Title: “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo”
Artist: Tony Christie
Year: 1971
Writer(s): Neil Sedaka/Howard Greenfield
Genre: Pop
Highest chart position (if applicable) 18 (UK) 121 (US)
Album: n/a
Did I own it? No but my sister did (the older one)
Album, single, both or neither? Single only
Opinion then: Positive
Opinion now: Positive
These days: Remembered for the horrible, stupid Peter Kay version, damn his heart
One of the very first songs I ever heard played in our house, or at least one of the first pop songs, this single was owned by my older sister, who would at the time jealousy guard her suitcase Hi-Fi and singles collection by locking herself in her bedroom, leaving us to listen outside. I remember being impressed and interested by the, to me at the time, description of foreign lands I had only seen in movies like
The Magnificent Seven and
Stagecoach, places with exotic names like El Paso, San Antonio and Rio Grande (come on: I was at this stage eight years old!) and the idea of a man travelling across the broad expanse of the American west to find his sweetheart in the eponymous town - which at the time I assumed to be in Mexico but is of course in Texas - really fired my imagination.
Tony Christie had a real strident, powerful voice which would remind you of Tom Jones at his peak, a man who elucidated all his words, and lent the song a gravitas that perhaps Neil Sedaka’s own version might not have had. Of course, the whole thing was ruined for me when, for some reason, in 2005 (oh I see, for charity: well that makes it all right, doesn’t it? Bah) so-called comedian Peter Kay decided to do a version (with the collaboration, I’m sad to say, of Christie) and burned all my good memories of the song down. It’s like when someone re-recorded Smokie’s classic “Living Next Door to Alice” and threw in the annoying if slightly amusing refrain “Alice! Alice! Who the f
uck is Alice?” Just ruined it. Bastard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBDbUjUH5So