color of some sort, but they didn't know whether it was Black or White. So they printed it Black." The Beatles soon told their manager, Brian Epstein, that Cilla was a promising young singer, and Epstein became interested in managing her. He, too, thought her name was Cilla Black, and wrote it so in the contract he eventually signed with her. "When I told Brian my real name was Cilla White, he didn't like it much," she says. "Because by now everyone was so used to calling me Cilla Black that they couldn't imagine me Cilla White, so we kept it Cilla Black."
The color mix-up was characteristic also of Cilla's life at that point. Cilla White went on working during the day as a typist. At night, Cilla Black sang in the clubs, looking forward to making a record when Epstein had time to arrange it. The Beatles were becoming very popular in the summer of 1963, so their manager had his hands full and Cilla had to wait.
Her turn came in August, when she took her annual two weeks' holiday from her typing job. She went to London with Brian Epstein and was introduced to recording manager George Martin, who had already heard and liked tapes she made with Gerry and the Pacemakers. Cilla enjoyed it all; Epstein showed her off as his new talent, and this, plus the fact that she is naturally outgoing and friendly, made her not in the least frightened. By the end of the week she had got to know a lot of people in the recording world and was feeling sufficiently relaxed to go into a recording studio and make a record. "I was a bit nervous at first," she says, "because all the musicians in the studio were strangers, and so far I'd only sung with people I knew. But once I got started there was no turning back."
The song Cilla recorded was "Love of the Loved" by Lennon and McCartney. Those involved in the recording were so pleased with the result that Cilla no longer had any doubts about where she was going next. She went home and handed in her notice to her Liverpool boss. Two weeks later she began to call herself a professional singer.
"Love of the Loved" shot up the British pop music charts, and Cilla went off on a concert tour with Gerry and the Pacemakers. She returned to London in time to appear in the Beatles' Christmas Show at Finsbury Park, Astoria, London. Early in 1964, her second record made number one on the British Hit Parade; so did her third, which was released while Cilla was appearing in Star-time at the London Palladium.
Cilla played the Palladium from May to December 1964, and was chosen (as Palladian resident performers always are) to sing before the Queen in that year's Royal Variety Performance. Since then, she has made many more records, has toured Australia and New Zealand, has appeared in America on The Ed Sullivan Show and on Shindig, and has often been on British television. She has done cabaret performances in different parts of the world, including a three-week season in New York at the Plaza Hotel's Persian Room. And during the winter of 1965-66 she played Little Red Riding Hood on a London stage (which, she says, was nothing like her nine-year-old school performance).
Cilla is a splendid example of the amateur-made-good spirit typical of British pop in the early 1960s. "I've never had any training," she says. "Nobody told me how to sing, or what to do at a certain point of a song, how to introduce songs. Not even Brian Epstein, because Brian didn't know -- he was just as much an amateur as we were!"
The colorful Cilla Black
Visit Cilla at http://www.cillablack.com for a free sample of the remixed single of Cilla Black's 1970s Top 3 hit "SOMETHING TELLS ME" due out 7 Sept or on her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/cillablack
Cilla Black in Black and White
Visit Cilla at http://www.cillablack.com for a free sample of the remixed single of Cilla Black's 1970s Top 3 hit "SOMETHING TELLS ME" due out 7 Sept or on her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/cillablack
Cilla Black's Album Art
Visit Cilla at http://www.cillablack.com for a free sample of the remixed single of Cilla Black's 1970s Top 3 hit "SOMETHING TELLS ME" due out 7 Sept or on her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/cillablack
The wonderful Cilla Black
Visit Cilla at http://www.cillablack.com for a free sample of the remixed single of Cilla Black's 1970s Top 3 hit "SOMETHING TELLS ME" due out 7 Sept or on her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/cillablack
“I had chosen to do "Summertime", but at the very last moment I wished I hadn't. I adored this song, and had sung it when I came to Birkenhead with the Big Three, but I hadn't rehearsed it with the Beatles and it had just occurred to me that they would play it in the wrong key. It was too late for second thoughts, though. With one last wicked wink at me, John set the group off playing. I'd been right to worry. The music was not in my key and any adjustments that the boys were now trying to make were too late to save me. My voice sounded awful. Destroyed — and wanting to die — I struggled on to the end. Cilla Black ”
Cilla Black OBE (born Priscilla Maria Veronica White on 27 May 1943) is an English singer, actress and television performer who has been successful as an entertainer from 1963 through the present day. She is most famous worldwide for her successful singles "Anyone Who Had A Heart", "You're My World", and "Alfie".
