Number One? That'll be this day ...

 

The soundtrack album for the fifties-set film That'll Be the Day was number one  on the UK charts today in 1973, according to social media. I have never owned a copy but it was very important to me nevertheless: tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall that first thrill of hearing Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

The film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of selling records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP was a way of raising the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said:

[David] Puttnam went to see a small Canadian television marketing company and proposed building our movie around a plethora of old hits they could promote as a tele-marketed compilation album.

They would pump more than £200,000 into an advertising campaign, showing clips from the film, so all we had to do was put together a 40-track soundtrack album of oldies but goldies.

We’d always planned to have some songs in the film, but 40!

Quickly, I began another draft of the script. If we continually moved our leading character around the fairground, from the dodgems to the whip, past the big wheel and round again to the carousel, we could add a few seconds of a different record onto the soundtrack everywhere he went.

Then, when he seduced a girl, we would cynically hear the Everly Brothers singing Devoted To You in the background. When he was roller-skating it was to Bobby Darin’s Dream Lover.

By the end of the final draft, we’d found a place for all 40 songs.

That'll Be the Day was actually released in the UK a few months before American Graffiti, though it came out afterwards in the States.  Which doesn't necessarily mean that the UK filmmakers had the idea first, but the point is not really worth exploring, as they are films about two very different worlds. 

Rock'n'roll is already firmly established in American Graffiti though the Beach Boys are threatening a takeover (the film's subtitle was: Where Were You in 62?); in the world of That'll Be the Day the music may already be around (though I don't think a particular year is specified) but is not universally favoured by the young. 

When the David Essex character, Jim, visits his old schoolmate Terry (Robert Lindsay) at university, he finds that as far as Terry and his smart new friends are concerned rock'n'roll is a craze which has spent itself out; trad jazz is now the in thing. It's hard to convey in a still but Jim's discomfort, engineered by Terry, is just one of many short but telling scenes in the film.

I like That'll Be the Day a great deal more than its sequel, Stardust, which picks up Jim's story after he deserted his wife and child and gone in search of fame and fortune. Ringo Starr, who appeared in That'll Be the Day, didn't want to relive the days of Beatlemania, and his role as friend-cum-manager was taken over by Adam Faith. 

The trouble with Stardust, however, is that the rites-of-passage story of That'll Be the Day has a universal appeal: even if we don't all aspire to become musicians when young we can identify with Jim MacLaine's sense of dissatisfaction, his desperate need to find something else, not yet knowing what might. But the decline of a rock star surrounded by  luxury - especially when some of his musical output is pretentious and high-blown tosh about the role of Woman and Mother - doesn't excite the same sense of general recognition.

Additionally, the focus is on the relationship between Essex and his manager so that the group, the Stray Cats (who seem to be all actors apart from Dave Edmunds) are not called to do that much, and Jim's wife reappears too briefly to make much of an impact.  

 

As rock'n'roll fans will see, the first three sides of the soundtrack double album are packed with classics plus the odd slightly more obscure number. Despite the film's title it's Bobby Vee's covers of That'll Be the Day and Well All Right which feature here, presumably because of licensing issues. I even seem to remember reading in Melody Maker that the original intention had been to produce a Buddy Holly biopic of that name, so it's not impossible that this project was Option 2. Alley-Oop is a cover by Dante and the Evergreens, not the Hollywood Argyles' original, written by Dallas Frazier, also composer of that great story-in-song, The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp.

Side Four has some tracks performed in the film plus others, including David Essex's Rock On and Viv Stanshall's Real Leather Jacket,  which offers a handy synopsis of Jim MacLaine's story, so there's a lot of bang for your buck. Why didn't I buy it at the time or even later? I'm not sure; probably price was the main consideration - or maybe, having been alerted to this music, I was already looking for compilations which favoured doo wop. Sometime later I did buy a CD recreation of the double album on behalf of an employer but by that time overfamiliarity with the songs made it rather less exciting. I can say, however, that happening upon the film on TV from time to time it's still a gripping story.