ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART
“Anyone Who Had a Heart” is a song written by Burt Bacharach (music) and Hal David (lyrics) for Dionne Warwick in 1963. George Martin saw the song as a vehicle for Cilla Black, the Liverpool vocalist whose star potential had yet to be realized despite her association with the Beatles. Black’s single of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” debuted at #28 on the UK Top 50 dated 8 February 1964. The Dionne Warwick original debuted on the chart for the following week at #42; by then Black’s version had reached #10, ascending in the subsequent two weeks to #2 and then #1 . In May 2010 research published by BBC Radio 2 revealed that “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by Cilla Black was the biggest female UK chart hit of the 1960’s. (More from Wikipedia)
The closest that the Poppees ever came to covering a Beatles song is when they recorded “Love of the Loved”, an obscure Lennon/McCartney song that the Beatles never recorded. Instead, they passed it along to Cilla Black, a protegé of their manager Brian Epstein who had been a coat-check girl at the legendary Cavern Club, where the Beatles were honing their skills in 1961. Though virtually unknown on these shores, Cilla Black was the only important female artist to emerge from the British Invasion – and the second-biggest-selling recording artist out of Liverpool (after you know who) – and has been a beloved entertainer in England for decades. While “Love of the Loved” wasn’t a big hit, her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, which came out in January 1964, eclipsed the original by Dionne Warwick and became the biggest selling record in Britain by any female artist in history: Cilla Black sold 800,000 copies of the single in England and another 1,000,000 worldwide.
(December 2010)