After a successful recording career and a brief time as a comedy actress, she became the best paid female presenter in British television history. In September 2009, Cilla's 45 years in showbusiness is celebrated by EMI (the record label which launched her career in 1963) with the release of a new CD/DVD set alongside a series of other digital download releases.
Cilla Black was born in Liverpool to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. She can be regarded[who?] as the first and only important female performer to emerge from Liverpool during the 1960s heyday of the Mersey Sound, popularized by the global Beatles phenomenon. Priscilla White, as she was then, was discovered by Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager. His management and George Martin's production skills assisted Black to become one of the most successful British popular music singers of the period. She became a formidable ballad singer. Her successes lasted longer than those of any Epstein artist, with the obvious exception of the Beatles themselves.
Determined to become an entertainer, she had managed to get a part-time job as a cloakroom attendant at Liverpool's Cavern Club, best known for its association with the Beatles. Impromptu performances impressed the Beatles and others. She became a guest singer with the Merseybeat bands Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes and, later, with The Big Three. She was also, meantime, a waitress at the Zodiac coffee lounge, where she was to meet her future husband Bobby Willis.
Epstein had a portfolio of local artists. At first he showed little interest in Cilla, billed as Cilla White or Swinging Cilla. She was introduced to Epstein by John Lennon, who persuaded him to audition her. Her first audition was a failure, partly because of nerves, and partly because the Beatles (who supported her) played the songs in their vocal key rather than re-pitching them for Cilla's voice. In her autobiography What's It All About?
But after seeing her at a later date, at the Blue Angel jazz club, Epstein contracted with Cilla as his only female client on 6 September 1963. The local music newspaper Mersey Beat misprinted her name as Cilla Black, but Epstein liked the sound of it.
Epstein introduced Cilla to George Martin who signed her to Parlophone Records and produced her debut single, "Love of the Loved" (written by Lennon and McCartney), which was released only three weeks after she contracted with Epstein. The single peaked at a modest number 35, a failure compared to debut releases of Epstein's other artists.
Her second single, released at the beginning of 1964, was the Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition "Anyone Who Had a Heart". The single scored #1 in Britain and became, for that time, the best selling single by a female artist in the history of popular music in England.
Her second UK #1 success, "You're My World", was an English-language rendition of the Italian popular song Il Mio Mondo. She also enjoyed chart success with the song in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, South Africa and Canada. This was followed by another Lennon-McCartney composition, It's For You. Paul McCartney played piano at the recording session and the song proved to be another major international success for Black.
Cilla Black belonged to a generation of British female singers which included Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw, and Lulu. These artists were not singer-songwriters but interpreters of 1960s contemporary popular music song writers/producers. Cilla Black recorded much material during this time, including songs written by Phil Spector, Randy Newman, Tim Hardin, and Burt Bacharach. All were produced by George Martin at Abbey Road Studios.
Black's version of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" scored no. 2 in the UK charts and was stopped from going to no. 1 by the original version of the same song, performed by The Righteous Brothers. This was the first of only three occasions in the history of the British Top 40 where the same song, recorded by two different artists, held the top 2 positions in the chart in the same week.
Being so closely associated with The Beatles, Cilla became the first artist to cover many Lennon-McCartney compositions. Her recordings of "Yesterday", "For No One" and "Across The Universe" were acclaimed critically and became radio favourites. McCartney also went on record stating that Cilla's 1972 interpretation of "The Long And Winding Road" represented for him how he always intended the song to be sung.
Black's career in the United States, although begun enthusiastically by Epstein and his PR team - was limited to a few television appearances (the Ed Sullivan Show among them), a 1965 cabaret season at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and a success with You're My World which scored #26 on the Billboard charts. The song was to be her only Stateside chart success, and Elvis Presley had a copy on his personal jukebox at his Graceland home. Cilla herself recognised that to achieve popular status in the USA she would need to devote much time to touring there. But she was plagued by homesickness and a sense of loneliness and returned to the UK just as she was starting to become popular in the USA.
