The Ultimate Peter & Gordon
The Ultimate Peter & Gordon
The Ultimate Peter & Gordon Reviews
“The Ultimate Peter & Gordon,” released in 2001, is the best collection available for a decade. Peter Asher and Gordon Waller were the rock duo who had the distinction of being the first group in the British Invasion other than the Beatles to have a #1 hit with “A World Without Love.” Of course, the explanation for this success was that Asher’s younger sister Jane was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend during the first part of the Sixties. This connection paid off with two other hits for Peter & Gordon in “Nobody I Know” (#12) and “I Don’t Want to See You Again” (#16). It is not surprising that the first three tracks on this collection are the trio of Lennon & McCartney songs. However, even without their recoding discarded Beatles songs Peter & Gordon would be remembered for their novelty hit “Lady Godiva” (#6).
A key thing to remember with these twenty tracks is that they are arranged in chronological order of when they were recorded rather than when they were released, for what that is worth (I am not enough of a fan to catch the value of the resequencing). What you have are the fourteen songs that made it to the Billboard chart, which means not only the songs you remember like the above along with “Woman” (#14) to go with ones you might have missed, such as “I Go to Pieces,” “The Jokers,” and “To Show I Love You.” The other six tracks are a single that did not chart (“You’ve Had Better Times), a pair of B-sides (“Love Me, Babye” and “The Town I Live In”), and a trio of ablum tracks (“I Still Love You,” “Broken Promises,” “My First Day Alone”). It is hard to quibble with the results and if you only own one Peter & Gordon album this one has to be it because it easily lives up to its title.
With their softer, more acoustic sound, you can see Peter & Gordon as being more in tune with the folk-rock movement than with the British Invasion (Asher would go on to be a producer who helped define the mellow sound of California rock, which would seem to help prove the point). Notice that their folksier songs, like “Knight in Rusty Armour” and the Phil Ochs song “The Flower Lady” stand up a lot better than ones where the production values lean towards orchestrations, such as “To Know You Is to Love You,” and “Baby I’m Yours.” At the very least, Peter & Gordon represent the lighter side of the British Invasion, and you can have fun figuring out who their dark side counterpart would be. The only serious knock against them is that Asher and Waller were average songwriters at best (but notice that the album ends with a pair of songs the duo wrote individually).
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