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Perfect 10: Noël Coward covers 

During his lifetime Noël Coward was generally considered that dreaded thing: a ‘national treasure’. But more importantly, among the many accolades and awards he was regarded in British society as one of the wittiest and wiliest men of his generation. 

Despite the ditties, and the occasional foray into art and film, Coward’s name was made with his plays and revues. Admittedly, some are now exceptionally dated and work better as Oscar Wilde style period pieces and historical documents rather than entertainment relevant to today’s discerning audiences. 

And while London’s West End still adores him in the same way it adores Wilde — there are regular productions and award-winning adaptations of The Master’s feted fables such as Hay Fever, Present Laughter and Brief Encounter, attracting the acting calibre of Andrew Scott, Damian Lewis, Toby Stephens, Olivia Colman and Jennifer Saunders (not to mention a perfectly cast Angela Lansbury in one of her last roles as Madame Arcati, the eccentric psychic of the hilarious Blithe Spirit) — even the Coward estate itself admits the playwright is annoyingly anathema to a certain tranche of contemporary directors.

So why the distaste?

We need not look further than the distinguished professor of English, Philip Hoare, where, in his 1995 biography: The playwright’s universe, he noted, The Master’s repertoire “is a world of our parents’ generation, a world rapidly disappearing as we leave the century behind, a world of different values, and different voices”.

This goes some way to explaining why there are so few cover versions of Coward’s songs these days. The way etiquette in the music world works in the international internet age is that something so elitist and parochial is dismissed as passé. A relic from a bygone era that is entirely out of most streamer’s curfews.

Admittedly, wry ditties like A Room With A View, Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage Mrs. Worthington and Mad Dogs And Englishmen are hardly relevant to 21st century living. And the less said about the vaguely xenophobic Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans, Could You Please Oblige Us With A Bren Gun? and (cough, splutter) There’s Always Something Fishy About The French the better. Zut alors!

Marking the 125th anniversary of Coward’s birth in a modest terrace in suburban Middlesex (being down the road from Richmond, Teddington happened to be location of my last gym in Britain, as it were), I’ve collated a perfect 10 of the epigrammatic eccentric’s more adaptable choons, half emanating from an EMI tribute album curated by the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant in 1998, of which — case in point — author Hoare expertly penned the liner notes.

Concise, clever, and effortlessly amusing, ladies and gentlemen this is Noël Coward all sung by many other fellows (and femmes)…

Dinah Washington — Mad About The Boy (1952/1961) 

As 2024 marks the centenary of Dinah Washington’s birth, it seems apt to kick off proceedings with her only posthumous ‘hit’ to date — the sublime Mad About The Boy, written by The Master in 1932 and, most recently, covered by Adam Lambert in 2023.

The subject matter was about the adulation of a matinee idol by a number of women as they queue outside a cinema, though closeted Coward also wrote a version which was never released, containing references to the then-risqué topic of homosexuality, then still illegal in Britain.

Later memorably performed by Eartha Kitt on the Ed Sullivan Show, Dinah recorded the track twice: firstly in 1952 with orchestral accompaniment by Walter Roddell, and then two years before her death, on 4 December 1961 in her native Chicago, with Quincy Jones and his orchestra. The later recording is the most widely known version of the song, and its cinematic sweep give it an air of a great lost James Bond theme. Three decades on and on the back of its use in a ubiquitous Levi’s jeans TV ad the single even charted in April 1992. 

In his 2001 biography Q, Quincy vividly describes Washington’s vocal dexterity, saying she “could take the melody in her hand, hold it like an egg, crack it open, fry it, let it sizzle, reconstruct it, put the egg back in the box and back in the refrigerator and you would’ve still understood every single syllable.” There can be no greater epitaph. 

Judy Garland — If Love Were All (1961) 

Get her to tell you the Dietrich stories!

The undisputed highlight of the final decade of her life, the success of Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall concert in April 1961, was reflected the Hollywood legends that were in attendance — take a bow Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Lauren Bacall, Mickey Rooney, Julie Andrews — but also in the resulting recording, which remained on the American Billboard charts for 73 weeks, including an astonishing 13 weeks at No. 1. A winner of four Grammy Awards, the album contains Coward’s lonely ballad If Love Were All, written for his 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet, which Garland, in the featured video here, performed on her 1963 telly special standing resolutely upright. Alas, at the prestigious Manhattan recital hall, the erstwhile “Dorothy“ opted to sing it while sat on the edge of the stage, accompanied on piano by the musical director Mort Lindsey. 