During 1966, Black recorded the Bacharach-David song "Alfie", inspired by the film, Alfie. While the song was not included on the UK film version, Cher sang "Alfie" on the closing credits of the US version. Alfie went on to become a success for Dionne Warwick in the States and it was a major success for Black in the UK, scoring #9 on the British charts. Cilla's version of "Alfie" was arranged and conducted by Bacharach himself at the recording session at Abbey Road. Bacharach insisted on several takes, and Black cited the Alfie recording session as one of the most demanding of her recording career. For Bacharach's part, he said "...there weren't too many white singers around, who could convey the emotion that I felt in many of the songs I wrote but that changed with people like Cilla Black..."
By the end of 1966, Cilla Black had guested on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only... But Also, appeared in a Ray Galton-Alan Simpson revue in London's West End — Way Out In Piccadilly — alongside Frankie Howerd, made notable appearances on The Eamonn Andrews Show, and starred in her own television special (the first of its kind to be shown in colour), Cilla at the Savoy.
Brian Epstein's attempts to make Cilla Black a film actress were less successful. A brief appearance in the "beat" film Ferry Cross the Mersey and a leading role alongside David Warner in the 1968 psychedelic comedy Work Is a Four-Letter Word were largely ignored by film critics. In a 1997 interview with Record Collector magazine, Black revealed she was asked to appear in the 1969 film The Italian Job, playing the part of Michael Caine's girlfriend, but negotiations fell through between producers and her management over her fee.
Brian Epstein died of an accidental drug overdose during August 1967, after negotiating a contract with the BBC for his only female artist to appear in a series of her own. Relations between Epstein and Black had somewhat soured during the year prior to his death, due largely to the fact that Epstein was not paying her enough attention, and due partly to his public admission that he had taken LSD. In her autobiography, Cilla claims that Epstein had tried to pacify her by negotiating a deal that would see her representing the UK in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest.
However, Black refused on the basis that Sandie Shaw had won the previous year's contest, and that the chances of another British female artist winning were improbable.
After the death of Epstein, her boyfriend and songwriter Bobby Willis assumed management duties. Further recording successes followed: Conversations, Surround Yourself With Sorrow, If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind (all 1969), Something Tells Me (Somethings Gonna Happen Tonight) (1971) and Baby We Can't Go Wrong (1974).
The Beatles association continued. At a Cannes Film Festival during the 1970s, Cilla joined George Harrison, Ringo Starr and popular music star Marc Bolan to attend a screening of the John Lennon-Yoko Ono experimental film Erection. She also holidayed with them on a trip aboard a yacht chartered by Ringo. Photograph was written on this trip — originally intended for Black to record — but Starr decided to record it himself. George Harrison also wrote two songs for Cilla: The Light That Has Lighted The World and I'll Still Love You (When Every Song Is Sung). The latter she recorded during 1974 with her then producer David Mackay, but it was not heard publicly until 2003, when it re-surfaced on a retrospective collection entitled Cilla: The Best of 1963-78.
She shows an increasing reluctance to sing nowadays, though there have been two returns to the recording studio in recent times; during 1993 Black released Through the Years, an album of new material featuring a number of duets with Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, and Barry Manilow.
Cilla Black outsold all other female recording artists in Britain during the 1960s. She has released 15 studio albums and 37 singles (many of which have charted world-wide).
During 2006–2007, Cilla's 1971 single "Something Tells Me (Something's Gonna Happen Tonight)" was used as the soundtrack to a new British advertising campaign for Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
During the 2008/09 Christmas/New Year pantomime season, Cilla Black returned to live musical performance in the pantomime "Cinderella", appearing as the Fairy Godmother. Cilla was part of an all Scouse cast assembled in this 3-hour stage spectacular to mark the end of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture. The show incorporated a number of Cilla's successes, which she performed live, including "You're My World", "Something Tells Me (Something's Gonna Happen Tonight)", "Step Inside Love" and "Sing A Rainbow". Cilla received rave reviews for her singing and overall performance It is not clear if/when Cilla will sing live again but her performance in this stage show demonstrated that she still has a commanding voice and stage presence and a large audience to make it worth her while should she ever desire to return to the concert stage.
