Speak To Me Pretty

Album: EP Collection (1962)
Charted: 3
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Songfacts®:

  • In his autobiography, which he co-wrote with Mick Wall, music promoter Don Arden (1926-2007) said this song was his first brush with the music business (on the management side) and his first real success. Extremely impressed with the diminutive Brenda Lee, he decided to promote her on her first UK tour, and went to see her record company, Decca, which of course had a London office. Arden asked them not unnaturally if they wanted to release a single to coincide with her shows, but "found them surprisingly reticent."

    He was told by Dick Rowe that Decca had never had a hit with her outside the US before, but Arden went with his instincts and managed to talk the company round. Rowe would later win a bizarre sort of fame as the man who turned down the Beatles, but he chose "Speak To Me Pretty" which Little Miss Dynamite had already recorded as an album track. Arden plugged the record like mad, making phone calls himself, and said three weeks later it had reached the #1 spot in the UK. In fact, this is not quite true, it reached only #3, the highest of any of her UK singles.
  • The song was actually written by the team of Vars and Dunham, who also wrote the theme song to the TV series Flipper; it was used in the film Two Little Bears, and was released on the Brunswick label backed by "Lover, Come Back To Me". Brunswick was acquired by Decca in 1934. Although this early success stood him in good stead for his future management career, Arden said he never made a penny from the song. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2

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