The pivotal moment Helen Shapiro topped the charts
Out of many ‘flash-in-the-pan’ pop stars through time, few were as emblematic of a particular time and place as Helen Shapiro, who by the time she was 16 in 1962 had topped the UK charts four times. Growing up in Hackney, East London, Shapiro demonstrated musical talent from a young age, becoming known for her idiosyncratically rich singing voice. After a stint at ten in a band that featured future glam-rocker, young Marc Bolan (later of T Rex fame), EMI songwriter John Schroeder took Shapiro in as a protege, successfully getting her signed, after recording a demo of ‘The Birth of the Blues’, around 1960.
From then on, Shapiro had a fast trajectory to success. She was taken straight to Abbey Road’s Studio One, an environment then known for recording film soundtracks. There, she recorded ‘Don’t Treat Me Like a Child’, her first single, written by Schroeder and fellow EMI songwriter Mike Hawker. On release, the single went top three in Britain and straight to number one in New Zealand.
Next was ‘You Don’t Know’, also penned by Schroeder and Hawker; on its swift release, it sold 50,000 copies in one day alone. Then came the crowning glory, ‘Walking Back to Happiness’, released in September of 1961, which the following year earned an Ivor Novello Award.
Shapiro’s success showed that the cogs were moving in UK music. It’s hard to say what, exactly, had changed – but something certainly had; as ‘pop music’ solidified as a concept in the minds of listeners through the western world, so too did the idea of the pop star: the loved individual held up as a cultural ideal in the eyes of millions. In less than two years, Shapiro had found herself reigning as one of the queens of this grand new shift in culture.
However, with the onset of UK ‘pop music’ came the symbolic challengers to its throne: The Beatles and, a little later, The Rolling Stones. In the early days of their careers, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were close personally and professionally with Helen Shapiro, supporting her on her 1963 UK tour. They also wrote her a new song, ‘Misery‘, which Shapiro said later that she would have accepted if the EMI bosses had not declined on her behalf.
As The Beatles’ fame grew, Shapiro’s stardom started to dwindle. In early 1963, the single ‘Please Please Me’ took the Fab Four into the limelight. In January of ’64, Shapiro released ‘Fever’: a cover of the 1950s R&B standard, but it only peaked at number 38 in the charts. By then, the fickle appetite of the music-loving public had moved on.
That being said, Shapiro’s life as a musician was far from over. She went on to have a long and fulfilling career outside of the pop sphere, performing in London’s West End in the mid-to-late-1970s, then collaborating with jazz artist Humphrey Littleton in the ’80s and ’90s. Still, the early days of Shapiro’s career exemplify the strangeness of the pop music machine: how it can withdraw people from the spotlight often as fast as it places them in it, and then rewrite its own history as if that artist was never really there in the first place.
