Matt Monro
The Hit Parade of the fifties and sixties were full of unlikely soubriquets and life stories as managers tried any angle to differentiate their crooners from the competition. Amidst the Faiths, Storms, Gentles, Wildes and Tempests, canny promoters were busily inventing backstories of where their hopefuls had been discovered: Tin Pan Alley was apparently awash with singing postman, soldiers, waiters and – in the case of East End hopeful Matt Monro – bus drivers.
Terence Parsons had been born in on 1 December 1930 in Shoreditch, though the date was later shifted back a couple of years (another pop management angle being to shave a year or two off the age of their charges). With three brothers and a sister, there was little enough money in the house, but things were to got a lot tougher. Dad Frederick died when he was just three and then mother Alice became ill, and for two years the young Terry was sent out to foster homes.
He was to leave school at 14 and kick around a succession of jobs – none of them lasting for very long. His real interest was singing, and from his early teens he would appear in local variety competitions. The Tufnell Park Palais was a popular venue. Starting his National Service at age 18, Terry was posted to Hong Kong, where he became a tank driving instructor. He spent his off-duty hours entering local talent contests, winning so many that he was eventually barred! Instead, he was given his own radio show, Terry Parsons Sings.
Back in Civvy Street in the early fifties, Terry tried to break into a music business very different to that of today. The focus was on the writers and publishers of Denmark Street in the West End, Britain’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’ who would use pluggers to push their tunes to the top singers. Singers, meanwhile, were always on the lookout for a good song, with several often covering the same number. The era of the singer-songwriter was still a decade away. For Terry, the odd gig was supplemented by occasional demo discs, cut for the Denmark Street pluggers.
Fortune intervened when he was heard by the pianist Winifred Atwell, herself enjoying huge chart success in the early fifties with her blend of ragtime and boogie woogie. She advised her own record company, Decca, to sign the smooth-voiced cockney and even game him a stage name, Terry Parsons being replaced by the rather more showbiz ‘Matt Monro’. Decca discovered that his latest day job had been driving the Number 27 bus from Highgate to Teddington and dubbed him ‘the singing bus driver’ (considering ‘the singing tank driver’ too aggressive for a crooner perhaps). The publicity department joyfully invented stories of ‘Matt’ running from finishing his shift, cutting tracks in the studio still in his uniform, while shots were staged of him jumping from his cab.
Fleet Street gleefully called him ‘the British Frank Sinatra’ but he was to enjoy little of Sinatra’s success. Hard work rather than instant stardom carried him through the fifties. ‘Nothing happened,’ he remembered wistfully. An old-style crooner, he had been signed just as rock and roll changed pop music beyond recognition. He did regular gigs for the BBC [radio] Show Band and was in constant demand for TV ads, singing the praises of Camay soap, toothpaste, cigarettes and milk, among others. By 1960 his star had dimmed considerably and when George Martin asked him to sing in the Sinatra style for the Peter Sellers album ‘Songs for Swinging Sellers’ (which Sellers would then imitate), Monro agreed. Sellers heard it, said he could never imitate it, and Matt’s vocal went on to the album, where he was credited as ‘Fred Flange’.
It was an unlikely start to a lifetime friendship with EMI house producer Martin, who would of course become famous as the Beatles’ producer and mentor. Martin loved Monro’s voice and signed him to Parlophone, making his career with a consistently astute choice of material (and aided by the sympathetic work of arranger/conductor Johnnie Spence). Portrait of My Love, Softly As I Leave You, the theme to From Russia With Love and Born Free were among the many hits (songwriter John Barry was another big fan of Monro’s precise yet underplayed phrasing).
Shuffled around between EMI labels Parlophone, Columbia and Capitol, Monro’s chart success began to dwindle with the end of the sixties, though he was to be a consistently successful live performer for the rest of his career. He remained a reliable and much-loved TV performer too. And long after Monro had stopped troubling the Top Ten in Britain, he was still shifting huge amounts of singles and albums all around the world, in markets as diverse as Canada and Hong Kong.
By the early 1980s, a lifetime of heavy smoking and enthusiastic drinking had taken their toll. He was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and entered Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge for a transplant. The operation was abandoned when the surgeons discovered that the cancer had spread beyond treatment. Monro discharged himself and, knowing he had perhaps only weeks left, he went back on the stage. His last show was to be at the Barbican Centre – he died shortly afterwards at London’s Cromwell Hospital on 7 February 1985, aged 54.