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VIP 25022 (A), August 1965
b/w What Now My Love
(Written by Richard Anthony and Silvano Santonio)
At first blush, this looks like a step backwards; the first time in three and a half years that Motown went to the trouble of buying in a finished record, paying for the rights to issue someone else’s single when there were several hours’ worth of top-notch unreleased home-grown recordings sitting in the vaults waiting for their chance.
The confusion only builds when we come to play the thing, and discover it’s a Merseybeat pastiche, a mid-Sixties attempt to ride the Beatles bandwagon; it’s quite a good Merseybeat pastiche, but, again, haven’t we done this already? Haven’t Motown grown too big for this sort of thing by now?
But then we dig a little deeper, and it turns out that rather than a retrograde step, this is actually a sign of Motown’s growing influence and widening ambitions. Richard Anthony was a star of the burgeoning French recording scene, and was starting to get airplay in England with his English-language cuts; Motown bid for the US rights to one of those singles – this one – and won the race, making Anthony the first European artist to appear on a Motown 45. The Sound of Young Europe.
M. Anthony, nĂ© Ricardo Btesh, was – is, since he’s still going strong at the time of writing – a genuine top-drawer French recording artist, packing out theatres and racking up hits on the French hit parade. He’d started out as a club singer in Egypt, growing up on the cosmopolitan banks of the pre-Nasser Suez Canal, mingling with French and British colonials and international visitors; as a result, he was fluent in several languages, not only becoming one of the first French stars to cover English-language American and British rock ‘n’ roll hits, but also one of the first to cover French hits for the English-speaking market.
By 1965, he could legitimately call himself one of the biggest names on the French rock scene. If he wasn’t exactly France’s answer to the Beatles, he came pretty close, with his armies of screaming fans and TV shows, his early alliance with the EMI empire even allowing him to record at Abbey Road in London, including his 1965 album Richard Ă Londres from which both sides of this single were taken. The cover gives a good idea as to Anthony’s appeal at the time: he looks and sounds like a rougher-edged Paul McCartney, slightly older, slightly chubbier but with a more worldly edge.
The record itself says a lot, too, about what on earth Motown were doing dipping a toe in these uncharted waters. It’s the sort of effortlessly bouncy, airy tune McCartney had turned in for filler on the early-mid Beatles’ LPs like A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale and – especially – Help!, slightly cheesy in places but with the authentic twang of Beatlemania stamped on it; only the brassy orchestral production (masterminded by the great Ivor Raymonde, about to become famous for his work with Dusty Springfield and the Walker Brothers) gives it away as hailing from a more MOR place than the Beatles were headed.
Even Anthony’s voice is not a million miles away from Liverpool, his French accent almost (though not completely) covered by his mid-Atlantic pronunciation, and the few occasions when his phrasing does mark him out as a non-native speaker just end up adding to the charm. In short, if someone told you this was a Beatles cover, you’d not necessarily doubt it; if they then told you it had also been a big hit, you’d not be too confused as to why.
It wasn’t a big hit, of course, and Motown wouldn’t be buying in any more Richard Anthony records to repeat the experiment, but the attempt makes sense all the same. I like the whistleable tune, I like the energy Anthony brings to this (when you consider the maudlin mess a contemporary like Claude François might have made of the same material), and the mariachi horns are an unexpected but welcome touch.
An irrelevant jaunt for Motown here at the height of their mid-Sixties powers, perhaps – the label’s own writers and singers were coming up with better pop records than this one in-house – but the whole thing ends up being sneakily likeable, and I’ve no quarrel with it at all.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
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Richard Anthony “What Now My Love” |
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Would this possibly have anything to do with the jaunt the Motown Revue made overseas around this time?
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It’s certainly possible, and the tour group and Richard might even actually have physically crossed paths in Paris or London for all I know – though if I had to guess, it’s more likely that Motown’s then-recent link-up with the EMI empire to license Hitsville stuff for European release via the Tamla Motown label probably led to Berry Gordy and the team looking for some sort of reciprocal traffic in European EMI acts for the US market. Maybe if this had been a hit, we’d have seen Motown singles on the likes of Anna Karina or France Gall…
(Interesting sidenote: since the rights to this were (and, I’m assuming, still are) owned by EMI – the CD reissue of “Richard Ă Londres” is still in print – presumably the compilers of The Complete Motown Singles would have had to pay to have this included on there a couple of years back.)
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Hmmm…certainly if Marvin Gaye can sing “A Tribute to Nat King Cole” how about “Richard Anthony sings H-D-H” (tongue firmly in cheek).
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It might not have been the complete train wreck you’d imagine. He covered a lot of American and British Invasion pop records, often translating the lyrics into French himself, as in this example – the video features the squarest “teen” crowd in the history of television, but it gives you some idea of who he was.
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Hey man thats not bad at all! It also helps that i’ve always like “I Should Have Known Better”. I’ll give it a 7 (it would have been 8 but dude is clapping on the wrong beat).
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“If this would have been a hit”??? How could it have become a hit? There was no possible market for it. But, even if there had been, Motown didn’t put one penny into advertising it or pushing it with DJs. It was a throwaway from its inception. Motown probably only scheduled the record, and pressed a measly 500 up, as a reciprocal act for their EMI partners. Gordy had no intention of wasting money on that perceived lost cause.
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Disagree. The Walker Brothers did plenty well for themselves in America mining this exact sonic territory, and Richard had scored top 20 hits across Europe by this point (including in England). You know I disagree with you about 30% of Motown’s 60s output being favours and tax write offs, so I won’t get into that again, but this isn’t a completely baffling commercial move, it’s exactly the sort of thing that would have seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.
