The comedian who outsold everyone but The Beatles in the 1960s
Britain’s culture has always been made up of a profoundly curious mix of the progressively cutting-edge and the perversely crap. While America was busy channelling the booming liberation of the 1950s into the visceral pandemonium of Elvis Presley, the Brits were going cockahoop about a bucktooth clown from Wigan called George Formby, singing about how he’d just seen a pair of tits during his lowly cleaning windows duties. Yes, for every band like The Beatles, there is the sorry existence of Mrs Brown’s Boys.
Yet, you also sense that you can’t have one without the other. Even the Fab Four had a fraction of that naffness about them, proven when Paul McCartney put out eerily cheesy ‘Mull of Kintyre’ with Wings and tragically outsold all of his work with The Beatles, landing the UK’s first single to hit the two million copies sold mark. Then there was John Lennon holding a soda aloft, putting the straw up his nose, and joking that he had been caught sniffing coke. Camp comedy was definitely part of the group’s make-up.
The band, and perhaps more importantly, Brian Epstein, did not discriminate against anything that there was a market for. And there was most certainly a market for camp comedy in the 1960s. Nothing proves that point quite like the uncanny rise of Ken Dodd. In a golden age of The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and a glut of other stars on both sides of the Atlantic, this strange comic who permanently looked like he had recently been struck by lightning, had the third best-selling single of the entire 1960s in the UK.
Looking back upon the psychedelic era, you picture nothing but peace and love parades, the visceral, near-terrifying liberation of The Rolling Stones, the ultra-stylish beauty of the likes of Jane Birkin, and a wave of groovy artistic advancement. You don’t picture a 38-year-old man with fake teeth covering a corny song from the 1930s, but ‘Tears’ was lapped up by the masses all the same.
How did ‘Tears’ become one of the best-selling songs of the 1960s?
In the UK, the track sat just behind ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ when the decade came to a close. It had outstripped ‘God Only Knows’, tore beyond ‘Satisfaction’, and ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ might have run it close, but the hunky lathoria Tom Jones was no match for Ken Dodd. In his own way, nobody was.
Perhaps stranger still is that the song was not a stand-alone success for the comic. Dodd had no fewer than 18 tracks that cracked the top 40 across his lengthy career. A whopping four of them made it into the top ten. But he was always going to have his work cut out for him bettering a booming hit that stood proudly on the podium of a decade that many consider to be the most pivotal in music history. How did you explain that to historians of the future? When they inevitably look back at the ’60s as a modern renaissance period, how will they reconcile that the public decided to spend their pennies on ‘Tears’ rather than ‘Like a Rolling Stone’?
Perhaps the most bizarre factor of all is not the man behind the monumental hit, but the song itself. ‘Tears’ is not a joke song. It is sung by a man with false teeth so protruding that a modern make-up department would ban them on account of the perposterous gnashers posing a severe health and safety hazard, but it is sung sincerely. In fact, it has a descending chromatic line—famously one of the weepiest compositional styles that a piano can offer. And it is actually sung rather well, to boot.
However, if you’d be tempted to make the argument that if ‘Tears’ had been sung by Perry Como, one of Dodd’s favourite singers, then there wouldn’t be such a hullabaloo about how it found itself third in line to the ’60s throne, you’d be wrong. Dodd, in his own way, was far bigger than Como. The bucktooth comic had his own weekly show, which allowed for maximum exposure during an age when such publicity was sparse and TV viewing was a genuine event. Dodd’s swooning performance was akin to Ed Sullivan rising up from the sofa and saying, ‘Now, it’s time for one of my own’, and delivering a touching, tears-of-a-clown ballad with the voice of a dishevelled angel.
For an older generation whose stiff upper lip was largely impenetrable following the strife of the war, the rising youth culture movement was largely alien. ‘Tears’, on the other hand, is an outlier in chart history by virtue of the fact that it willfully harks back to a different era. The track echoes a pre-rock sentimentalism, weaving its way back through the static of liberation’s buzz, like a ghostly signal from a simpler time, resonating with the masses who had not yet acclimated to the ferocious pace of heavy metal modernity.
So, in some ways, historians of the future might conclude that the track was actually a prescient hint at the nostalgia that would soon gather within cultural consciousness. We might think of the present love for culture from a different era as something new, but ever since society put its foot on the gas, we’ve yearned for something simpler every now and then to break up the blur of Beatlemania, Britpop, Brat summer and whatever else has come hurtling towards the top of the charts.
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