Alma Cogan

From Wikipedia:

Alma Angela Cohen Cogan (19 May 1932 – 26 October 1966) was an English singer of traditional pop in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dubbed the “Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice”, she was the highest paid British female entertainer of her era.

1950s fame

[…] Cogan was one of the first UK recording artists to appear frequently on television, where her powerful voice could be showcased along with her bubbly personality and dramatic costumes. Her hooped skirts with sequins and figure-hugging tops were reputedly designed by her, made by her mother and never worn twice. Cliff Richard recalls: “My first impression of her was definitely frocks – I kept thinking, how many can this woman have? Almost every song had a different costume. The skirts seemed to be so wide – I don’t know where they hung them up!” Cogan topped the annual NME reader’s poll as “Outstanding British Female Singer” four times between 1956 and 1960.

1960s career

The UK musical revolution of the 1960s, symbolised by the rise of the Beatles, suddenly made Cogan unfashionable; in the 1991 BBC documentary Alma Cogan: The Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice, Lionel Blair said she was perceived as “square”. Her highest 1960s chart ranking in the UK was no. 26 with “We Got Love”, and most of her successes at this time were outside the UK, notably in Sweden and Japan. […]

Paul McCartney played tambourine on “It’s You”. Cogan recalled in 1964 that The Beatles had been recording in the adjoining studio when she was working on the song:

The boys started making suggestions on how to improve the recording. We took their advice about double-recording my voice to sound as though I was singing a duet with myself, and then Paul came up with the idea of putting in a tambourine. All the musicians had gone home, so he went upstairs, found one, and played it while we dubbed the sound onto the tape.

There have also been suggestions that Ringo Starr performed on “It’s You”, but Cogan did not mention this in the 1964 quote above. However, she did suggest that all the basic tracks were completed when The Beatles heard the song. […]

Personal life

Cogan lived with her widowed mother at 44 Stafford Court, Kensington High Street, in a lavishly decorated flat where she frequently entertained other celebrities. She was close with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. Regular visitors included Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, Frankie Vaughan, Bruce Forsyth and Roger Moore.

John Lennon once recalled that, when he was a teenager, he used to mimic her savagely during his time at the Liverpool College of Art. Lennon’s wife Cynthia also recalled, “John and I had thought of Alma [as] out of date and unhip.” However, after Lennon met Cogan on the TV pop show Ready Steady Go! in 1964, they became friends.

Cogan was also close to the other Beatles, especially Paul McCartney, who played the melody of “Yesterday” on her piano. It was there that he added the words “scrambled eggs” to the nameless melody. The 1987 compilation album A Celebration includes a testimonial from McCartney:

When the Beatles first came to London, Alma was lovely to us… welcoming us with open arms. All my memories of that time are very special to me. Her high spirits made being with her great fun. I will always remember Alma and her sweet music with great fondness.

[…]

I was living in a little flat at the top of a house and I had a piano by my bed. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’ It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes, I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it (a G, F#minor7 and a B), made sure I remembered it and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.’ I took it round to Alma Cogan, a friend of ours (I think she may have thought I was writing it for her), and she said, ‘I don’t know it, but it is rather nice.’ It didn’t have any words at first so I blocked it out with ‘scrambled eggs’: ‘Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs — diddle diddle — I believe in scrambled eggs.’ Over the next couple of weeks I started to put in the words. I liked the tune and I thought I’d like to take some time over the words, get something that fitted like ‘scrambled eggs’. And then, one day, I had the idea of ‘Yesterday’.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

Albums, EPs & singles by Alma Cogan

Albums, EPs & singles which Alma Cogan contributed to

Songs written or co-written by Alma Cogan

Songs Alma Cogan contributed to