48 Original Tracks CD review

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN 1971-1975
(Double CD)
EMI Records (8 27110 2)

The runaway success story of Olivia Newton-John, the Cambridge-born, Australian-raised pop singer who gatecrashed the closed-door party which was the American country music scene in the early-mid seventies to become one of that genre’s biggest-selling and popular acts, is one of the most unlikely in an industry renowned for the unusual.

If you consider that many of these 48 tracks also became mainstream pop hits and all were recorded, not in one of the many studios which fill Nashville’s Music Row by a Billy Sherrill or Allen Reynolds, but by Bruce Welch and/or John Farrar in EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, you can understand why that Nashville establishment was shaken to the core by her impact.

Olivia and her producers were smart, and knew that there are tons of great songs in modern country music capable of crossing over to the pop charts, just as there are many pop tunes capable of reaching the vast country audience.

And so numbers like If Not For You, Banks Of The Ohio, I Honestly Love You, Take Me Home Country Roads and What Is Life became huge pop hits and hit the upper reaches of the US country charts.

There’s a lot more besides, of course and all of it that great easy style which so typified Olivia at her best and helped make her one of the most popular artists in the world at the time.

The booklet notes included in this set spend a lot of time apologising for labelling the material as ‘country’.

Dammit, Olivia Newton-John was voted Female Artist of the Year in the annual Country Music Association awards twice during this period, so no excuses are necessary!

Review by David Sandison