Toshiba EMI Japan
1964
Peter And Gordon
About This Album
The duo's first British album is essentially the American A World Without Love LP with one extra song ("Long Time Gone"), and as a British Invasion debut record, it's not bad. The duo sort of rocks out on Little Richard's "Lucille" and Ray Charles' "Leave My Woman Alone," and harmonizes in the best Beatles/Merseybeat manner on "If I Were You," the Buddy Holly/Crickets number "Tell Me How," and "You Don't Have to Tell Me," and they attempt to sound bluesy on "Trouble in Mind" and fail, but they fail in no worse fashion than 98 percent of the white British singers who went down that road in 1964. Arranger/producer Geoff Love -- who led a pop orchestra of his own and had previously worked with Shirley Bassey, among other pop singers -- occasionally lets the electric guitars come to the fore, but on most of this album the accompaniment is no harder than the way that the Beatles played on, say, "Till There Was You" from With the Beatles, embellished with light orchestral accompaniment. Try as they might to emulate the sound of the Beatles, the duo and their producer never get much closer or better than a kind of formulaic "Beatles-lite" -- the Liverpool quartet could have covered "Tell Me How" in the manner depicted here, but you just know that they'd have left in some rough spots and sung it a little tougher.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,11,13 and 14)

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