Yodelling Frank Ifield topped the charts and gave the Beatles a break

Frank Ifield was born in the UK but grew up in Australia learning to yodel from hearing 1950s country songs on the radio.

Legendary Recording Artist Frank Ifield has an ARIA and a new double CD.

OBITUARY

Francis (Frank) Ifield Singer.
Born Coventry, England, November 30, 1937; died Sydney, May 18, aged 86.

On February 26, 1964, the small American record label Vee-Jay released one of the oddest records in music history: Jolly What! England’s Greatest Recording Stars: The Beatles and Frank Ifield On Stage.

Vee-Jay was given Ifield’s catalogue after his British hit, I Remember You, rose to No.5 on Billboard in 1962. Capitol Records, EMI’s American partner, had passed on the right to issue Beatles songs, transferring these to Vee-Jay as a bonus to Ifield’s music.

When the Beatles tidal wave crashed on US shores and their first single there, I Want to Hold Your Hand, topped Billboard on February 1, 1964, Capitol grabbed back its Beatles contract, leaving Vee-Jay with a handful of songs.

Music changed on Sunday night, February 9 when the band famously appears on the Ed Sullivan Show. By February 26, Vee-Jay had cobbled together the Jolly What! album combining songs by the band and Ifield.

It was far from the only link between the two acts: Ifield had agreed to let the little-known band appear on stage with him – unpaid – over two shows in December 1962. The first night was at the Embassy Cinema in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. Ifield went over well, a local reporter commenting: “It is easy to see why Frank Ifield is so popular in this country. No pseudo American accent; no sulky Presley look.” The critic didn’t much like the Beatles, who “failed to excite me … (but) Love Me Do was tolerable”.

At the 2005 ARIA awards, I asked Ifield why the Beatles had bombed that night. He said they were probably too loud for his more conservative audience.

Ifield had four No.1 songs – I Remember You, Lovesick Blues, Wayward Wind and Confessin’ – that spent a total of 18 week in to top spot. His records were classily produced by Norrie Paramor, second only to George Martin as England’s most successful producer.

Ifield’s parents were Australians who moved to England before Frank, one of seven brothers, was born. His father, Dick, was an engineer and inventor and the Sydney-based company Ifield Products trades to this day. His most famous global patent, one of 112, was the Ifield pump, which was used in the earliest jet engines and in Concorde. The family returned to Australia, settling on a dairy farm outside Dural.

Ifield was given a guitar and taught himself to play while mimicking the country-song yodelling then popular on radio. By his teenage years, the family had moved to Sydney and Ifield sang slots on various radio shows, which were often live back then. He appeared on TV in its early days hosting Campfire Favourites and had a series of low-flying singles, but a top seller in New Zealand just before returning to Britain in 1959.

There he scored a hit with Lucky Devil in 1960, but a string of releases failed until he found Paramor and I Remember You. He entered the British rounds of Eurovision, running second in 1962. Like many artists, he found himself cast aside by the changed music scene after 1963 – although his songs continued to chart.

He also appeared in a Royal Variety Performance, did some pantomime and starred in the 1965 musical comedy Up Jumped a Swagman. In 1991 he was back in the charts with the amusing, radically remixed The Yodelling Song. Five years earlier, while undergoing lung surgery, his vocal cords were damaged, sidelining him for years. He returned to Australia and to Dural, where he died last weekend.

In 2007 he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame and two years later was given an Order of Australia. He will be linked inexorably and forever to I Remember You, a song written for the 1941 film The Fleet’s In by Victor Schertzinger days before Schertzinger died and which has taken on a life of its own. The lyrics are by Johnny Mercer, who later wrote the beautiful Moon River.

After their disastrous stint with Ifield the Beatles went to Hamburg one last time, having added I Remember You to their repertoire, sung by Paul McCartney (who couldn’t pull off the Ifield yodel, but hit the high notes). Glen Campbell recorded it in 1988 and played it nightly.

In 1993, Icelandic oddball Bjork recorded it accompanied only by harp and in the style of the Dorothy Lamour original. She was later stalked by the disturbed Ricardo Lopez, who sent a sulphuric acid bomb from Florida to her London address. He made series of video diaries about Bjork and in September 1996 filmed himself taking his life while listening to I Remember You.