Artist: Alma Cogan Genre(s):
Pop
Discography:
Happy Valley Sweetheart Year: 2005
Tracks: 25
Alma Cogan was one of the most successful and tragic figures in English pop music of the '50s and early '60s. Her 18 graph hits were a record for a female isaac Bashevis Singer at the end of the '50s in England, and scorn existence region of the pre-rock & vagabond epoch, Cogan seemed capable of working with the newfangled medicine when her life was cut short.
The daughter of a clothier, Alma Cogan was born in St. John's Wood and educated at St. Joseph' Convent School. It was Cogan's mother world Health Organization pushed her toward a calling as a isaac Bashevis Singer and onto the microscope stage. In 1948, at age 16, she was spotted in the chorus of High Button Shoes by EMI staff producer Walter J. Ridley (also responsible, a decennary later, for signing Johnny Kidd & the Pirates), world Health Organization afterwards signed her to the HMV judge. Around this same time, she began appearing with floor show at the Cumberland Hotel. Cogan began her vocation doing ballads, simply her first attain was a gewgaw tune called "Bell Bottom Blues" (not the Derek & the Dominoes song), which got to number basketball team on the British charts in 1954. A yr by and by, she topped the charts for the low and only time with "Dreamboat." She also covered several American hits, including "The Birds and the Bees" and "Wherefore Do Fools Fall in Love," which was a confidential information of the cooking stove she would show in her later vocation. By the turn of the '50s into the '60s, she was as well the star of her have goggle box syllabus, and she reached the apex of her success when Lionel Bart (whom, at one percentage point, she manifestly intended to conjoin) cast her as Nancy in Oliver! Her describe receded from the pop charts middling in the early '60s, as jr. performers such as Helen Shapiro coupled the EMI roster, but Cogan was a mending as a concert draw during the first half of the decade.
During the '50s, Cogan attracted press attention as a personality beyond her vocalizing, for her horse sense of humor and for her solicitation of gilded clothes -- it was aforesaid that she never wore the same dress twice -- and her dwelling was filled with an over-the-top array of fashions. By the mid-'60s, she was much more celebrated in the gossiper columns for the overnight parties she threw at her Kensington High Street home, where guests included such various figures as Stanley Baker, Paul McCartney, Roger Moore, Noël Coward, Ethel Merman, and Lionel Bart, among many others. If she was no longer a chart-topping star, Cogan was still a much-loved figure to her peers, and remained in meet with the cutting edge of the popular music business concern, transcription the medicine of Burt Bacharach when he was still acquiring established, and befriending McCartney, wHO must've loved qualification the friend of EMI's biggest female pop star from the menses in which he was ontogenesis up. McCartney contributed pleximetry to the B-side of one of her mid-'60s singles, which resulted in her application "Eight Days a Week," as well as "Yesterday," "I Feel Fine," and "Just the ticket to Ride." There's no relation where that friendship might've light-emitting diode -- Cogan could easy have been another, more mature Cilla Black, her voice portion as an release for McCartney songs that weren't suited to the Beatles. If her version of "Eight-spot Days a Week" -- a to the highest degree startling re-thinking of the song, transforming it into a gloriously lyrical common mullein issue -- is whatever denotation, she might've done marvelous, splendid things with "For No One," "Your Mother Should Know," and "When I'm Sixty-Four." Alas, it was non to be. Cogan had simply proved able of making the transition to a more rocking reasoned, or at least of embracing some components of the last few age of changes in music, when disaster smitten. In 1966, she was diagnosed with genus Cancer. She received treatments and planned to continue her life history, even writing respective songs (under the name "Al Western") that were recorded by other singers. She kept working during the class, and an album was intended. Cogan continued concertizing, and while touring Sweden, she fainted. She was diagnosed as terminally ill, and died on October 26 of that year in a London hospital.
Her final album,
Alma, was released early the following year, just Cogan was never completely disregarded. Collections of her medicine have shown up passim the CD epoch, including a complete triple-CD anthology (
Grand Canyon State of Alma). In 1992, the BBC presented a video documentary about her life and vocation.
