Berry Cornish - Questions/ Stories From The Wishing Well

 

One-off folk 45 from stage and screen performer

Label: Jam

Year of Release: 1973

Berry Cornish may not be an immediately familiar name, but she was certainly very active on the light entertainment circuit throughout the sixties and seventies. While not being someone who landed many regular television appearances after 1970, she nonetheless made one-off acting appearances in shows such as "Love Thy Neighbour" and "Man About The House", as well as being a regular guest (as herself) on "The Roy Castle Show" throughout his third and fourth series in 1969 and 1970.

While being someone who was just as comfortable singing as acting, her recording career appears to have been restricted to this solitary 45 on the DJM subsidiary Jam. She promoted it with an appearance on the "Benny Hill Show" on 5th December 1973 a mere two days before its official release, and out it slid to not many sales at all.

That's not altogether surprising. While Cornish is obviously a professional performer here and the arrangement is delicately handled, this sounds like the kind of folk disc you'd have been more likely to encounter at the tail end of the sixties with its hints towards people's attitudes about men with long hair and the judgemental, conservative ways of society's straights. These issues hadn't gone away by 1973, of course, but the mainstream appetite for those ideas had definitely diminished (or been absorbed by Glam and other genres).

The author of the A-side is Ann Odell who had her own LP out on DJM in the same year, and she seems to have co-produced this single as well, which would suggest a closer involvement with Berry's career than her merely being someone whose work was found on file in a Denmark Street office. 

After this, Cornish's career starts to slow down and her television and film appearances fizzle out and her recorded output vanishes entirely. It's not clear what happened - although it may be that she had to focus more on the stage rather than the screen after 1973 - but it would seem that she did shift career towards counselling at some point in the noughties and is still an active practitioner today. 

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