Albert Hammond - Original Album Classics (2016)

Albert Hammond is one of the more successful pop/rock songwriters to come out of England during the 1960s and 1970s, and has also enjoyed a long career as a recording artist, his work popular in two languages on three continents across four decades. Hammond was born in London in 1944 – his family actually came from the British colony on Gibraltar, but wartime considerations caused his mother to be evacuated to London, where she gave birth. He spent his childhood and youth on Gibraltar, where he became fluent in both English and Spanish – that bilingual ability would serve him well in his later career. His family lived modestly on his father's fireman's pay, and one of his early diversions was music – he sang in church and became head choir boy. He also became interested in popular music, sang for his own enjoyment, and also took up the guitar.

Hammond reached his teens just as rock & roll was taking hold on British youth. By his own account, at the outset of his performing career Hammond played and sang in a Moroccan strip club. In an interview with John Tobler, he recalled performing in front of audiences of American servicemen, singing Dion repertory such as "The Wanderer." In 1958 he and a friend, Richard Cartwright, began performing as a duo on the island and in Spain. Hammond become reasonably proficient on the guitar and was a more than fair singer, and they were good enough as a duo that they eventually became the core of a band called the Diamond Boys. By then, Hammond had done something that was the worst fear of most parents – left school to embark on a music career, which for Hammond soon came to include writing songs. The Diamond Boys, whose vocal influences included the Everly Brothers, the Kalin Twins, and the Brook Brothers, mostly did English and Spanish rock & roll songs, and cut Hammond's first two songs, "New Orleans" and "Fools in Love," which were good enough to get issued together as a Parlophone single. Even at this early point in his career, Hammond displayed his facility for writing songs with a distinctly American feel, though "New Orleans" had an added twist, showing the heavy influence of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over" in its accompaniment and arrangement. .....