Graham Reid | | 2 min read
I Believe
The Beat-era Bachelors out of Dublin – brothers Con and Dec Cluskey with John Stokes – had an unexpected career according to Decca's Dick Rowe who signed them up in 1962.
Previously called the Harmonichords, they played mouth-organs (hence the harmonica-referencing name) and when Rowe saw them in Arbroath after a message from their manager he was unimpressed. Sixteen minutes of harmonica and a couple of Irish folk songs weren't much of a pitch from the band.
But Rowe – famously “the man who turned the Beatles down”, although anyone who heard their Decca audition would have done the same – thought there was something in their singing if they just did more contemporary material.
He'd had in mind a vocal version of Mantovani's famous orchestral piece Charmaine – a beautiful arrangement for strings which we've hailed in the past – and it seemed these were the boys who could do it.
They practiced it for eight weeks, recorded it for Rowe and in '62 it went top 10 in the UK charts. It wouldn't be until '64 that they had another decent chart showing, with Diane (number one in the UK, 10 in the US) then I Believe (number two in the UK).
Those songs were also two and one respectively in New Zealand.
Their '64 album 16 Great Songs, pulled from the shelves at random for this on-going column, went number two in the UK at Christmas that year.
You can hear why, there is a long streak of sentimentality in their repertoire: I Believe (“that someone in that great somewhere hears every word”), Rodgers and Hammerstein's You'll Never Walk Alone, Diane, If (“they made me a king I'd be slave to you”), With These Hands (“I will cling to you, I'm yours forever and a day”), Johnny Ray's The Little White Cloud That Cried . . .
This is richly orchestrated pop with its roots in the past: the Gershwins' Maybe is here alongside I'll See You In My Dreams written in the Twenties, as were Diane, Whispering, I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time, Ramona . . .
Ironically, given Rowe's aim to have them present more contemporary material, these were song played around the family piano for decades yet somehow the Bachelors – adopting the slightly moptop look of the day and sometimes white polo-necked sweaters like The Dave Clark Five – managed to take them to the charts through their harmonies and Con's earnest delivery (check I Believe for an example).
Their niceness, popular repertoire (they covered Paul Simon's The Sounds of Silence) and television appearances on mainstream variety shows sustained them right through until the mid-Eighties when the Cluskey brothers split with Stokes.
Their hits were repeatedly collated and reissued but if you only want to hear one Bachelors album then this string-soaked, sentimental collection is probably the one.
Incidentally Con Cluskey died in 2022. He was married when the band dropped the Harmonichords name and stepped out as . . . . the Bachelors.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here or, as I did, you could find a good condition copy in a hospice shop for $1
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Elsewhere occasionally revisits albums -- classics sometimes, but more often oddities or overlooked albums by major artists -- and you can find a number of them starting here.
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