On the 7th September 2009, a total of 13 original studio albums (the first seven produced by Sir George Martin) recorded by Cilla between 1963 and 2003 will be released for download. These albums are all digitally re-mastered and feature an array of musical genres from pop, jazz, R&B, show tunes, sixties power-ballads, gospel and disco. Also released that same day by EMI is a 2CD/DVD set entitled ‘The Definitive Collection (A Life In Music)’ featuring a DVD of rare BBC video footage; a digital download album of specially commissioned re-mixes ‘Cilla: All Mixed Up’; a remixed single on digital download of "Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)".
Cilla was offered her own show on the BBC by Bill Cotton, then Assistant Head of Light Entertainment. The first series of Cilla was broadcast on Tuesday 30 January 1968. On the first show her guest was Tom Jones. The two popular music stars sang a duet together. Paul McCartney (without Lennon) wrote the theme tune - another chart success for Black - entitled "Step Inside Love". This song was later covered by Madeline Bell. Henry Mancini, Ringo Starr, Donovan, Georgie Fame and Dusty Springfield were among the artistes who appeared in the earlier series of Cilla, however many programmes were later wiped. Her BBC show was relatively successful and paved the way for a lengthy television career which continued intermittently until 2003.
Like so many of her contemporaries, during the 1970s her musical career declined, although she toured often. Increasingly thought of as a television "personality", she found herself experimenting with situation comedy for ITV. Her BBC series, Cilla, continued however successfully until 1976, recessing during 1970, 1972 and 1975. The theme songs from the Cilla series were also successful. "Step Inside Love" opened the series in both the 1968 and 1969 runs and reached number 8 in the UK singles chart on its release. Something Tells Me (Something's Gonna Happen Tonight) was the theme for the 1971 and 1973 shows, reaching number 3 and becoming Cilla's last top ten success. "Baby, We Can't Go Wrong" was used for the 1974 series and was a minor success, reaching number 36, Cilla's last UK chart siong until 1993. "It's Now" was the final theme from the 1976 series and failed to reach the charts, albeit released as a "B" side.
The UK's Eurovision Song Contest entry selection process was part of the Cilla show in both 1968 and 1973, when her close friend Cliff Richard was the featured artist performing all the songs shortlisted in the A Song For Europe segment. Cilla herself was originally asked to sing for the UK in 1968 and was asked again for the 1970 contest, but declined; she was pregnant at the time.
On the 15 January 1975, Cilla performed as main entertainer of the first of six half-hour situation comedy plays. The series which was broadcast on ITV was entitled Cilla's Comedy Six[8] and written by Ronnie Taylor. During May 1975, the Writer's Guild of Great Britain named Cilla as Britain's Top Female Comedy Star. The following year, ATV was commissioned to film six more plays as the initial series had accrued healthy viewing figures and remained constantly among the best scoring three shows of the week. During August 1976, Cilla reprised her role as a comedy-actress in Cilla's World of Comedy[9] which featured her theme song and new single "Easy In Your Company".
By the beginning of the 1980s, Cilla Black was performing mainly in cabaret and concert, and had been absent from television since a Thames Television special during 1978. During 1983 she appeared on the BBC's Wogan programme. Her appearance on this peak-time talk show was a major success, and her career in television was resurrected.
She signed a contract with London Weekend Television, which resulted in her becoming the host of two of the most popular and long-running evening entertainment shows of the 1980s and 1990s - Blind Date (1985–2003) and Surprise, Surprise (1984–2001). She also presented the gameshow The Moment of Truth, which was initiated during 1998 but was less successful and was terminated during 2001. All programmes were mainstream ratings winners and consolidated her position as the best paid female performer on British television.
Her TV appearances have made her spoken mannerisms ("Lorra lorra laughs" for example) and her habit of referring familiarly to her fellow presenters ("Our Graham") well known.
Notable television performances since her resignation from LWT have included Parkinson, So Graham Norton, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Room 101 and Cilla Live! for Living TV. Black was a judge on the first series of the Reality TV series Soapstar Superstar, has featured in an episode of the series Eating with... and has recently guest presented editions of The Paul O'Grady Show and The Friday Night Project for Channel 4.
Cilla Black filmed a pilot dating show for Sky One during 2008. The project referred to as Loveland was to be a ten-part "21st century" dating programme for the channel for the next year. Unlike on Blind Date, which Black hosted for 18 years, contestants would not sit in front of a studio audience but would be 'hidden' behind real-time animations as they date each other. Each episode concludes with the contestant picking their preferred animated character before meeting that person in real life. Production costs for the innovative pilot proved however too costly and it was terminated.
