Number One? Ah, that'll be THIS day ...

 

The soundtrack double album for the fifties-set British film That'll Be the Day was number one  on the UK charts today in 1973, or so I have recently been informed on social media. Its featured oldies helped foster a love in me for doo wop and rock'n'roll more generally even though I have never owned a copy. Tracks were played on the radio at the time - Luxembourg as well as Radio 1 - and I still recall the moment I first heard Frankie Lymon hitting a certain note on Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

The modest film, written by Ray Connolly, has endured, probably because it wasn't primarily conceived as a means of shifting records. Quite the reverse, in fact: the soundtrack LP came into being in order to raise the rest of the finance to make the film, as Connolly has said.

[Producer 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 released in the UK a few months before American Graffiti.  Which doesn't necessarily mean that the UK filmmakers had the idea first, but the point is not really worth exploring, as they are about two very different worlds. 

Rock'n'roll is already firmly established in American Graffiti (the film's subtitle was: Where Were You in 62?); in the world of That'll Be the Day the music is already popular (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 himself a fish out of water: for Terry and his bookish new friends 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 below, which seems to have been deliberately engineered by Terry, is just one of many short but telling scenes in the film. It's a reminder that the Beatles reminded both UK and US audiences about the excitement of the original rockers; I remember leafing through a collection of Beatles Books (the monthly magazine) and seeing how regularly they would namecheck Jerry Lee Lewis and the like. 

That'll Be the Day appeals to me rather more than its sequel, Stardust, which picks up Jim's story after he has deserted his wife and child to seek musical fame and fortune. Ringo Starr, who appeared in That'll Be the Day as his workmate, didn't want to relive the days of Beatlemania onscreen, and his role was taken over by Adam Faith, who becomes Jim's manager in his new venture. 

The problem is that the rites-of-passage story of That'll Be the Day is universal: even if we don't all aspire to become musicians we can identify with Jim MacLaine's youthful sense of dissatisfaction, his desperate need to find something else, whatever that might turn out to be. The decline of a rock star surrounded by  luxury, however - especially when his musical output includes high-flown tosh about the role of Woman and Mother - isn't quite as gripping. Dramatisations of Elvis Presley's decline have been successful, of course, but the music produced by the Essex character doesn't convince you that he is anywhere near that league. Before the self-conscious material his straight pop stuff is unremarkable.

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

 

As rock'n'roll fans will see, the first three sides of the That'll Be the Day double album are packed with acknowledged classics of the genre plus the odd slightly more obscure number (I haven't seen Linda Lou on many compilations). And despite the film's title it's Bobby Vee's covers of That'll Be the Day and Well All Right (with the Crickets) which feature here rather than Holly's original recordings, presumably because of licensing issues. I seem to remember reading in Melody Maker that the original intention had actually been to produce a Buddy Holly biopic of that name, so it's not impossible that this film project was Option 2. 

Alley-Oop [sic] 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.

The Holly embargo might have been imposed late on as in one scene we see a record is taken out of a Buddy Holly LP sleeve, and we hear on the record player ... Ritchie Valens' Donna. Which reminds me of an occasion early on in the Walkman era. I was on a train and someone seated near me, unused to the immersion which those novelty items offered, began moaning aloud: "Ohhh Do-ona, ohh Donna ..." Maybe he was listening to a Buddy Holly tape. 

Side Four of the soundtrack album 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 an unofficial CD recreation of the double album on behalf of an employer but by that time overfamiliarity with most of the songs made it rather less exciting. I can say, however, that happening upon the film on TV from time to time it remains a gripping story, well and sparely told. I read in a review of the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy that That'll Be the Day was based in part on Lennon's early years. Certainly Rosemary Leach, who plays Jim's mother, has echoes of John's Aunt Mimi. Ray Connolly knew Lennon well and has written a biography of him, so the assertion (by Philip French) is a plausible one.

 

 

Links:

A longer piece about the film and a recent radio adaptation, also by Ray Connolly, can be found here.  

Review of Nowhere Boy here.

Piece about a Dallas Frazier song here.

Beatles novella by Ray Connolly discussed here along with other "what-if?" Beatles stories.