We reckon even Sir Tom will have consigned his foray into the pop world to the bin. And he’s unlikely to thank our music misadventures correspondent Angus Young for fishing it back out.
At the height of Beatlemania, American music fans lapped up British pop bands. Among them was Herman’s Hermits, fronted by 17-year-old singer Peter Noone who had previously acted in Coronation Street. Their self-titled debut album was released in America in early 1965 and included both sides of the group’s first two UK singles and a song added at the last minute having been a regular fixture during live shows.
Mrs Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter wasn’t meant to be a single but that all changed when the track started to get heavy airplay by American radio DJs. The song entered the American Billboard Hot 100 chart at Number 12 and went on to spend three weeks at Number One.
Music writer Tom Breihan, whose book The Number Ones reviews every No. 1 chart hit in American history, describes the song as “an amiable and ambling little nothing.” He adds: “The song never archives lift-off. It never even tries for lift-off. Instead, it’s a morose little mutter, a self-pitying rock-kicker. In some small way it’s amazing that a song this flat and unassuming could have hit the way it did but that was the British invasion; lots of incredible music and lots of unremarkable music that people only only liked because it was British.”
Breihan suggests the song’s appeal might have been its easy-to-grasp storyline. “Noone is sad about being dumped, so he goes to the girl’s mother to assure her that he’s OK, even though he’s not particularly OK. It’s supposed to be a sort of stiff upper lip romantic gesture, even though it comes off more as trawling for sympathy.”
However, The Hermits weren’t the first to record the song, Two years earlier Hessle Road lad and lifelong Hull City fan Tom Courtenay had wrapped his tonsils around Mrs Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter on a single released by Decca. His version was first featured in a TV play called The Lads, in which he also starred. The play was set in a small town near a British army base in the Mediterranean and the plot concerned a group of soldiers led by Courtenay’s character going for a last night out looking for girls before their next deployment.
The song was one of four featured in the play and they were all written by fellow cast member Trevor Peacock, who later became best known for playing elderly eccentric Jim Trott in The Vicar of Dibley. To coincide with the broadcast, it was decided the Hull actor should record all four and release them as an EP on the Decca label with one being chosen as a single. A write-up on the reverse cover of the EP’s sleeve explains: “The songs form an integral part of the play’s plot and are, in the main, sung by different members of the cast; however on this record, we have Tom Courtenay’s own exciting versions.” Interestingly, he sings them all as his character in the play. As a result, his familiar gentle voice with an unmistakable Hull twang is replaced by an unfamiliar Cockney accent.
The single failed to make the charts, probably because Courtenay wasn’t keen on promoting it or becoming a pop star. “One thing I will not do, and that is sing on TV,” he said at the time. “It’s one thing to sing at a recording session but quite another to put a song over on TV. I’ve made an album of all the songs in the play and a single of Mrs Brown. I did it because I was in the play and I thought the songs were nice. I don’t think I’ll make any more records but you never know. Acting is really my only love. I have no desire to be a pop singer.”
It was a fair point, his breakthrough film Billy Liar had just been released and he was about to start work in a starring role in Dr Zhivago. (Listen to Sir Tom singing the song in the supplemental materials below – Ed.)
When The Hermits recorded the song, their producer Mickie Most fought hard against it being released as a single. He later described it as “probably the worst record ever made, or at least the worst I have been associated with.” Most’s lack of enthusiasm for the song probably explains why It was never released as a single in the UK but it eventually sold three million copies worldwide.
The song’s strange history would later include a cover version by the cartoon band Alvin and the Chipmunks and a 1967 instrumental-only version by Mexican band Elias and Ruiz and the Comanches.
However, Herman and the Hermits weren’t finished with it because it was used again as the title song for a 1968 feature film starring the band. Billed as a musical comedy, the script confusingly features two Mrs Browns – a greyhound inherited by Peter Noone who decides to enter it into a big money race to fund his struggling band’s dreams of becoming pop stars and also the mother of the girl he falls in love with along the way. Is there a happy ending? Sort of. The greyhound wins as Noone gets jilted but the film closes with him being consoled by another girl who lives nearby and who appears to have her heart set on making him her man. As the Swinging Sixties film poster says: “London is for the ‘birds’ and all the loveliest birds are flocking to Herman and his Hermits!”