Marty Wilde

At least one of these tracks is another entry from The Roots Of British Rock. The other comes from some obscure cassette collection.

So take a guy whose name is Smith and change it to Wilde and you’re guaranteed results. Wilde née Smith had 9 top 20 hits in the UK between 1958 and 1962, most of which were covers of American hits. And check out his cover of Jezebel. We’ll have more to say about it later…

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Marty Wilde:

• Bad Boy – The whole moral challenge thing encapsulated in a 2 ½ minute pop song. He’s not bad, insists Marty, just a good boy in love. I don’t see the connection. A UK number 1 in December of 1959. A few months later it reached number 45 on Billboard and was the closest Wilde had to having a North American hit, not counting his recording as Shannon in 1969, which I don’t know why it doesn’t count.
• Rubber Ball – His cover of the Bobby Vee hit. A hit in the winter of 1961.