With her masterful melancholic phrasing, an occasional quiver in her voice, and minimal gesturing, this showbiz trouper exposed her all too visible vulnerability and emotional pain, readily understandable in a life that ended, at just 47, with an accidental overdose of barbiturates four days before I was born, and a mere ten minutes across Central London. Talking of the Big Smoke

Frank Sinatra — I’ll Follow My Secret Heart (1962) 

The second of two Coward covers the king Rat Packer released in ’62 (the wistful I’ll See You Again appears on Sinatra’s adieu to Capitol, The Point Of No Return), I’ll Follow My Secret Heart can be found on Ol’ Blue Eyes’ only UK recorded studio set, Sinatra Sings Great Songs From Great Britain. 

The LP yielded one enduring gem which Frankie tackles in his swoonsome lush legato. The romantic set piece of 1934’s Conversation Piece, Secret Heart was a daring lyric to tackle, with Coward conflicted between the social rebel he dared to be in his scripts, and the more conservative recorded media of the day presenting a mainstream heterosexual cover, or “beard,” which afforded him security, privacy and success. Like his better-known Bitter-Sweet, the libretto’s coded message is “to follow one’s heart,” suggesting that happiness comes not from an arranged marriage within social class structures, but from an independent free spirit willing to reject the conventions of society. 

By inference, the hero/heroine could choose an alternative lifestyle that transcends class or wealth, even if it is private and sheltered from public view. As a relatively poor gay boy who created his own public persona of wit and privilege and would in his final years be knighted “Sir”, Coward would return again and again to his theme of the outsider, or lower class, bumping up against the rules and prejudices of the upper class. 

Julie Andrews — Parisian Pierrot (1968) 

On to the sound of Julie. Star! was a somewhat elephantine musical biography of Coward’s beloved partner-in-crime Gertrude Lawrence, with a fresh from Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music Julie Andrews in the title role. A less than Thoroughly Modern Movie, it was panned by critics and shunned by audiences — a fate that Noël Coward’s own withering diary entry foresaw:

“It is a project of which I heartily disapprove… why they are doing the film I shall never know. There isn’t any real story behind the fact that she started young in the theatre, became an understudy, then a star, lived with Philip Astley, Bert Taylor, etc., married Richard Aldrich, and died. I really do think that the Hollywood film mentality is worse than ever.”

Still, then nascent Daniel Massey did receive an Oscar nomination for playing The Master on celluloid, his real-life godfather. And the sweetly avant-garde Parisian Pierrot, dating from 1926’s London Calling! revue and later covered brilliantly blandly by Sharleen Spiteri’s Texas, was sung magnificently by Andrews. Her crystal clear diction is as beautiful as the first time she tackled the Coward catalogue, with the patriotic backslapper London Pride taking pride of place as the second song on her 1957 debut album The Lass With The Delicate Air.

Marianne Faithfull — Twentieth Century Blues (1973) 

Over two decades before Marianne Faithfull made Coward’s world weary 20th Century Blues the title track of a 1996 live album, the one-time Stones cohort took time out from substance abuse to guest on David Bowie’s infamous Midnight Special telly spot The 1980 Floor Show.

In addition to a slightly wonky duet with the Dame on Sonny & Cher’s perennial I Got You Babe, the gig was also notable for the singer unveiling her Coward cover for the first time. It’s Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and very cabaret. 

The concert, taped at London’s Marquee Club, would ultimately turn out to be Bowie’s final appearance as the alien androgene Ziggy Stardust. Also included were guest performances of varying entertainment value by The Troggs, Carmen, and Amanda Lear. And it‘s advisable not mention Bowie and Lear to this next chap if you know what’s good for you.

Bryan Ferry — I’ll See You Again (1998)

As expected of such an eclectic outfit, art-rock pioneers Roxy Music took their inspiration from a range of places. Though its mainman Bryan Ferry clearly pastiched the playwright’s tuxedoed hoi-polloi on the cover of 1974’s Another Time Another Place, the singer exhibited his Coward credentials even earlier. On Roxy’s first self-titled album, from 1972 was the pensive ballad Chance Meeting, and Ferry explained that it was inspired by Noël’s 1945 romantic drama, Brief Encounter. Starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as star-crossed lovers in the midst of an extramarital affair it is regarded as one of the greatest movies of its time.

