“You don’t get the mix, he’s gone 76…”
Marking blue-eyed soul singer Steve Ellis’s three-quarter century +1, a thumping throwback to that Everlasting Love
If push came to shove and I was asked to make a wee listicle of my favourite music from the decade I was born, well, there’d be some obvious 60s chestnuts — an Ike & Tina here, a Scott and Dusty there… not to mention that White Rabbit munching its way through Strawberry Fields framed by a Waterloo Sunset.
Still on a Summer of Love kick, perhaps more of a surprise is The Love Affair’s decidedly less hip Everlasting Love would almost certainly be up there too, and not even U2’s raggedy pickle attempt has put me off. Or Gloria Estefan’s, come to that.
If my memory serves (and it’s famously no slouch in that department), the first version of this eternal classic I recall being aware of was by a German chanteuse called Sandra. As with the rest of her candy shop of bubblebum pop pieces — by and large written and/or produced by then, hubby Romanian future Enigma mainman Michael Cretu — her pseudo PWL remake didn’t trouble the UK charts in 1987, nor its reissue in 1988. Though we MK bods were exposed to the video on a weekly basis via something called the Eurochart Top 50, as our town was one of a small handful able to receive the nascent Sky TV via compulsory cable rather than any pesky satellite dish.
There’s a Pet Shop Boys-meet-Kylie doing Patsy Kensit vibe about this fully unexpurgated 12-inch whopper, don’t you think?
Twenty years earlier, Everlasting Love had been recorded in 1967 and taken to the top of the charts in 1968 by a London band called The Love Affair, a bunch of photogenic teen boys who worked their way round the capital’s soul clubs, looking for an opening. And boy did they find it in this song, their sophomore single.
Like all their 45, Everlasting Love wasn’t written by the boys. Buzz Cason and Mac Gayden held that honour, providing Robert Knight with a medium sized US hit in 1967, though the black R&B vocalist Carl Carlton would do better, taking the song to No. 6 in 1974.
Nothing really tops the brilliance of the Brits’ rendition though, which I grew to love via a Castle Communications 2CD compilation called The Ultimate 60s Collection, issued in 1990.
Everlasting Love is tightly constructed, and how. Every element is there for a reason: to make the experience more exciting – from the sudden stop and whistling breakdown before the chorus climax, to the bass, the brass, and the over-the-topness of the Spector meets Motown orchestration.
In retrospect, the powerful production was the perfect showcase for those remarkable Steve Ellis pipes. Born in Middlesex on 7 April 1950, he was reportedly the only member of the band on the recording — a persistent trend in the ’swinging’ 60s — probably to great frustration, as the lads, which would soon include future Mott The Hoople keyboardist Morgan Fisher, could play a bit. Alas, they were eschewed in favour of anonymous sessionmen and a full orchestra, a label diktat which continued on the group’s subsequent hits.
Ellis, of course, puts in an impassioned performance. Like Dusty Springfield, he’s taking his cues from American soul music, but the Edgware intoner was barely even 18, which shows not in any audible mis-steps but in a tremulous throaty intensity – as the chorus hits again and again, he nails the overwhelming urgency of teenage love superbly. What you get is ruthless studio craft allied to the hormone rush of calculated pop: in other words classic boyband formula.
When Everlasting Love dislodged Georgie Fame from the top spot in February ’68, the band were suddenly veritable heart throbs for the year, then they vanished. Perfect then.
Steve Pafford
