Olivia (10 page)

Bruce was so worried about the damage the film could do to Olivia’s embryonic career that he went so far as to arrange for a private screening of
Toomorrow
for several of his music industry pals to see if they could at least salvage it musically. Bruce’s devotion to Olivia was evident from the calibre of songwriting professionals he called in. They were among the UK’s very best and the most prolific hit-makers: Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, whose output included ‘Home Lovin’ Man’ for Andy Williams, ‘Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart’ for Gene Pitney and ‘You’ve Got Your Troubles’ for The Fortunes; Mitch Murray, who had written the chart-topper ‘How Do You Do It?’ for Gerry and The Pacemakers, and Les Reed who wrote Tom Jones’s massive hit ‘It’s Not Unusual’.

It was a brave and gallant gesture on Bruce’s part to assemble such songwriting talent on a rescue mission, but it was futile. It soon became obvious that any musical changes would mean some major reshooting of several key scenes and the cost would be prohibitive.

Despite Guest’s efforts, in the run-up to its scheduled UK opening, the beating of the drum for
Toomorrow
continued apace. The movie’s distributors, the Rank Organisation, promised: ‘The film launches the supergroup with the sound of the seventies in a contemporary story which is as fresh and compelling as tomorrow’s date. Each individual member of the combo - Olivia, Karl, Vic and Ben - radiates those unique qualities of built-in excitement, personal magnetism and a powerhouse of potent musical talent. Together they ensure that
Toomorrow
provides out-of-this-world entertainment for the young-at-heart filmgoers of today.’

One of the press handouts said of Olivia: ‘Livvy has buttery skin, big, big, very round grey-green eyes, stands 5ft 6ins and weighs 98lbs.’ She dug ‘Baez, horse riding, Mac Davis, Redford, Bruce Welch, McQueen, Streisand, Feliciano, steak and salad, Hank Marvin, Beatles, wine, Bacharach and her red setter named Geordie.’

Another reported: ‘She is five feet and six inches tall, weighs 115lbs, and has dark blonde hair and grey-green eyes. Olivia sings and “sort of” plays the guitar. She loves to wear micro-miniskirts (sometimes 18 inches above the knee) and loves animals of all kinds.’

Bruce and Olivia flew to America for a starry New York launch and were back in London to attend the UK premiere.
Toomorrow
the movie finally opened at the London Pavilion cinema in Piccadilly Circus, but quickly vanished, accompanied by a lawsuit between Harry Saltzman and Val Guest. ‘What can I say but it was terrible and I was terrible in it,’ Olivia much later told the music press. ‘They kept telling me I had to project so I went through the whole movie shouting.’

The movie did briefly surface later in the UK, but its very limited screenings ensured that the multi-media Toomorrow project got off to the worst possible start. Without the movie to guarantee cross-promotion, the records by Toomorrow the pop group failed to make any sort of a dent in the charts. Two singles and a soundtrack album was the sum total of the group’s output, and during their two years together they played not a single concert.

Don Kirshner has said that he began to lose interest in the whole Toomorrow project when he saw it was all going in the wrong direction, and it was no surprise when the venture that had promised so very much was quietly wound up and consigned to history.

‘The film opened and closed within a week,’ Olivia said. ‘They called us into the office and told us that we were all being released from our contracts. And that was that. I suppose I was disappointed. It had all seemed too good to be true at first. I thought it was all going to be terrific. Then we were told that it was all over.

‘We knew it would end eventually, but the guys in the group were shattered. We didn’t realise it would be over so soon. Mr Saltzman just called us into his office and told us it was over. The group had been together for two years and we’d done nothing. Just rehearsed a lot and did auditions for big businessmen.’

Olivia and the other three members of the group had been signed to exclusive five-year contracts and their release at least enabled them now to press on with their careers as solo artists. ‘I wasn’t desperately unhappy,’ Olivia later reflected about the whole experience. ‘It didn’t destroy me that it wasn’t as perfect as I imagined it would be. I was into other things, I was engaged to Bruce Welch and I was having a lovely life.’

