Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Heartstrings...



I always liked the bipolar nature of this melancholy Mersey beat by Gerry and the Pacemakers. It's somewhat peppier than your typical pop ballad, arrangementwise, but the string tremolos, French horns, and reedy oboe lines very effectively evoke a melancholy fugue somewhere far east of midnight. The package is subtle: its topic is fairly standard heartbreak, but the narrator speaks as a trusted advisor --- sympathetic but not sentimental, encouraging but not patronizing. Like other songs I've embedded here, this one always struck me as being Important Music. The orchestration was a factor in that assessment, but there was more to it than that. It was a nontrivial treatment of an emotion that I was fully capable of, uh, emoting for a member of the opposite camp without all the accompanying complications of hormones. (It charted when I was in 6th grade, I think.)

Watch this performance now because it was pulled down a month or two ago for reasons I certainly don't approve of and therefore hold in contempt. I don't know the provenance of the clip, but it's just cool. Check out the nice Mondrian-inspired set, which is shown wide two or three times. This is definitely not a lipsync of the record. Possibly it's a live-in-studio clip, but it might be a lipsync of a prerecorded original performance specifically for the program. The chamber orchestra may have been present in the TV studio, or the band might be playing to the accompaniment of a prerecorded orchestra (bandsyncing, so to speak). Anyway, the performance is a little raw around the edges, which I like. The occasional tempo problems don't bother me at all because they lend authenticity, making it seem possible that some producer actually went through the expense and difficulty of throwing umpty-nine musicians together in a room for a live TV performance to entertain a mob of frenzied teenage girls one day in 1965.

I don't consider this a glitzy, over-rehearsed production number, but just a down-to-earth British Invasion band from Liverpool playing with a pickup orchestra to recreate the feel of the vinyl studio recording for an audience because someone actually cared. Gerry's guitar and the electric piano sound sincerely grimy, without cheapness, backdropped and framed in the ambiance of 19th century orchestral romanticism. Luxuriate in it.