People in focus - pop singles - Norwegian article and pic
By Peter Jones
Translation:
Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Lulu and Sandie Shaw all have something unfortunate in common. They are unfortunately suffering from steadily declining record sales.
For now, at least, it seems that the days when they topped the charts are over. It is clear that the public has grown tired of hearing the same voices over and over again. Because apart from these four, there has been little choice when it comes to top-level soloists.
All of this may explain why Olivia Newton-John is suddenly on top. She is a beautiful girl from Australia, who recently topped the list of the most popular with a single song. namely Bob Dylan’s “If not for you.
Not only that, but she actually did it better than Bob Dylan himself. She has also had success with an old sing-along song, “Banks of the Ohio”.
Life is looking pretty rosy for Olivia at the moment, but it hasn’t always been that way for this university lecturer’s daughter. Especially right after she found a talent competition in Australia and headed to London, which one half of a singing duo, Pat and Olivia”. She didn’t get very far on this path.
However, she started going to places where things were happening. At one of these shows, she met “The Shadows’ rhythm guitarist. Bruce Welch, to whom Olivia is now engaged.
She got to meet the other members of The Shadows in turn, including Hank B. Marvin, who was named the world’s best instrumentalist last year, and Cliff Richard who was named best male solo singer, as well as their manager, Peter Gormley.
How did Olivia Newton-John get past them all? It helped that she had a hit album at the time of the voting, and that she was recently featured alongside Cliff Richard on his TV series.
Olivia Newton-John herself says: “I owe Cliff a lot. He has given me self-confidence. I attended his shows and held his hand as if it were my life. I felt the confidence flowing from him.
I don’t feel like a star. If someone comes up to me on the street and talks to me as if we were old acquaintances, I am convinced that they are mistaken me and for someone else.
It is quite certain that Olivia Newton-John did not feel like a star when she tried out for “Toomorrow”, the group that was supposed to become the “Monkees” of the seventies, but which failed. From all the “Toomorrow noise”, however, Olivia Newton-John stood out.
“For the moment I am going through that period of doubt and uncertainty, which is called waiting for a follow-up album”.
It has come, by the way, and is called “Love Story”, but has nothing to do with the original film score. It is good and Cliff Richard expects it to be.
We need new faces in pop music, especially among the girls, and they cannot be much, prettier than Olivia Newton-John’s. Moreover, she smiles as if she were really happy.