Rating: 3 Stars
“His pitch was right on the nose; his word enunciations letter-perfect” – the words of Frank Sinatra, describing Matt Monro, the diminutive British singer who enjoyed a long and successful career before his death from cancer in 1985.
And Old Blue Eyes was not the only celebrity fan of Monro’s, as we learn from “The Singer’s Singer” The Life and Music of Matt Monro, an exhaustive new biography from Matt’s daughter, Michele. Her father enjoyed a legion of celebrity fans, many of whom seemed eager to supply complimentary quotes. This book paints a picture of the genuine (and rare) article, a very talented peformer who was also an genuinely nice guy.
Which is perhaps what held him back from realizing his full potential. For the book’s overarching theme is that if Matt had enjoyed better management (and been a little more demanding), he could have taken his rightful place among the giants of his time – Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr. Indeed the last of these was a huge fan and friend of Monro’s right up until the day he died.
The book covers every imaginable aspect of Monro’s life from his birth in Shoreditch, East London as Terence Edward Parsons, the youngest of five children. His father died when Terence was only four , leaving his mother to struggle along on a pension of ten shillings a week which she supplemented by working as a cleaner.
From such a hardscrabble background came the singer’s later pride in being immaculately dressed and presented, and an appreciation for hard work – as evidenced by his astonishing travel schedule, often clocking up 150,000 miles a year during his heyday.
As Terence Parsons turned into Matt Monro and worked his way up the showbiz ranks – including a spell as an army entertainer that resulted in his being an icon in the Philippines – he seems to have made friends wherever he went with his unpretentious style and his complete professionalism. The book contains endless anecdotes of the music business from the 1950s onwards, with glimpses of performers from Lonnie Donegan, Alma Cogan and Helen Shapiro to Frank Ifield, George Martin, Tony Bennett, Val Doonican and Jimmy Tarbuck.
By the 1960s things were changing fast in popular music, but Matt’s classic style earned him plenty of bookings on the Northern club circuit, and he also did numerous international tours to packed houses in South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, and the Phillipines. He was even wildy popular in Argentina, thanks to a couple of Spanish language LPs that Matt recorded phonetically.
But for most of Monro’s career America – the market that really mattered to him – stayed tantalizingly out of reach. His daughter ascribes this to Monro’s misplaced loyalty to his manager Don Black, whose own musical ambitions led to him to neglect the sort of strategy that would really have put his client over the top. Still, he had his moments; appearances on Johnny Carson, the Dick Cavett show and a series of engagements in Las Vegas, both as a headliner and supporting the likes of Shecky Green and Don Rickles.
The dark side to this charmed life was Monro’s ongoing battle with alcoholism; what started as a shadow in his early days grew to almost engulf his health before he finally turned to AA to kick the habit, but not until he had sustained considerable liver damage.
Sadly he was also a smoker for many decades, and in the end the twin vices cost him his life, as he finallysuccumbed to liver cancer in 1985.
The Singer’s Singer is a good read, but suffers from repetition and at over 600 pages, is at least a third too long. Michele Monro clearly idolized her father, but she could have been a little more ruthless in culling the many, many anecdotes from friends and admirers, which seem to cover a lot of the same ground. As her father could doubtless have told her: always leave them wanting more.
“The Singer’s Singer” The Life and Music of Matt Monro: Hardcover, 632 pages. Titan Books. (January, 2010). ISBN: 9781848566187.
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