APRIL DOURS
1963 was the last year of the US pop charts before Beatlemania stormed in, and it was a peculiar year for the charttoppers with a revolving door of acts who ultimately didn’t have the biggest pop culture footprint – take Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, Paul & Paula, or Dale & Grace. Among those yesteryear acts were the brother-sister duo of Nino Tempo & April Stevens. Stevens was the older of the two and had been an active pop singer since the early 1950s. She had several top ten hits in 1951, but in 1959 the seductive “Teach Me Tiger” saw little radio airplay by virtue of being one of the horniest 50s records not recorded by Little Richard.
Her commercial zenith came after joining forces with Tempo, when the duo recorded a cover of old standard “Deep Purple” (the name inspiration for the Deep Purple). The charmingly slapdash nature of their performance – it was recorded at the last minute and Stevens speaks out the lyrics in the second half to remind Tempo of the words – left producer Ahmet Ertegün convinced it was a clunker. It ended up a US charttopper (UK No. 17) and a Grammy winner. Try to imagine that happening with a hit record in today’s hyper-polished times!
The siblings would deliberately apply the “Deep Purple” blueprint to other pop standards, achieving a follow-up hit with “Whispering”, and breached the top 40 one final time in 1966 with the Wall of Sound-inspired “All Strung Out”. Now that the deep purple has fallen over sleepy April Stevens, aged 93, a duet of music theme teams encore (presumably with one doing a spoken-word recital).
April Stevens
29 April 1929 – 17 April 2023, aged 93
2 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀 5 POINTS)