成人快手

by Bob Stanley of

Purists may have snorted at the the Typhoons' take on A Hard Day's Night, and Bud Ashton's attempt to ape Hank Marvin on , but for cash-strapped teenagers the Embassy label was a godsend.

The label was initially an offshoot of Oriole who did a deal with the formidable high street chain to record cash-in cheapo covers in 1954. The Levy brothers ran Oriole from their pressing plant in the Buckinghamshire village of Aston Clinton. It has to be said, with more than half a century's distance, that quite a lot of their recordings were at least as good as contemporary British covers like Craig Douglas's take on Sam Cooke's Only Sixteen.

The session singers Embassy used had to be pretty tidy impersonators to cover the range of material in the chart. Jean Campbell did a decent job of sounding like the very English Petula Clark, but flip the single and she sounds quite a lot like southern gal Connie Francis on Many Tears Ago. In fact, Jean was from Glasgow, had been a member of the Cyril Stapleton band, and later achieved pop culture immortality by singing "Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face with mild green Fairy liquid."

The output varied in quality. On Are You Lonesome Tonight, Rikki Henderson sounds more like Elvis than Elvis, except that his narrated part is as flat as a pancake - kind of proof that Elvis was really a decent actor. Bobby Stevens is clearly happier as Adam Faith (a decent soundalike on Who Am I) than he is as Elvis on a version of Wooden Heart that sounds even more (ahem) wooden than the original. Bud Ashton, who cut Duane Eddy and Shadows singles, wasn't even a real person, just a name attached to whichever session guitarist happened to be in the studio! Due to contractual tie-ups elsewhere, pseudonyms were rife. Of interest to SOTS listeners Brian Matthew - as we've heard from the man himself - had to pretend to be Peter Sellers on Goodness Gracious Me, and was renamed "Matt Bryant" for the occasion.

By the time it folded in July 1965, Embassy had released some 1,200 songs recorded by around 150 different singers, each song given a strict thirty minutes recording time in their New Bond Street studio. The budget soundalike record would become a big deal once more in 1968 with the first of Hallmark's Top Of The Pops compilations, soon to be followed by Hot Hits, the majority of which featured perky young women best described as dolly birds on the cover. Once again, these largely sold in Woolworths, and - unlike Embassy recordings - are now more collectable for their cheesecake artwork than their musical content.