Billy Fury With The Tornados - "The Sound Of Fury Radio Luxembourg Sessions"

Billy Fury With The Tornados – The Sound Of Fury Radio Luxembourg Sessions

2 x CD, Compilation, UK, 2005

Castle Music

For hopeless fans only! The sound quality is dodgy at best, but nevertheless important document on Billy Fury's life with the Joe Meek's favorite instrumental band The Tornados. They backed the golden suit one in the early 1960's and really the best album to hear is We Want Billy, which is a pretty good live album. But beyond the sound quality, the selection of songs here are top-notch. “Don't Leave Me This Way” is a classic Fury tune, but he also does covers of Elvis' “Paralyzed” and “I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone” on disc 2 which focuses on demos and early acetates.

Disc one is from Radio Luxembourg and its a combination of his hits with cool covers such as Hank Snow's “I'm Moving On.” And there is a strong Elvis overtures on this package, which makes sense because he was seen as Liverpool's answer to Preseley. So for the fanatics only.  

Billy Fury - "The Sound Of Fury Demos CD Album

Billy Fury – The Sound Of Fury Demos

CD Album

Earmark

Raw demos of Billy Fury's first album, which some consider to be the U.K.'s first rock n' roll record. Sun Records recordings as imagined by a Liverpool lad. The bootleg quality of these recordings expose the vision of a young Fury, and its quite remarkable that at the time, when music was so processed in England; here was an artist willing to write original material. What happened afterwards is that Fury recorded a full version of The Sound of Fury that made an huge impression on future rock n' rollers.

Rockabilly teen pop tunes that reeks of innocence but with a dark edge that comes up time-to-time. What's interesting to me is that it is rock, but it's rock with a Liverpool accent. Not an imitation of Elvis, but sort of building on the image of Elvis that would work for Billy. This album is for the hardcore Billy fan, but for those who want to study rock n' roll mythology will find these recordings to be of great interest.

Billy Fury - "The E.P. Collection" Vinyl

Billy Fury – The E.P. Collection

Vinyl, LP, Compilation

See For Miles Records Ltd.

There are three Billy Fury albums that I love and feel that are essential, and The E.P. Collection is one of the releases that I can't live without. So much so that I bought this album on vinyl in Japan last March (2013) and for some years now have the CD version as well.

A greatest hits album for the connoisseur, but deeper than that because this is a collection of EP's realeased in the UK, including the b-sides or the three other songs. A typical EP would have two songs on each side. It was invented by record companies to deal with those who couldn't afford an entire album, and specifically marketed to the teenager and their budget. But also I imagine this format was popular with the jukeboxes at the time as well.

To this day the EP has a romantic appeal for me. I like the 45rpm format, and having four songs on a 7” single, aesthetically speaking, is very pleasing to me. So what we have here is 20 songs and not a bad cut on the collection. All his early hits are here, but also strong recordings from his catalog as well.

There are two songs that gives me goose-bumps whenever I hear them. “Nobody's Child” and the Morrissey like “Don't Jump.”

“Nobody's Child” is a heartbreaking narrative about a child all alone in the world, and Billy's voice conveys the loneliness and despair, but also just the sadnessness of it all. “Don't Jump” is our hero about to end it all at a cliff's end, with only the chorus singing “Don't Jump Billy, Don't Jump.” It's a brilliant pop record, but those two are just the highlights of an amazing album all the way through.

Even the titles alone has a haunted aspect to the Billy Fury theme of romantic disaster coming around the corner. “Don't Walk Away,” “What Am I Living For,” and the incredible “I'll Never Quite Get Over You” are important landmarks to an era when Pop was popping its head above the murky waters of Pre-Beatles UK.   

Billy Fury - "We Want Billy" / "Billy" CD Compilation

Billy Fury – We Want Billy/ Billy

CD Compilation, 1995

Beat Goes On (BGO)

Like all good titles, the name 'Billy Fury' stayed with me ever since I first read that name. Totally unknown in America, especially in the 1960's, I must have read about him as a teenager in an article about Swinging London, but as someone from the past. At the time not that interesting but I love the combination of Billy with Fury. Many years later The Smiths put Billy Fury on the cover of one of their 12” singles, and something about his face caught my imagination. In fact I became totally fascinated by U.K. Pop culture right before The Beatles made the big time. Like millions of others, I was lead to believe that nothing was happening music wise in England before The Beatles, but alas, I was deeply wrong. In two words what was happening was Billy. Fury.

I had to search the internet for this CD release of two Fury albums on one disk. What really interested me is the live album We Want Billy because he was backed by The Tornados, the Joe Meek fueled instrumental band. I have this one image I think I got from Mojo, where Fury is on stage and wearing a gold suit, and clearly you can see he is wearing heavy eye make-up, and he's rockin' with The Tornados' bass player Heinz looking on. For me it is one of those classic moments that freezes a specific time in a very specific place.

Musically the live album is very so-so. Fury, at heart, was a white RnB singer, who was forced to sing pop, even though at the very beginning of his career he was one of the first pop figures to actually write his own songs – but alas, over time he had to cover other songs due to the recording pop world at the time. There is tension between the early songs in his set, which was mostly rock n' roll, but eventually he does a melody of his 'pop' hits. Done without passion, there is clearly a wall between the two styles of music for him, at least on stage.

Now one would think I would prefer the rockin' songs, but I actually love his pop side more. For one the songs he sang were excellent, and two he was a great British ballad singer. What makes him special is you can clearly hear his Liverpool accent when he sang, which of course gives it an instinctive stamp of individuality, as it becomes his song. Billy is a very straight forward pop, but tinge with tragedy of romance and heartbreak.