Episode 042 - Seven Inches Of History 004 - Adam Faith - Poor Me

Two number ones before breakfast. Adam Faith was just getting started.

Adam Faith was not an accident. While some artists stumble into the charts through luck or timing, Terence Nelhams-Wright from Acton arrived at number one in the spring of 1960 as the result of a series of very deliberate decisions. The name. The image. The sound. All of it carefully assembled, and all of it working perfectly.

"Poor Me" was his second consecutive number one, following "What Do You Want" which had topped the chart at the end of 1959. Back to back number ones before most people had even worked out who he was. The songwriter was Les Vandyke, pen name of Johnny Worth, who had an almost uncanny gift for matching a lyric to a performer. The narrator of "Poor Me" is convinced the universe has it in for him romantically. Faith delivered that conviction with a sincerity that made it completely believable.

The sound was John Barry's work. The pizzicato string arrangement, plucked and precise, gave the record an intimacy that set it apart from everything else on the chart. Barry would go on to write the James Bond scores and win five Academy Awards. In 1960 he was a young arranger who understood that putting Faith's voice right at the front of the mix, with minimal decoration around it, was exactly the right call.

Three weeks at number one. A career built on intelligence as much as talent. And then, just to prove he was more than a pop star, a famous television interview in which he sat opposite John Freeman and actually thought about the questions. Not many number one artists of 1960 could say the same.

Seven Inches of History is Rainbow Valley's bite-size series covering every UK number one of the 1960s. Every episode is available now at https://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/rainbowvalley.

Follow us on Twitter at @rv_podcast.

#AdamFaith #PoorMe #SevenInchesOfHistory #RainbowValleyPodcast #UKNumberOne #BritishPop #1960s #PopHistory