In 1998, Ferry went the whole hog and submitted a track to a charity record benefiting the Red Hot AIDS trust, executive produced by fellow Geordie Neil Tennant. Nestled among offerings from Sting, Suede, Elton John, Paul McCartney and a preposterously meandering instrumental of the wartime weepie London Pride from Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman (a last-minute entry stepping in for a no-show David Bowie) was I’ll See You Again. A wistful waltz originating in the 1929 operetta Bitter-Sweet, the original’s crackly shellac backing track was sampled and spruced up by BF’s producer Rhett Davies and overlaid with new piano and vocal. It’s powerfully majestic and very nostalgic. 

Shola Ama — Someday I’ll Find You (1998)

The lead single from Twentieth-Century Blues: The Songs of Noël Coward project was a two-act double-A, the main song being the beautifully delivered Someday I’ll Find You by Kilburn local Shola Ama, who was living two streets from me in NW6 at the time of release, and neighbours with Irish telly hunk Dermot O’Leary. She liked to shop at Sainsbury‘s.

In musical if not vocal terms, the track was effectively a plaintive preview of Craig Armstrong’s lushly orchestrated arrangements on the Pet Shop Boys’ 1999 Nightlife set. Indeed, a perfectly nuanced Shola managed to capture the ache and yearning lustre of this handsome ballad in a way that Claire Sweeney‘s subsequent Poundland knock-off hadn’t a hope in hell.

The Divine Comedy — I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party (1998)

And on to other other side of the 45. With his witty wry wordplay and literate quirkiness, Irish singer-songwriter Neil Hannon is very evidently an artistic descendent of Noël’s, so full marks to him and his Divine Comedy moniker for providing the most atypical cut on the tribute album, and of their entire career. 

A sardonic observation on early twentieth century society, I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party was penned in 1938 for the Broadway revue Set To Music. Gaily, the track’s techno conceit is coruscating in its greatness as Hannon alternates quaint comically caricatured verses that faithfully replicate Coward’s original melody with a thumping hi-NRG chorus in line with the contemporary club culture of the late nineties.

Whenever a musical performer ticks my boxes with a sardonic joke as their entry point they’ve got favoured nation status right off the bat. And I am unanimous in that.

Pet Shop Boys — Sail Away (1998)

The insider allusions and erudite vignettes of Coward’s literate lyrics were always going to attract evocative wordsmiths like Neil Tennant to the table. And though the Pet Shop Boys’ version of If Love Were All, from 1994, was touchingly bittersweet, it was a relatively straightforward cover as opposed a reinvention. 

The duo’s air-conditioned, synth-pop retooling of Sail Away arguably fares better, and even features The Master’s voice commandeering the intro, announcing imperiously, “This is the story of a ship,” as sampled from Noël’s 1942 wartime film In Which We Serve. There‘s a nice twangy sounding guitar in the middle too, which evokes Hank Marvin at his most Bond-like.

A mellow mid-tempo rumination on middle age, the tune first featured in 1950’s Ace Of Clubs and was repurposed as the title song of a 1961 musical which Coward directed at London’s Savoy Theatre. Ultimately, it would be the last stage show for which he wrote both the words and music, although he wrote the music for one last “book” musical in 1963. 

Robbie Williams — There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner (1998)

The year of his epochal Glastonbury set of the summer of ’98, just weeks before former Take That tiny bopper Robbie Williams dashed off his rendition of Coward’s 1952 gloom anthem There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.

If the timing was catty (less than a year after the arrival of Tony Blair‘s “New“ Labour government), the end of the pier music hall sensibility of the song was superlatively suited to the Staffs lad. And as the finished result was co-produced by Neil Tennant and boasted former Roxy Music synthscapper on omnichord, eagle-eared listeners were treated to a foretaste of not only RW’s impending No Regrets (featuring the duelling dulcet tomes of the two Neils: Tennant and the aforementioned Hannon) but what was planned to be an entire soundtrack album for the Pet Shop Boys’ disc musical Closer To Heaven. In other words, Eno a no-go.

Steve Pafford

Tales from the cottage: George Michael, John Gielgud and Noël Coward behind the Masquerade is here

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