She attended St. Anthony's School, which was behind St. Anthony's Church in Scotland Road, and Anfield Commercial College.
She was married to her manager Bobby Willis for more than 30 years until his death from lung cancer on 23 October 1999. They had three sons, Robert (now her manager, born in 1970), Ben (born in 1974), and Jack (born in 1980).
On 4 August 2004, Black became a grandmother for the first time when her eldest son, Robert, and his wife, Fiona, had their first child, Max. Her second grandchild, Alana, was born on 6 February 2007.
Black has previously been a keen supporter of the British Conservative Party. During 1992 she made prominent calls for the party's re-election
The Beatles
"That guitar is okay but you'll never make a living with it" -John's Aunt Mimi
"What does it mean when a person is such a pacifist that they get shot? I can never understand that." John Lennon
"We thought that if we lasted for two to three years that would be fantastic." -Ringo Starr
"When you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,' you just scream." -John Lennon, 1970
"I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know." -Paul McCartney, 1969
"I'm a tidy sort of bloke. I don't like chaos. I kept records in the record rack, tea in the tea caddy, and pot in the pot box." -George Harrison, 1969
"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one" - The Catcher in the Rye
"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans" -John Lennon
"We all have Hitler in us, but we also have love and peace. So why not give peace a chance for once?" John Lennon
"I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, 'You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don't need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it's the very best, and it's the part I give most willingly'" -George Harrison
"I am not the Beatles. I'm me.Paul isn't the Beatles...The Beatles are the Beatles. Separately, they are separate." -John Lennon
"The things is, we're all really the same person. We're just four parts of the one." -Paul McCartney
"John had his thing, and Paul had his, and together there were two different things all together. But they fit." -Billy Preston
"When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed. If there is such a thing as a genius...I am one, and if there isn't, I don't care." -John Lennon
"As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead." George Harrison
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock and roll or Christianity."
- John Lennon in a 1966 interview
"I'm not saying we're better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a thing, or whatever it is. I just said what I said, and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong. And now it's all this."
-John Lennon
"There's a lot of random in our songs...writing, thinking, letting others think of bits-then bam, you've the jigsaw puzzle." -Paul McCartney
"Love is like a flower, give it time and it will grow" -John Lennon
"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination." -John Lennon
"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -John Lennon
"Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law its nine-tenths of the problem. -John Lennon
"We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep on watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it." -John Lennon
"As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot." -John Lennon
"Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given, never forgotten, never let it disappear."- John Lennon
"Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who can control me is me, and that's just barely possible." -John Lennon
"At the beginning I was annoyed with [John], jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the breakup of a great musical partnership. It took me a year to realize they were in love." -Paul McCartney
"It doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I'm a woman or a man."-John Lennon
"If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or my music, then in that respect you can call me that...I believe in what I do, and I'll say it."-John Lennon
"I am going into an unknown future, but I'm still all here, and still while there's life, there's hope." -John Lennon (December 1980)
"I'm really glad that most of our songs were about love, peace and understanding."
-Paul McCartney
"You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!" -John Lennon
"I don't believe in killing whatever the reason!" -John Lennon
"Now Daddy is part of God. I guess when you die you become much more bigger, because you're part of everything." -Sean Lennon, December 1980
"I can't tell you how much it hurts to lose him. His death is a bitter cruel blow. I really loved the guy." Paul McCartney, Dec. 1980
"I consider that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried, and I hope that's a long long time."
