Label: President
Year of Release: 1976
Adrienne Posta is probably a familiar name to many "Left and to the Back" readers - not only did she have a long career in the sixties bubbling under the national music charts with a variety of singles on Decca Records, she was also an actress with a successful career. Obtaining parts in "To Sir With Love", "Up The Junction" and "Budgie", her face became a reasonably familiar one on people's black and white sets and also the "silver screen", as people very rarely ever referred to it in real life.
Her most notable music release was probably "Shang A Doo Lang" in 1964, penned for her by those budding songsmiths Jagger and Richards and produced by Andrew Loog Oldham in a Phil Spector style. Despite the pedigree of the people involved in the track, it stiffed terribly, and subsequent releases penned by others didn't really perform as hoped either.
She eventually used other aspects of her stage school education to obtain an alternative career, and concentrated predominantly on acting. While she gained parts in some respected sixties British films and proved herself to be a highly accomplished actress, I highly doubt her role as Carol in "Adventures of a Taxi Driver" (not to be confused with the similarly titled Scorsese film, which I'm sure you weren't about to do) features highly on her CV. Like most of the "Adventures of..." films, it was a fairly basic piece of sex farce which offered more titillation than it did a sophisticated plot or action.
Still, she was more than content to put her name to the theme tune, which she performs here in a smooth and sultry way which ill suits the film itself. It seems to suggest that the taxi driver in the main role is a sophisticated gent, a fare-collecting James Bond character, and not a rather ordinary and abrupt mini-cab driver who almost certainly harbours a sexually transmitted disease. Despite that, it has a certain cabaret sweetness about it. Posta's vocal performances were always good, and her earlier work features on endless sixties compilations as a result - this, on the other hand, has been under-exposed.
Inevitably it didn't provide her with the hit her career had been missing. I doubt many of the mostly male cinema goers for this film left the screenings of "Adventures of a Taxi Driver" thinking about the title music.
2 comments:
Interesting past. Adrienne's early singles were released as Adrienne Poster and she missed out on a "Ready Steady Go" appearance when her first record company Oriole wanted to coerce her into a three-year deal - when her dad refused permission, Oriole pulled the plug on the single, which later came out on Decca. Adrienne was married to Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet at one stage and she also owned the dog in the Dulux adverts. Oh, and she did make the UK chart, as one of The Piglets who charted with "Johnny Reggae". I knew none of this without rooting round the net after being intrigued by your post, so cheers.
The "she owned the dog in the Dulux adverts" fact is the kind of thing I really would have put in this blog entry beforehand if only I'd known it!
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