Golden Lights

They Say...

Review by Dave Thompson, All Music Guide

Recalling Twinkle for anything other than the 1965 death ballad "Terry" demands a feat of memory far beyond the majority of British Invasion fans. But dismissing her as simply a one-hit-wonder whose greatest subsequent claim to fame was having a follow-up covered by the Smiths ("Golden Lights") is an injustice that this collection goes out of its way to remedy. "Terry" itself is magnificent -- Phil Spector meets the Shangri-Las on a rain-slicked English back-road. Banned by both the BBC and British TV's top pop show, Ready Steady Go, on the grounds of bad taste, it made the U.K. Top Five without touching the brakes and should have set up Twinkle for never-ending fame. And it might have -- one can only imagine what would have happened had her early career been handled by Andrew Loog Oldham, for example, as opposed to a last-gasp hurrah. For Twinkle's own team was considerably less well-versed in her requirements, while she herself swiftly lost patience with the star machine cranking noisily around her. The shimmering "Golden Lights," the follow-up single, was a barely disguised assault on the ease with which fame changes people, written from the point of view of a faithful girl spurned by her newly glittering boyfriend, while a sparkling cover of Reparata & the Delrons' "Tommy" was harpooned by Twinkle's own loathing of the song. By 1966, Twinkle had retired from the music industry; she was just 17. The first 14 tracks here wrap up Twinkle's heyday with every track she recorded for Decca, and almost all of them stand as shimmering peaks of Invasion-era pop. Three years elapse before "Micky" and "Darby & Joan" finally usher in the partnership she should have been enjoying the first time around. Coaxed out of retirement by Oldham, a new Twinkle 45 proved a mighty highlight for his short-lived Instant label (a subsidiary of Immediate), and that despite Oldham delegating production duties to Michael D'Abo. A third song from that period, "Soldier's Dream," closes the set out with what would have been her follow-up 45, had Twinkle not retired once again. In the great scheme of things, Twinkle was little more than a blip on the British pop scene of the mid-'60s -- how many other artists, after all, scored just one career-defining hit, only to discover they either didn't have, or didn't want, a career in the first place? Twinkle, however, deserves more. She wrote her own songs, she styled her own act, and she had a voice that puts one in mind of the late Kirsty MacColl -- yes, it really was that good. Most important of all, however, she followed her own heart and trusted her own opinions. And, at a time when even the big boys were yes-men, that spoke louder than songs.