-John Lennon, Dec. 1980
"I hope the fans will take up meditation instead of drugs." - Ringo Starr, 1967
"John loved and prayed for the human race. Please tell people to pray the same for him. Remember that he had deep faith in love and that, though he has now joined the greater force, he is still with us." -Yoko Ono, Dec. 1980
"Love is the answer and you know that for sure" - John Lennon
"There's a woman in the United States who predicted the plane we were traveling on would crash. Now, a lot of people would like to think we were scared into saying a prayer. What we did actually--we drank." Ringo Starr, 1966
"There is one thing I used to regret and feel guilty about. When Ringo joined us I used to act all big time with him because I'd been in the business a bit longer and felt superior. I was a know-all. I'd been in the sixth form and thought I'd read a bit, you know. I began putting him off me, and me off me." -Paul McCartney
"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war-for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more." -John Lennon
"John was in constant need of proof of love and security and he was constantly testing people for that proof." -Cynthia Lennon
"...the only way you can better John is by copying him exactly." -Yoko Ono
"It's hard to follow my own act. But the only answer to that would be to give up after the Beatles. I only had two alternatives. Give up or carry on." -Paul McCartney
"I've never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I'm here because it happened. But I didn't do anything to make it happen apart from saying 'Yes'" -Ringo Starr
"The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them." -George Harrison
"One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said: "It's only me." And then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armor, which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armor. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you'd just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world." -Paul McCartney (on John Lennon)
"I didn't leave the Beatles. The Beatles have left the Beatles--but no one wants to be the one to say the party's over." -John Lennon
"I'd like to end up sort of...unforgettable." Ringo
"Those of you in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you just rattle your jewelry."
-John
"There's high, and then there's high, and to get really high--i mean so high that you can walk on the water, that high--that's where i'm goin'" -John
"I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen."-Timothy Leary
"I now realize that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache." -Paul
"When two great saints meet, it's a humbling experience."-Paul
"Explaining the motives behind the breakup of the Beatles: "Personal differences, musical differences, business differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family." - Paul
"We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time."-John
"I think the French girls are fabulous." Paul
"Us, communists? Why, we can't be communists. We're the world's number one capitalists. Imagine us communists!" -Paul
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." -The Beatles
"You can go to church and sing a hymn, Judge me by the colour of my skin, You can live a lie until you die, One thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside. " - John Lennon
"You're all geniuses, and you're all beautiful. You don't need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you'll get it as soon as you like." -John Lennon
"I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and myself and I hoped we passed the audition." -John Lennon
Model Naomi Sims
Naomi Sims, 61, a black fashion model whose landmark appearances on the covers of major American magazines in the late 1960s were regarded as mainstream endorsements of the idea that "black is beautiful," died Aug. 1 in Newark, N.J. She had breast cancer.
Sometimes described as the first black supermodel, Ms. Sims was also an entrepreneur. She owned and operated a multimillion-dollar cosmetics and hair care business, called the Naomi Sims Collection, specifically designed for black women, and was singled out by the Harvard Business School and Oprah Winfrey as a skilled entrepreneur.
At a time of heightened consciousness of racial issues in the United States, Ms. Sims drew widespread attention in the late 1960s for her appearance on the covers of the Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue and Life magazines and a New York Times fashion magazine.
It was not only that she was among the first black women to appear so prominently in a magazine such as Ladies' Home Journal, which was recognized as a bastion of middle class culture. It was also that the shade of her skin -- dark brown, rather than tan or coffee-colored -- suggested a tacit but powerful acceptance of the idea of Black Pride.
Her work was often credited with making the 1970s a particularly favorable period for black models, including such runway stars as Pat Cleveland, Alva Chinn and Beverly Johnson.
Naomi Ruth Sims was born March 30, 1948, in Oxford, Miss. Her parents divorced soon after her birth, and she grew up in Pittsburgh with her mother and two sisters. By age 13, she had attained her full height of 5 feet 10 inches. Later, that stature would contribute to her allure, helping her offer what was characterized as elegance and regality.
But as a teenager, it seemed only to accentuate the differences between her and many of her peers. "Black wasn't beautiful then," she told a magazine writer. "The darker your skin, the less good-looking you were considered. And I was too tall, and too skinny."
In her late teens, she joined a sister in New York and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, helping to support herself by posing for fashion illustrators. As a next step, she took it upon herself to phone a well-known photographer, a move that resulted in her appearance on the Times cover.
Even then, however, the doors of the major New York modeling agencies did not swing open to her. So, she took another bold step, as told in biographies, that illustrated her shrewd business sense.
She made a suggestion to Wilhelmina Cooper, as Cooper, once a top model herself, was opening an agency. The proposal was this: Send out copies of the Times layout, together with Cooper's phone number, to 100 advertising agencies. The plan would cost Cooper nothing, and every ad agency response would mean a commission.
