Olivia sings Dylan - and wins
Journalists who venture to take on Bob Dylan usually emerge from the fray with as much morale as a platoon of South Vietnamese after a foray into Laos. For a slightly - but shapely - built girl of 22 to tackle Dylan on his own territory as it were would seem suicidal.
But Olivia Newton-John has done just that. She has recorded Dylan’s own “If Not For You” and, in direct competition with the master’s version has beaten it into the MM chart. But no one is more surprised about her success than Olivia. “I was beginning to lose hope after that Toomorrow episode,” says Olivia. She is, of course, referring to the group that was launched with a blaze of publicity just over a year or so ago.
The men behind Toomorrow were film mogul Harry Saltzman and Don Kirshner - of Archies and Monkees fame. Toomorrow fizzled out after making a film but Olivia says she is grateful for the opportunity it gave her to embark on a solo career.
She has appeared on Cliff Richard’s touring shows, and is currently touring the continent with Cliff. But she glows particularly at the opportunity to appear solo last week on Top Of the Pops. “That is an ambition I always wanted to realise,” she said in her dressing-room at the BBC’s TV Centre at London’s White City just before a run-through of the show.
The daughter of a University professor, Olivia Newton-John seems a somewhat unlikely recruit to show business. She was singing professionally with an Australian friend, Pat Carroll, before that Toomorrow bit. She had, in fact, won a trip to Britain from Melbourne on the strength of winning a talent contest.
She avows she did not ‘cover’ the Dylan record of ‘If Not For You’. She modestly disavows any intention to match Dylan. “Dylan’s recording had not been put out when I did ‘If Not For You’,” she says. “We took the song off the George Harrison LP. Frankly, I was terrified when Dylan’s single was released. ‘There go my chances,’ I thought.”
How wrong she was is proved by the fact that her version has been selling at the rate of 4,000 copies a day. The last count on Dylan was 1,000 a day.
Backing Olivia on her record are John Farrar, Brian Bennett, John Rostill, Bruce Welch and pianist Chris Hall (electric piano and organ). “Half the session took place at George Martin’s Air Studios and it was completed at EMI.” “With 5000 overdubs,” chipped in lead guitarist Farrar with a grin.