Music Makes My Day album review
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN “Music Makes My Day” (Pye)
I SHOWED the sleeve shot to Greta The Groupie. “You should look that good,” I said. And Livvy, dressed in unbuttoned denim shirt and jeans, really does brighten up the place. Miss Nashville 1974 and a Grammy to prove it.
You can knock her if you wish and say disgusting things like “Toomorrow” and “Cliff Richard’s TV Show” but I’m keeping the thought in my mind that one day she might invite me up to her place to do an interview - and when a chick looks like she does, I’m not going to queer the pitch.
Not that I have to “Music Makes My Day” is a good album filled with well-chosen songs and dead-right arrangements, mainly by John Farrar who also found enough time to handle the production angle and chip in a little guitar, synthesiser and background vocal work at the same time. “Let Me Be There” is, naturally enough, included and so too is “Take Me Home Country Roads”, which John Denver reckons is the best version he’s heard (Can’t be all bad can he?).
Also around is a curl-up-your toes cut of “Being On The Losing End” that deserves a Grammy of its own; a free-flowing “Amoureuse”: a crisp, multi-tracked rendition of Russ Ballard’s “Heartbreaker”, and a Flett-Fletcher ballad called “Leaving” that finds Livvy getting really inside the song and not being merely superficial.
All right, it’s not heavy, it’s Olivia Newton hyphenated John and your mum probably likes her. But you’d have to be a real bigot not to admit this is a damn fine album. Now hands up all those who wish to enter our “Can You Kick Cliff Richard In The Penalty Area” competition!
By Fred Dellar