Responses flooded in, and within weeks it was difficult to open a fashion magazine or stare at a fashion runway without seeing Ms. Sims staring back.
One of the first designers to bid for her services was Halston. "When she put on a garment, something just marvelous happened," Black Enterprise magazine quoted him. The Kansas City Star took note of her trademark walk, describing serpentine movements that were "beautiful to watch and as subtly controlled as a dancer's."
She married Michael Alistair Findlay, at a ceremony at which Dr. Kenneth Clark, the noted psychologist, gave her away. She and Findlay, from whom she was divorced, had a son, who survives along with a sister and a granddaughter. The marriage took place in 1973, her last year of modeling and one in which she appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan.
A few years later she told The Washington Post, "my ultimate goal was never to be only a model."
This explained her shift into the cosmetics, skin and wig business, and to authorship. Her first book was a compendium of health and beauty tips. It appeared in 1976 and was followed by three others, on modeling, on hair care and on success.
Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell
Julian J. Ewell, 93, a retired Army lieutenant general who was a highly decorated paratrooper in World War II and who oversaw a major combat operation in Vietnam that critics inside and outside the military said killed thousands of civilians, died of pneumonia on July 27
Gen. Ewell held two top command positions in Vietnam, as commander of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta and later as commander of II Field Force, the largest Army combat command in Vietnam.
Under his command between December 1968 and May 1969, the 9th Infantry Division launched a large-scale offensive, Operation Speedy Express, that aimed to quickly eliminate enemy troops with overwhelming force. 10,899 enemies were killed during the operation.
Gen. Ewell was known in Vietnam for his attention to the enemy "body count," considered an indication of success in the war. Subordinates noted that he never ordered them to kill civilians but was insistent about increasing the body count.
In an interview Tuesday, Ira Hunt, a retired major general who was Gen. Ewell's chief of staff in the 9th Infantry Division, called him a "tremendous tactician and innovator." By training large numbers of soldiers to be snipers, Hunt said, "We took the night away from the enemy. . . . They just totally unraveled in the Delta. He got the idea of putting night vision devices on helicopters, and we stopped the infiltration."
Gen. Ewell had the support of his superiors, as well. When he was promoted to command the II Field Force, Gen. Creighton Abrams called Gen. Ewell a "brilliant and sensitive commander . . . and he plays hard." Critics of Gen. Ewell's command, Hunt said Tuesday, were engaging in "sour grapes."
Gen. Ewell's 1995 book with Hunt, "Sharpening the Combat Edge," said, "The 9th Infantry Division and II Field Force, Vietnam, have been criticized on the grounds that 'their obsession with body count' was either basically wrong or else led to undesirable practices."
The charge was not true, they wrote, and Gen. Ewell's approach, "which emphasized maximum damage to the enemy, ended up by 'unbrutalizing' the war, so far as the South Vietnamese people and our own forces were concerned. The Communists took a different view, as could be expected."
After Vietnam, Gen. Ewell became military adviser to the U.S.-Vietnam delegation at the Paris peace talks. He retired in 1973 as chief of staff at the NATO Southern Command in Naples.
Julian Johnson Ewell was born Nov. 5, 1915, in Stillwater, Okla. He attended Duke University for two years before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1939. He became a paratrooper in World War II.
Before dawn on D-Day, he jumped into Normandy with the 101st Airborne Division. So many paratroopers missed their landing zones that then-Lt. Col. Ewell found only 40 of the 600 men in his battalion, but they managed to regroup and engage the Germans. In fall 1944, he parachuted into Holland, fighting in the defense of the Belgian city of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor, for holding off two German divisions.
In 1952, he was sent to Korea as commander of an infantry regiment. He later spent four years at West Point, rising to assistant commandant of cadets. He became executive assistant to presidential military aide Gen. Maxwell Taylor at the Kennedy White House. He later served as executive to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and as chief of staff at V Corps in Germany before he went to Vietnam in 1968.
His other military awards included four awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Silver Star, two awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.
His marriages to Mary Gillem Ewell and Jean Hoffman Ewell ended in divorce. His wife of 40 years, Beverly McGammon Moses Ewell, died in 1995. In 2005, he married retired U.S. ambassador to Madagascar Patricia Gates Lynch Ewell, in a ceremony performed at the U.S. Supreme Court offices of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)