Kenny Lynch

Although Kenny Lynch scored multiple British Top Ten singles during 1963, the recording for which he remains best known is a commercial failure he released that same year. “Misery” became the earliest cover of any Beatles composition to reach the marketplace. Early in 1963 Lynch shared concert bills with the Beatles during their inaugural U.K. tour; that January, John Lennon and Paul McCartney composed “Misery” expressly for Helen Shapiro, the headliner on those dates. Shapiro’s producer rejected the song, yet Lynch secured the rights and fashioned a markedly more pop-driven arrangement than the version the Beatles later cut for their debut album Please Please Me.

As one of the scant number of Black vocalists active on the British pop circuit in the early 1960s, Lynch returned to the Top Ten twice more in 1963, first with “You Can Never Stop Me Loving You” and then with his reading of the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof.” His discography blended lightweight early-1960s teen-idol pop with American pop-soul, occasionally evoking the contemporaneous work of Gene Pitney and Gene McDaniels, though neither Lynch’s voice nor his song choices matched the caliber of those artists. He composed a substantial share of his own releases while also interpreting material from Brill Building writers such as Goffin-King and Mort Shuman.

Lynch ultimately enjoyed greater success as a songwriter—frequently working alongside other composers—than he did in front of the microphone. The Drifters, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and Cilla Black all recorded his compositions; among the more noteworthy examples are Dusty Springfield’s girl-group-styled “He’s Got Something” and Billy J. Kramer’s minor hit “It’s Gotta Last Forever.” In the mid-1960s Lynch gained the chance to collaborate with Mort Shuman, the Brill Building tunesmith who had earlier co-written such classics as “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Teenager in Love” with Doc Pomus. Their partnership yielded Lynch’s most celebrated credit: co-authorship of “Sha La La La Lee,” the Small Faces’ first British Top Ten single. He also contributed, or co-contributed, two further tracks to the Small Faces’ 1966 debut album—“You’d Better Believe It,” written with American soul writer-producer Jerry Ragavoy, and “Sorry She’s Mine,” which might well have succeeded as a standalone single.