It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Yeh Yeh” by Georgie Fame

January 20, 1965
“Yeh Yeh” by Georgie Fame
#1 on the Record Retailer Singles Chart (UK), January 14-27, 1965

Popular memory of UK rock at the time of the British Invasion primarily reduces the music to a two-party system: the poppy rock’n’roll of British beat, made famous by the Beatles, versus the bluesy, heavier R&B popularized by the Rolling Stones. But plenty of other popular bands of the era didn’t fall neatly into either of those camps. Several acts approached rock from a jazz standpoint, although without the cohesive, marketable scene and major American crossover that would match the success of Merseybeat or British blues.

Many young British rockers, however, had been raised on a diet of jazz music in some form. A revival of Dixieland-style music (called “trad jazz”) would become a major teen fad in the UK during the late ’50s and early ’60s, while fans of bebop (aka “modern jazz”) would lend their name to the Mod subculture. The Who and Manfred Mann both started out playing jazz, while the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts is famously a jazz drummer who more or less stumbled into a rock band. Nevertheless, the jazz influences on British rock records from this era were seldom overt.

One exception was a young piano player and singer from Lancashire called Georgie Fame. While a teenager, the erstwhile Clive Powell was adopted by infamous manager Larry Parnes, who rechristened him in the flamboyantly-monikered style of his other teen idols Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. Despite the new name, and the support of Fury’s ex-backing band, the Blue Flames, Fame’s early singles went nowhere. A new manager, Ronan O’Rahilly, was so frustrated by Fame’s lack of radio airplay that he started the pirate radio station Radio Caroline specifically to get his client’s music out on the airwaves.

The gambit worked. Fame’s single “Yeh Yeh” not only became his first hit, but it soared all the way to the top of the UK charts. Most of his new fans probably didn’t know the unusual origins of the song, however. “Yeh Yeh” started out as an instrumental on the 1963 album Watermelon Man! by Afro-Cuban congo drummer Mongo Santamaría. Jon Hendricks, master of vocalese — the art of singing words to pre-existing instrumental melodies — wrote lyrics to the brass line of “Yeh Yeh,” which his vocal jazz trio Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan recorded on the album At Newport ’63, released the same year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qvI49SGQUQ

Fame and the Blue Flames’ take on the song tightens the running time to under three minutes and features Fame’s Hammond organ on lead. Otherwise, however, evidence of its jazzy origins are slathered all over the record: in the complex, Latin-style drumming, the horn section’s emphatic accents, and Fame’s loose but controlled vocals. “Yeh Yeh” is catchy and sharp enough to fit alongside more straightforward rock songs of the era, but it’s also just different enough to stand out. You can see how it would have caught the ear of a wide variety of listeners, from jazz-pop fans, to R&B heads, to kids just looking for something to dance to.

The success of “Yeh Yeh” wasn’t just a one-off, either. All of Fame’s singles for the rest of the decade made the UK Top 40, including two more number-one singles: “Get Away” (1966) and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” (1968), the latter of which also crossed over into the US Top 10. Nevertheless, the success of Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station founded by Fame’s manager to promote his music, surpassed Fame’s own. In an era before the BBC added rock and R&B to its playlist, Radio Caroline became one of the premier sources for youth music in the ’60s.

Yet Fame maintained a respectable career of his own, even after the hits ran out. He worked as a session musician, and joined fellow jazzbo Van Morrison’s band in the late ’80s, leaving a decade later to become a founding member of Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. Like Radio Caroline, Fame has never matched the level of cultural influence that he reached in the ’60s. But 50 years on, Radio Caroline still broadcasts (via the Internet), and Georgie Fame still occasionally gigs with the Blue Flames.

It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.

Sally O'Rourke

Sally O’Rourke works in an office and sometimes writes about music. She blogs about every song to ever top the Billboard Hot 100 (in order) at No Hard Chords. She has also contributed to The Singles Jukebox, One Week // One Band, and PopMatters. Special interests include girl groups, soul pop, and over-analyzing chord changes and lyrics as if deciphering a secret code. She was born in Baton Rouge and lives in Manhattan. Her favorite Nugget is “Liar, Liar” by The Castaways.