Dwight and Taupin attempt to push Linda Kendrick's career over the line
Label: Dawn
Year of Release: 1975
Once every so often during the course of writing this blog, I stumble on a band or performer whose hitlessness I find fascinating. Their career is riddled with opportunities and possible turning points, none of which seem to correct the low-key course they're on.
Back in 2020, I bought Linda Kendrick's cover version of the Rolling Stones "Sympathy For The Devil", which can be found here, and immediately fell in love with its archness, its pantomime evil and camp. All of these things could be found in the Stones original, of course, but for all Jagger's strutting and showboating, the Stones always seemed weighed down by the serious rock ambitions of the others (with the obvious exception of their psychedelic diversions, but even they seem drenched in a knowing heaviness at times). Kendrick takes the track and sings it through narrowed eyes gleefully, loving every second, stopping short (you sense) of cackling. Her vocals are also wondrous.
She wasn't the first female artist to pick up "Sympathy" and spot its hidden potential. Sandie Shaw did so too for her recently re-released "Reviewing The Situation" album, but her take is - while damn good - a little too respectful of the source material. It stemmed from a period where Shaw was keen to be thought of as something more than a pop singer, and it shows in the delivery. It serves an entirely different purpose to Kendrick's take, rocking out with it rather than dragging it around Soho with sharp fingernails digged into its palm.
When that inexplicably wasn't a hit, her old friend Elton John (with whom she had toured in 1970) offered her a new composition entitled "House of Cards". This should have been a massive turning point, turning a popular live draw and accomplished musical theatre performer into a nationally recognised star. Suffice to say, it didn't. It's as superbly arranged as "Sympathy", with slinky, menacing bass lines wrapping around chiming piano lines, and delivered as wonderfully as ever by Kendrick, but for all Taupin and Dwight's power at this point, the tune itself is arguably too slight to create a hit. The arranger Mike Moran works wonders with it, adding interesting little sliproads and twists into the arrangement, but it's not quite enough to make a difference. The song is, nonetheless, powerful enough to have been a solid album track.
Elton's rendition of the song turned up a few months later as the B-side to the classic "Someone Saved My Life Tonight". As for Linda Kendrick, she re-emerged on the Private Stock label three years later with the track "Go On Girl", then re-emerged in 1979 with her attempt to represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest, "All I Needed Was Your Love". This obviously didn't happen, and shortly afterwards she decided to retire from music at the age of 30.
She eventually died at the age of 59 from pneumonia, a tragedy on top of a lifetime already filled with some spectacularly harsh luck; her first husband died at the age of 25 and her son passed on twelve months after that due to an undiagnosed heart condition. Somewhere, in another parallel dimension, perhaps there's a happier ending to this tale.
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