Search - Dickie Valentine :: Very Best of

All the hits except for three Christmas songs

Peter Durward Harris | Leicester England | 03/21/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Born Richard Brice, Dickie Valentine was a popular singer in fifties Britain, where he had eight top ten hits (all on the Decca label) including three number ones. This compilation contains all of his Decca hits except for three songs - Christmas alphabet (a UK number one hit), Christmas Island (a UK top ten hit) and Snowbound for Christmas (a minor UK hit).



Apart from those Christmas songs, Dickie made the UK top ten with All the time and everywhere, In a golden coach, Mr Sandman (an American number one hit for the Chordettes, whose own version just missed the UK top ten), Finger of suspicion (a UK number one hit - with the Stargazers), A blossom fell and I wonder. Dickie also made the UK top twenty with Broken wings, Old pianna rag and Endless.



Dickie left Decca for Pye, where he had two UK top twenty hits (Venus, One more sunrise - neither included here) but couldn't really compete against the rock'n'roll music that came to dominate the charts. He settled for performing live on the club circuit, in which capacity he eventually died in a road accident in 1971.



This compilation contains all the essential Dickie Valentine music except for his Christmas hits. You'll have to buy a Christmas compilation to get those."

A pleasant sound

Bruce R. Gilson | Wheaton, MD United States | 11/30/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Actually, to rate this CD on a 1-to-5-star basis is difficult. I didn't like this as much as some others I've given 5 stars to, but I enjoyed it enough that 4 isn't quite good enough. I vacillated some before giving it a 5-star rating.



This CD is typical of collections of British artists' work in the 1950s in that many of the recordings are covers of American hits of the same era. However, the number of non-covers seems to be greater than in many other collections. It's still true, however, that much of my evaluation of the CD is based on comparing the covers with the very familiar US originals that I have stored in my mind.



Dickie Valentine did not, to my ears, have a very distinctive sound, in the way Perry Como or Frankie Laine did. (Como I like, Laine I don't, and I cited those two just because of that; to show that "very distinctive" is neither always good nor always bad!) He was basically an almost generic 1950s crooner, not dissimilar to Eddie Fisher, and I suspect that if I heard him singing an unfamiliar song without identification, I might not be able to say who was singing it. But nevertheless, I liked what I heard. (Parenthetically, when I decided he sounded a lot like Eddie Fisher, I went to listen to the one Eddie Fisher hit in this collection: "Many Times." In this one, however, he appeared to be deliberately distancing himself from Fisher, singing the song at quite a different tempo, so it's a difficult comparison to make!)



It was said somewhere that there were three British male singers who had been expected to make it onto the US charts: Frankie Vaughan, David Whitfield, and Dickie Valentine. Only Whitfield actually did, with "Cara Mia." But of the three, now having heard them all, I consider Valentine the one I like best, and Vaughan still better than Whitfield. I wish that I'd had the opportunity to hear them 50 years ago. The US is poorer for our not having had that opportunity.



While Valentine's voice is not very distinctive, it is flexible. Songs as different as "Cleo and Me-O," "Many Times," and "A Blossom Fell," all covers of US charting songs, but very different in type, all come off well as sung by Valentine. The bottom line is, I enjoyed this collection."

Good Old Dickie. Where's Lita Rosa?

RON | VALLEY CENTER, CA USA | 02/26/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I used to dance to Ted Heath at the Oxford town hall. His singers were Dickie Valentine, Lita Rosa and Dennis Lotus. Dickie was always the one girls liked the best. I have this record and it reminds me of when I was 20 years old, dancing away the night. Good singer. Ron."