Olivia’s image and career might have been so very different if
Toomorrow
the movie had not proved to be such a disaster. She might never have gone on to solo success. Mass audiences never got to see her as the singing young student looking cute and sexy in her little shorts and those micro-skirts daringly ‘18 inches above the knee’. Overall, the entire Toomorrow venture was a desperate letdown for the four young co-stars, especially for Ben Thomas, whose actress girlfriend Susan George had been pipped to the lead role by Olivia, and whose own big break had now come to so little after promising so much.

The records had flopped, the movie was barely seen and Olivia came away vowing to stay clear of films for the foreseeable future. Failure was hard to swallow and the whole enterprise had been a harsh lesson. Nothing at the start had pointed to such an unhappy outcome.

Frustratingly for Olivia’s fans,
Toomorrow
the movie has rarely seen the light of day since its limited release, and it’s thought that very few prints are still in existence. There was a rare showing of the film at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles in 1970, which Olivia attended with her sister Rona, after a copy was tracked down in England and flown out to LA for the special screening. With the passing of time the film’s inaccessibility has given it considerable curiosity value among film buffs.

 

 

During Olivia’s involvement with Toomorrow, Bruce Welch began to get restless spending his time behind a desk on behalf of Shadows Music. He started tossing a few ideas around with Hank Marvin and they talked of the possibility of teaming up to perform as a duo but without calling themselves The Shadows. In the course of their conversation, the name of John Farrar cropped up. The guitarist had left a lasting impression on them both in Australia and they decided to call him up and invite him over to England. It was a telephone call that would have a major bearing on Olivia’s success as a singer - John was just emerging as a highly talented songwriter and, in time, he would go on to write and produce many of Olivia’s biggest hits.

John arrived in London in August 1970, and Hank and Bruce immediately took him off to Portugal with a view to spending some time working on new songs together. They all gelled so well during this working holiday that they agreed to team up to record and perform as a trio, Marvin, Welch and Farrar, as soon as they returned to England.

Olivia was especially pleased when John pitched up in London. The bonus for her was that by now the girl in John’s life was Olivia’s erstwhile singing partner, Pat Carroll. Just as Olivia had predicted, John and Pat proved to be very good for each other and Olivia was thrilled when the couple decided to get married. And now that John Farrar was planning to base himself in England with his new wife, it meant Olivia would be seeing a lot more of her great friend Pat - but not as a regular singing partner. Pat had no alternative but to cheerfully accept that Olivia had forged ahead with her solo career and there was to be no real opportunity to team up again as a singing duo.

Chapter 5

If Not For You

LEE KRAMER ON MEETING OLIVIA FOR THE FIRST TIME ON A BEACH IN MONTE CARLO

 

 

ONCE OLIVIA was released from her Toomorrow contract, her manager Peter Gormley saw the importance of rapidly distancing her from the doomed project. He wanted any lingering whiff of Toomorrow’s failure to be dispelled as quickly as possible. Gormley personally had seen nothing in Toomorrow to shake his firm belief in Olivia’s talent, and he and Bruce Welch realised that the best way of drawing a line under the whole Toomorrow disaster was to find Olivia suitable songs to record for a debut LP that would give her the chance of a hit and put her on the map.

Together with John Farrar, they picked out a handful of outstanding American country songs for the album, including Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me And Bobby McGee’ and ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’, Tom Rush’s ‘No Regrets’ as well as Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s classic ‘If You Could Read My Mind’.

Among other numbers that came up for consideration was Bob Dylan’s ‘If Not For You’, one of the strongest tracks on Dylan’s
New Morning
album released in 1970. George Harrison had also recognised ‘If Not For You’ as the pick of the bunch on Dylan’s new LP, and the Beatle had recorded his own version with a distinctive slide guitar backing for a track issued on his solo album
All Things Must Pass
.

Peter Gormley heard Harrison’s rendering of ‘If Not For You’ and suggested Olivia might like to record it. Olivia was far from convinced it would suit her, but John Farrar and Bruce Welch won her round. They would take care of everything in the studio, they assured her. John, by now showing a remarkable ear for harmonies and musical arranging, would take on the responsibility of the song’s arrangement and Bruce would mastermind Olivia’s vocal performance. Surrounded by experienced professionals who were also friends who loved her and believed in her, Olivia was hardly in the mood to turn down their choice of ‘If Not For You’.

