walking upstream…
Anthony Newley
sourcesA History of Rock Music in 500 Songs — bonus episode on Anthony Newley (backs the George Pescud foster-father account) · Anthony Newley official site — Biography by Judy Harris (backs the arm-extended stage sign-off and the Pescud foster story) · Smithsonian National Museum of American History — sheet music record for "You Made Me Love You" (backs the song's origin as Al Jolson's signature) · judyharris.net — Anthony Newley (1931-1999) discography (backs the 1966 recording of "You Made Me Love You")
Anthony Newley was born illegitimate in Hackney, east London, in 1931, and left school at fourteen having spent the Blitz evacuated to a foster home on the Lancashire coast. He turned that itinerant childhood into a whole-career method, working as actor, singer, songwriter, and director often at once: he played an Elvis-spoofing pop star in the 1959 film that made him a chart-topping teen idol, then reinvented himself as a West End and Broadway book-writer with Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. Those shows produced standards, What Kind of Fool Am I, Who Can I Turn To, Feeling Good, that outlived the plays around them. His overenunciated, theatrical delivery, all cockney vowels and outstretched arms, became a blueprint an entire generation of English pop singers grew up imitating. He died of cancer in 1999, aged 67.
the sound in question
1961
What Kind of Fool Am IAnthony Newley
walk the tributaries ↓
George PescudMusic hall
When the Blitz emptied London's East End in 1940, nine-year-old Newley was evacuated to Morecambe, on England's northwest coast, and fostered by George Pescud, a retired music-hall performer. Wikipedia's account of Tom Vallance's 1999 Independent obituary credits Pescud with inspiring Newley's "freedom of self-expression"; Andrew Hickey, researching a book on Newley's television series, found no other trace of the man beyond the same debt, that he "instilled in Newley a great love of the theatre and of the arts." Whatever passed between them, the boy who left Morecambe went on to sing, write, paint, act, and direct, often within a single show.
listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Anthony Newley (backs the George Pescud foster story and the "latter-day British Al Jolson" tag, both citing Tom Vallance's 1999 Independent obituary) ↗
1940
No known recordingGeorge Pescud
1960
Strawberry FairAnthony Newley
listen forNo recording of Pescud survives to compare; he retired from the stage decades before anyone thought to tape a local music-hall turn. Listen instead to what Newley built on that education: "Strawberry Fair," his 1960 rewrite of a bawdy Victorian broadside performed under the pseudonym Nollie Clapton, sung with the leering, direct-to-audience wink of a music-hall comic rather than a pop crooner, all exaggerated cockney vowels and vocal mugging, the sound of a performer working a room rather than a microphone.
Al Jolson1920s–30s · Vaudeville / Popular
On 1966's The Genius of Anthony Newley, Newley recorded "You Made Me Love You," the 1913 song that had been Al Jolson's signature since Jolson introduced it on Broadway. It wasn't an isolated tribute: Tom Vallance's 1999 Independent obituary, via Wikipedia, called Newley "a latter-day British Al Jolson," a label critics reached for to describe a singer working the same big, one-man mode, down to a trademark closing gesture, right arm flung to the crowd, echoing Jolson's own knee-drop finish. No interview has Newley naming Jolson himself; the debt is one biographers hear, not one he ever stated outright.
listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Anthony Newley (backs the George Pescud foster story and the "latter-day British Al Jolson" tag, both citing Tom Vallance's 1999 Independent obituary) ↗
1913
You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)Al Jolson
1966
You Made Me Love YouAnthony Newley
listen forPlay Jolson's original 1913 recording against Newley's 1966 cover and the resemblance is close to a photograph: the same held, quavering final notes, the same lean into the confession "I didn't want to do it" pushed straight at the listener rather than sung past them. Newley doesn't cool the delivery down or modernize the arrangement for a rock-and-roll audience; he sings it as full-throated Broadway testifying, the same unguarded, one-man-show address Jolson built a career on and that Newley never entirely put down, on record or on stage.