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Motown would have done better to put this out on Tamla-Motown in France, The U.K., Belgium, and The Netherlands. Or, DID they actually do that?
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They didn’t, because they couldn’t. Motown paid – paid, not “were paid” – actual money for the US rights to some of Richard’s Abbey Road English-language cuts which had already been successfully issued in Europe.
There’s a note at the back of The Complete Motown Singles volume 5 indicating even those limited rights weren’t perpetual, which I’m assuming means Motown would have had to pay again to include this.
Incidentally the UK Tamla Motown label falls within this site’s remit, so if a record was ever released by TM in Britain it’ll be noted as such at the top of the essay.
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I suppose it’s a reasonable enough “facsimile” of a “Merseybeat” song, which at the time, would have had to fight for radio time against hundreds of others of similar or better quality, and therefore, it would have been quite a longshot. It MUST have been pressed up as a “good faith” gesture to their EMI partners. It’s well done enough to give it a “5”. So, I agree with your assessment. When I first bought the record in 1965, I expected something quite different. But, that was par for the course, with the unpredictable mix of VIP records.
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Do you not like the Walker Brothers, Robb?
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The Walker Brothers’ hits were okay sounding. I can listen to them. But, that kind of music is more like “background” music to me. I don’t feel any emotional involvement. I didn’t buy them. I don’t like “Pop” nearly as much as R&B/Soul, on average. The only records I bought by “Caucasian” artists, who are not “termed “Blue-eyed Soul” or “White Neo-Doo Wop” artists, were those by The Four Seasons, Four Evers (Four Seasons’ clones), Dusty Springfield, Del Shannon, the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, The Ripchords (Bruce & Terry), The Fantastic Baggies (and the other Surf harmony groups), and the Caucasian girls’ groups, but only those that had a “Soul tinge” to their sound, like the Philles/Dimension/Red Bird “Wall of Sound” style. I don’t really like The British invasion sound. I LOVE the original US R&B/Soul songs they remade (both the writing and the singing). But I don’t like the singing or the instrumentation on the remakes. As for the British original songwriting of those artists, I don’t like most of them. Ivor Raymonde is the only one I can even recall, who wrote more than one song in the style I like. Otherwise, I can only remember one other British songwriter whose song I like a lot (Pierre Tubbs-who wrote “Right Back Where We Started From”. I don’t even like Ian Levine’s modern “Motownlike” productions. Out of the many thousands of records I bought, I would guess I have no more than a few hundred records by “Caucasian” artists on vocals. I may have approaching 1,000 or so Jazz records by Caucasian artists (or mixed bands).
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It’s been a long time that I’ve been waiting for this one. I was fearing a dismissive critic but that is not the case. Richard, my fellow citizen, was one of the few french singers (with Joe Dassin) not to sing in “yaourt” (that awful “bouillie” that Claude François made in his english records) and he did a good job there. A million miles away from Marvin Gaye and Levi Stubbs but still a good job. Thanks for the reappraisal !
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🙂 I aim to please. Well, no, I don’t, and fair warning: I really dislike the B-side. But Richard made lots of good records, and this one is good.
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Richard sang this song very well. It’s very “Merseybeat” sounding. To ME it’s just not a well-structured song -and so, not a well-written song. It just wanders aimlessly. It’s a “facsimile” of the Merseybeat Sound, but it’s NOT inspired. It’s a poor copy, with no life of its own. That’s the main reason why it didn’t sell, and buying its rights was a poor investment. To Berry Gordy, who wasn’t really into The Merseybeat Sound, it sounded “sort of like” The Beatles, Jerry & Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas, et al. , so, it was worth a try. But, not being into the music from that genre, he was just listening superficially. It sounded “like” those hits that were making tonnes of money, so buying The US rights to it at a “bargain price” was worth the gamble. But had he asked a bunch of young, American Caucasian Beatles fans if they liked this cut, they’d have been luke warm . at best, and they’d have told him they wouldn’t have spent their hard-earned money on it.
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This does, in hindsight, seem to be a forerunner to the licensing deals Motown would make with British labels for release on the Rare Earth label in the late 1960’s / early ’70’s period, doesn’t it? (Records that wound up, for those same reasons, excluded from Complete Motown Singles CD box sets.
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Though I was somewhat familiar with Richard Anthony, I’d never heard of this particular record. And certainly wasn’t aware that Motown had ever issued any of his tracks in America. Checked it out on youtube and liked it at once. Talk about a recording with a perfect split personality, both aspects going full-bast at the same time ! Half lost Beatle track from “A Hard Day’s Night”, half Dusty Springfield single from the “Stay Awhile”.”I Only Want to be With You” period. Anthony’s serviceable enough – but how I would have loved to hear this by either the Fab Four or Dusty!
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Dusty Springfield sang “I Only Want to be With You” and “Stay Awhile” in the style of a Soul singer. They don’t sound, to me, in the slightest, like Merseybeat, or, indeed, ANY British music. The Beatles’ music sounds nothing like Soul music to me.
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The work that makes the author of this blog is truly remarkable, as everybody can notice.
As I’m French and know a little bit about French songs, even the worst, I can bring some precisions about this article.
The people interested can read them in the comments below the article about the b-side ‘What Now My Love’.
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Minor criticisms of this extremely mid-sixties production could be made, but why “buther”? A delightful slice of obscurity from a French icon. Thanks for turning me onto it!
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