During the studio recording, John Farrar seized on George Harrison’s slide guitar sound as the dominant force in the backing and took a similar approach to cushion Olivia’s soft vocal. John had always enjoyed music with a country tinge and there was undeniably a touch of Nashville about the finished recording.

By the end of the studio session everyone was happy with the outcome, even Olivia. ‘I didn’t think it was my type of song at all,’ she admitted, ‘and I had a little bit of trouble being convincing in putting it over. But everyone else was so enthusiastic that I came round to liking it eventually.’

‘If Not For You’ was chosen as Olivia’s first single from the album. It was released early in 1971, and by the middle of March it had reached the Top Ten in the UK charts, eventually peaking at number seven. After the false dawns with Decca and Toomorrow, Olivia had finally achieved some tangible success. Bruce, Peter and John were all delighted for her.

Olivia’s personal delight was tempered by the fact she knew this success would now turn her life upside down. And so it proved. Her chart hit heralded a sudden non-stop whirlwind of activity. Soon Olivia was given a part in a fifty-minute film caper with Cliff Richard for BBC TV called
Getaway With Cliff
, and in October she was added to the bill for Cliff’s three-week run at the London Palladium. Conveniently the run also starred Marvin, Welch and Farrar. By this time, Olivia had also followed up her initial chart success six months earlier with another smash hit, a contemporary reworking of the traditional American country song ‘Banks Of The Ohio’.

The song was as old as the hills and was first recorded way back in 1936, but Olivia’s catchy version brought it up to date, helped by some resonant bass vocal refrains from Mike Sammes. Peter Gormley was a country music fan and Olivia felt entirely comfortable when it was suggested she record ‘Banks Of The Ohio’. She had frequently included the song in her set list on her club engagements and it had always gone down well. She was, moreover, well acquainted with country music after listening to the Tennessee Ernie Ford LPs she had, as a child, found nestling between her father’s opera albums.

‘Banks Of The Ohio’ entered the UK Top Ten at a time when ‘If Not For You’ had also started to make a dent in the charts in America, where the great Bob Dylan even professed approval of Olivia’s version of his song. ‘If Not For You’ finished up as a creditable Top Thirty US hit and also made the charts in South Africa, Ireland, Canada, Israel and across the Continent.

Hard on the heel of her hits, television, too, was now beckoning in a major fashion. Olivia had already made a guest appearance on Cliff’s BBC-TV series
It’s Cliff Richard!
earlier in the year where she’d been so nervous that Cliff held her hand to stop her shaking when they duetted together. But now, buoyed by the confidence of an international hit record, she was ready for bigger things and she was signed up as a resident guest star on Cliff’s new thirteen-week BBC-TV series,
It’s Cliff Richard!
. Cliff’s show, which started in January 1972, became required family viewing and the weekly TV exposure for Olivia helped her to secure a third consecutive UK hit with a cover version of George Harrison’s ‘What Is Life?’.

In addition to appearing in Cliff’s TV show, Olivia was also starring in the West End in a revue called
Paris To Piccadilly
with French singer Sacha Distel. She had her own fifteen-minute solo spot in the show, joined in the half-time finale, and later sang a duet with the French charmer.

Distel was strikingly good-looking and regarded as a sexy heartthrob in Britain. He had gained quite a reputation as a lover after embarking on a high-profile affair with French screen sex kitten Brigitte Bardot. In the UK, Sacha came to prominence when he had a Top Ten hit in 1970 with ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ and, although he didn’t sell huge quantities of records in Britain, he was always a popular performer and an interesting guest on any TV show. He sang well, played guitar, oozed Gallic charm and melted English female hearts with his obvious sex appeal and his soft French accent.

Olivia was only too aware that the audiences who turned up to the show at the Prince of Wales Theatre were predominantly female and were there to see sexy Sacha. The adoration emanating from the stalls for the chanteur was almost tangible. Despite her hit records, she had to accept that she was very much a minor addition on the bill. ‘At first it was frightening to go out and see so many women looking at you,’ she told
Australian Women’s Weekly
. ‘I mean, they could hate me. Women in an audience can get very resentful towards female artists on stage.’