2. Little RichardLittle Richard’s Greatest Hits
It’s got all the classics on it: ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, ‘Rip It Up’. It’s tremendous, when you put that thing on: from start to finish, it’s boom all the way! First of all, I thought he was a girl, because I heard him do ‘Rip It Up’ and I’d heard Bill Haley & The Comets – they covered a lot of things where we didn’t know what the originals were at first, but then you’d hear them – sometimes in movie houses funnily enough, like in Pontypridd, between films, they would play records. Sometimes they’d play the original American ones, but that’s when I heard ‘Rip It Up’ by Little Richard. I thought, ‘Some chick has covered Billy Haley & The Comets’, but it was the original record. And then the same thing with ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ – I heard the Pat Boon version before I heard Fats Domino. We never got to them that early – there was always somebody covering them first, getting the jump on it.
It definitely made me appreciate the songs more when I first heard it, no doubt about it. Americans – they’re paranoid about the lyrics that might be a little risque. With Big Joe Turner, on his version of ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’, there’s some – ‘you’re wearing those dresses, the sun comes shining through / I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you’ – [laughs] well, they cut that back out straightaway! Bill Haley & The Comets: ‘Wearin’ those dresses, your hair done up so nice / you look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice’ – they changed it.
