By Stephen Islip

"Every track that Dion recorded is brilliant" - are you kidding?

Like all creative artists, in stretching himself to new heights, he has sometimes hit the ground at full speed. And when we mean bad tracks , we don’t mean mediocre - we mean truly awful .

We’re talking here about the type of tracks that are so out of step, they sometimes spoil the experience of the album - unless you get to the skip track button first .Therefore tracks like ‘The Red Red Robin ‘ are not included because although individually they may make you cringe, they completely fit into the context of the album they were recorded for.

Perhaps we can learn more about the artist by looking at a selection of his all time bad tracks. One thing that becomes clear is that we’re talking about his whole career and not just a tiny section.

Anyway lets be fair, no artist, except the mega-successful has a 100% free hand. Most recordings are team efforts by artists, backing musicians producers, studio time and that dreaded word budgets.

So lets see what’s on offer:

This song killed my interest in Dion for over 20 years. It must have taken him all of 2 minutes to rhyme sun and fun - why didn’t he follow it up with moon in June? . This track is so bad, the in depth review of tracks on the new CD reissue of the Dion album manages to completely ignore this one. Compared to the song writing quality of most of the other tracks on this album this track is embarrassing.

How do you cover up a weak track - give it an elaborate accompaniment - clearly the arranger was highly influenced by ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘ A Day in the Life’. A song like this must have made Dion realise he needed a partner for most of his future song writing.

A song he first sang as a child - people gave him money when he sang this one - perhaps they were trying to shut up the precocious brat!

I accept the antipathy to this song may be my European upbringing - Americans have a much greater appreciation of Death Songs. Why does the argument have to be won by a fatal road accident?

But why end an excellent album (Donna Prima Donna) with this dirge?. Was he under pressure from his relatives to record something for his mum/ dad/ sister or pet parrot?

(Sorry Gordon I know its one of your favourites- I suppose you’ll strike me off the circulation list now!)

This sounds like it came straight out of his cabaret set ‘The Last of the first name singers’ . He was being groomed by his management for ‘greater things’ and a new recording contract gave him little chance to reject this dross. The real problem is he doesn’t add anything of his own to the track. It could be any cabaret artist bashing out this song. Even an unknown group like the Happenings demonstrated that new life could be breathed into a hackneyed old number like this.

From the seriously floored ‘Born to be with you‘ album ,this is a spiritual, that Dimucci and Phil Spector his producer claim to have written.

Spector had a liking for the British producer Joe Meek, who was well known for distorting voices . The difference was that Meek often had poor material to work on - but Spector on this occasion had one of the best voices in rock and roll. Distorted voice , distorted backing (phasing 10 years out of date) - the whole thing is a mess.

You’d think that after this Dimucci would steer clear of gospel music - how wrong you’d be - 5 gospel albums followed and they contained their fair share of duffers :

From the album ‘Only Jesus’, a nasty track full of fundamentalist dogma "No more water only fire next time". The message is quite clear if you don’t behave according to mid-American Protestant ideals, their Lord will bring a cataclysmic end to your existence - did he have Regans Star wars in mind? Perhaps Mr Dimucci would argue that he was only preaching to the converted at this time?

By the time he got round to his fifth gospel album he must have been scrapping the barrel for material. This is a toytown image of the place above, where Saturday talent competition seems to take place, but there can only be one winner.

From the album Sanctuary comes one of three live tracks . Mixing live and studio tracks very rarely works and this proves the rule. On top of that this track is light comedy. The audience sounds to be politely laughing with the performer. Whatever the joke was, it doesn’t travel, so it spoils the whole of this side .

Dion had the sense to leave these tracks on the cutting room floor, only for ACE to come along 20 years later and dredge them up.

Moon river is fairly limp, adding nothing to the original and Crying sounds close too, but not as good as the Orbison Original.

What’s missing with both of these tracks is distance between the original and the cover.

We’re going right back to the beginning - 1957- with this song he recorded with the Timberlains. This was the B side of his first single.

What influence did the Man (sorry Boy) have over the choice of tracks - probably none. Gordon tells me it sounds like Guy Mitchell - but to my ear all I hear John Clease and the Monty Python chorus doing an early take on the ‘Lumberjack Song’.

His producers may have been out of touch with the youth market at this time but fortuatly it didn’t take them long to catch on.

So there we have 10 of his worst - in no particular order with the exception of the last, which probably makes me cringe more than the others. I believe there are few others that fall this low and given that he’s had 363 tracks released, this is a very good hit ( I think I mean miss) rate.

I hope I’m being objective in my selection - I don’t recall seeing any of these in your favourite listings.

If I’ve offended anybody by not including their worst track - or even better included one of their favourites, then write to Gordon and let the readers know what I’m missing.