Pop careers have always been fleeting and all too often the stars find themselves out of the limelight without a penny to show for their brief taste of fame.
But there can’t be too many people who find themselves labelled a has-been at 18, after many successful years in the music business.
East End girl Helen Shapiro was always a precocious talent. It was March 1961 when the 14-year-old schoolgirl went straight to the top of the charts with the appropriately titled Don’t Treat Me Like A Child.
It was the beginning of a crazy career that saw her topping the bill at the London Palladium before getting home to bed in time to be at her school desk the next morning.
Most people couldn’t believe that the astonishingly deep and full voice was that of a schoolgirl – indeed many disc jockeys thought that it was actually a man singing!
Helen, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, swiftly followed that hit with two Number One singles, including her best known song Walking Back To Happiness.
Brief career
It was probably inevitable that Helen’s career would be as short as it was. She occupied that brief period between the late-1950s invasion of the British charts by American rockers Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochrane and the rest, and the UK response of Beat Music in the early 1960s.
It was a time when Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Rory Storm ruled the charts. But most were swept away by the boom in guitar groups which lay just around the corner.
Shapiro appeared on a bill with an unknown Mersey band called The Beatles in 1963 and could already see the writing on the wall.
“That was the point when I thought: ‘Uh oh, something is changing,’” remembered Helen.
“The novelty thing was wearing off. The thing that really did it was the whole idea of groups. The majority of demonstrative record buyers were girls, and they went for the fellas. The Beatles upsurge was down to them.”
The irony was that Helen was still younger than the teenagers who were taking her place and had grown up being inspired by just the same artists.
“When I was 10, Elvis Presley was the coming thing, followed by Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, then Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka,” she said.
But Britain’s initial answer to rock and roll was very different to Elvis’ and Eddie Cochrane’s take on Black Rhythm and Blues. Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Helen’s first musical efforts were in the skiffle music taken into the charts by the likes of Lonnie Donegan.
Skiffle stars
At the age of just 10, Helen and her brother Ron formed a band with another East End star of the future.
“Our group included Marc Bolan, who was nine and lived down the road,” she remembered.
“He was called Mark Feld then and was very chubby and very into Cliff.”
Helen’s break came when she caught the attention of legendary Columbia A&R man Norrie Paramor, who had already worked with The Shadows and Adam Faith.
It started a fantastic, but brief, run of success for the East End girl.
Like so many others, when it was over, she was left with nothing and in the Nineties embarked on a fight with EMI, which was still paying her a derisory farthing-per-record royalty.
Today, still only in her early fifties, Helen is in the middle of a successful second career, touring as a singer with Cliff Richard and jazz stalwart Humphrey Lyttelton, releasing religious and devotional records and acting in the theatre.
“I’ve finally come of age,” she said.
“I’m more contented than I’ve ever been and would never swap the life I have now for the pressures of my teens.”
For East End schoolgirl Helen, it has been a long,
but satisfying, walk back to happiness.