Knock ’em out, Cyril, joked Lennon. And she did just that!
From docker’s girl to buddy of the Beatles, she rose like the bubbles in a glass of Champagne
ACILLA, in showbiz slang, is a magnum of champagne — the kind that admirers would send over to her table whenever she appeared in public. Champagne was famously her favourite tipple. But more than that, it matched her personality: glamorous, effervescent and overflowing with fun.
For the Sixties superstar and friend of The Beatles, who enjoyed No 1 hits with Anyone Who Had A Heart and You’re My World, the champagne lifestyle was a world away from her upbringing on Liverpool’s toughest street, Scotland Road in the heart of the docklands.
She grew up above a barber’s on the ‘ Scottie Road’, in a flat so cramped that it didn’t have an indoor toilet or even a front door. The family had to go in and out through the shop below or via the Chinese laundry next-door.
Born Priscilla White in 1943, she lived with her older brothers George and John, her younger brother Allan, their mother (also called Priscilla) and their Irish father John, a docker whose dark, Brylcreemed hair and highly polished boots earned him the nickname Shiner.
The whole family loved music. The brothers fought over the Dansette record-player, listening to doo-wop, trad jazz and Frank Sinatra. Their ‘Mam’, a natural soprano, loved singing along to operatic arias on the radio, and Shiner brought his pals round every Saturday night after the pubs closed, to belt out raucous country songs and music hall numbers.
Cilla would crouch on the stairs, listening — until one night her father caught her and, for a joke, made her stand on the kitchen table. ‘All right, Queen,’ he said, ‘you sing something.’
The precocious five-year-old obliged, wailing the Al Jolson show tune Mammy to whoops of applause. ‘From that moment on,’ she said in 1964 as her career took off, ‘I truly believed I was going to be the Shirley Temple of the North!’
Her ambition to be a star gave her a split personality in her teens. There was Priscilla, the dutiful Catholic girl who earned a prize for her good attendance record at school, St Anthony’s, and who went on to Anfield Commercial College to study shorthand and typing. When she went on dates, her boyfriends always had to see her home by 10pm.
And there was Cilla, who dyed her hair flame-red with a seven-penny rinse from Woolworth’s aged 13, and who sneaked out of the flat, after her boyfriends brought her home, to boogie and jive until the small hours at the notorious dance halls, the Rialto and the Empire.
As the Merseybeat boom took off in the early Sixties, Cilla was at the forefront, always clamouring to climb on stage with the bands and belt out rock ’n’ roll numbers.
HER first appearance was with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes — then featuring Ringo Starr on drums — and she raised the atmosphere at the Iron Door club to a frenzy as she launched into the Peggy Lee hit Fever.
Ringo was so impressed that her guest appearances became a regular highlight, as she duetted with him on a rocking Shirelles song called Boys. Budding music entrepreneur Tony Cartwright, who went on to manage Tom Jones, spotted her, too.
‘Big heart, loads of personality,’ he said, ‘and with that red hair she really stood out in every crowd. It took a lot to make your mark, with so much huge talent in Liverpool in those days — the Beatles, Gerry Marsden and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the rest. But whatever it took, Cilla had it.’
She nearly threw it all away, though, when she auditioned for Beatles manager Brian Epstein, at the Majestic in Birkenhead with the Fab Four as her backing band. John Lennon, who had taken a shine to her and nicknamed her Cyril, encouraged her to perform the Gershwin standard Summertime.
But disaster ensued. Perhaps it was an accident, perhaps it was a typical Beatles prank. Whatever the reason, the opening chords were in entirely the wrong key.
Cilla fluffed her first note, and limped through the whole song horribly out of tune. But the girl from Scottie Road refused to be beaten. She settled for a job checking coats at the Cavern Club, in return for free entry.
She kept on elbowing her way on stage with the bands, until Bill Harry, editor of the local Mersey Beat paper, ran a feature on the singer with ‘the red hair and the black voice’.
An editorial mix-up meant Harry got the colour of her name wrong — and called her Cilla Black instead of White. It stuck.
Epstein saw what he was missing, one night at the Blue Angel jazz club in Liverpool’s city centre. After Cilla gave a yearning performance of Nina Simone’s Bye Bye Blackbird, the Beatles’ manager pushed his way through the audience to her. ‘Why oh why,’ he demanded, ‘didn’t you sing like that for me at the audition? Come and see me in my office tomorrow.’
Backstage at her first official gig, supporting The Beatles in Southport, she had an attack of nerves.
This was 1963, she was 20 years old, and the screaming, deafening Beatlemania craze was taking off. Lennon sloped up to her. ‘Go knock ’em out, Cyril,’ he whispered. ‘And if that fails, show ’em your knickers!’
Her first recording, at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in North London, was a number written for her by Paul McCartney. He had treated it as a challenge — a song that would showcase her ability to shift from a soft croon to a raucous bellow in the space of a breath. But the melody wasn’t one of his catchiest, and Love Of The Loved stalled at No 35.
Epstein had an inspiration. Cilla wasn’t really a rock ’n’ roller. It was her jazz singing that had impressed him, after all. Her real talent lay with big ballads.
Despite misgivings from Cilla and her chaperone, Bobby Willis — a former baker who was both her road manager and her dogged boyfriend — Epstein ordered her to record a Burt Bacharach song, Anyone Who Had A Heart.
The number was originally intended for Dionne Warwick, but Cilla’s version was an instant smash. Epstein was so thrilled that he bought her a diamond bracelet from Boodle and Dunthorne, the Liverpool jewellers, and told the Press: ‘Cilla is going to be the next Judy Garland. I haven’t made her a star — the material was already woven.’
But Cilla the star never lost touch with her other personality, Priscilla the good and dutiful Catholic. Part of her