British teen idol
Adam Faith gets the omnibus treatment on this 172-track, six-CD set covering all his recordings from the start of his musical career in 1958 to 1968, when he temporarily quit music making to pursue acting full-time.
Faith was more a pretty face than a distinctive voice, and he was molded in the pop music of his time, particularly drawing on the sound of
Buddy Holly.
Holly's late recording "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," with it pizzicato string chart, was a template for
Faith's music, both in terms of the arrangements of
John Barry and in
Faith's singing. As the years go by and the recording sessions mount up over the course of these discs, he tries aping any number of other American singers, including
Jerry Lee Lewis,
Elvis Presley, Rick Nelson,
Dion, and
Gene Pitney. But he keeps coming back to the
Holly sound. By the early ‘60s, he was on two separate tracks. As a singles artist, he necessarily began assimilating
the Beatles' Merseybeat sound, even to the point of hiring his own beat-heavy backup group, the Roulettes (containing future members of
Argent). As an albums artist, he sang for grown-ups over big-band arrangements that suggested a British version of
Bobby Darin. By late 1964, he had turned to the soft rock style of
Burt Bacharach's arrangements for
Dionne Warwick, notably scoring his last U.K. Top 20 hit with a version of
Bacharach and
Hal David's "A Message to Martha (Kentucky Bluebird)" (aka "Message to Michael"), but he reverted to his ‘50s rocker self for one night to record the live-in-the-studio LP Faith Alive, his final chart album of the period, in 1965. That brings this collection to the end of the fifth CD. The sixth disc covers the final two-plus years of
Faith's EMI tenure, a miscellany of desultory, one-off singles in which he tries everything from anti-war folk-rock ("Daddy What'll Happen to Me") to light psychedelia ("Cowman Milk Your Cow") in the search of a career resurgence. It's a long journey from the late '50s to the late ‘60s, but for
Faith fans and fans of the era in general it may be worth taking the trip again. ~ William Ruhlmann