The Chiffons: "Sweet Talkin' Guy"

June 27, 1966 (1 week)

The Chiffons have two songs that are well-known to this day: "One Fine Day", which is great, and "He's So Fine" which is no "My Sweet Lord". Obviously, they recorded a great deal more but who beyond their no doubt devoted following could name any of them? That's not to say that the hits dried up since here we are discussing them again coming from a year in which their soulful doo-wop pop had seemingly died out.

But there wasn't a great deal left beyond their two biggest hits. Following the Top 5 success of "One Fine Day" in 1963, follow-up singles "I Love So Fine" and "I Have a Boyfriend" could do no better than graze the Top 40. Subsequent releases couldn't even do that well. By this point, the girl group craze had died down with both Merseybeat and Motown dominating airplay and sales. Yet somehow or other, The Chiffons managed to return to former glories in 1966 with "Sweet Talkin' Guy".

While recognizable as The Chiffons, the one notable difference is that its arrangement sounds more up-to-date. On the surface, it sounds like they'd been borrowing heavily from the Motown sound but in reality the playing is more like the product of LA's Wrecking Crew than Detroit's Funk Brothers. With Phil Spector already in retreat after the failure of Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep - Mountain High" on the American charts, it was left to his many imitators to pick up the slack. The good folk at Bright Tunes Productions — who had previously produced "One Fine Day" as well as The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight — did a good job making it almost seem like The Supremes had been given the Wall of Sound treatment.

Almost. The trouble is, it's still at heart a highly predictable throwback to the heyday of the girl groups. The Chiffons do their brand of in unison singing as well as ever but it's very much just as they were on both "One Fine Day" and "He's So Fine" - which, it must be said, are both far sturdier compositions. There's far too much of the sense that almost everyone involved was going through the motions. They weren't making a game attempt at re-positioning The Chiffons for a 1966 audience but just to re-claim what had once been there's. And it worked, though only for this one off bounce back. Though "Sweet Talkin' Guy" took them to number one in Canada and gave them a Top 10 hit in both the US and UK (their British success though was belated by six years) but who remembers it now? "He's So Fine" and "One Fine Day" have both managed to survive but a similar fate did not await this one — and it's by no means due to some sort of cruel pop injustice.

Score: 4