Both Cook and Greenaway were British. They first met while members of an obscure vocal group. They had a short but successful career of their own from 1965 to 1967 as "David and Jonathan," scoring hits with a cover of "Michelle" by the Beatles and their own "Lovers of the World Unite." In 1968, they decided to focus solely on songwriting. However, Cook was one of the two lead vocalists for the band Blue Mink from 1969 to 1974, and had some big hits with them. Greenaway also was briefly a member of the bands the Pipkins and Brotherhood of Man around that same time period.
However, despite such musical projects, their main attention and greatest success was with songwriting. They generally wrote all their songs together until 1975, when Cook moved to the U.S., and still wrote some together after that. But sometimes a third or fourth writer would get credited too. They had a big success right out the gate, when "You've Got Your Troubles" by the Fortunes reached the Top Ten in both the U.S. and Britain. After that, it was a rare year when they didn't have at least one big hit. I could have included many more hits, but their songs could get quite poppy and even cheesy at times, with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Andy Williams having hits with their songs. So I tried to limit this collection to songs with a wider appeal, though often still very poppy.
Probably the most famous, even notorious, song here is "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The song was originally written by Cook and Greenaway as "True Love and Apple Pie." It was released in 1971 by someone called Susan Shirley and went nowhere. Then Bill Backer, an advertising executive, happened to run into Cook and Billy Davis at an airport in Ireland. Davis was another songwriter who had written many soul hits, but by this time was mainly writing jingles for advertisements. Backer came up with the line "I'd like to buy the world a Coke," and suggested the others write a song with that line for a TV commercial. So Cook, Greenaway, and Davis reworked "True Love and Apple Pie" into "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing."
The resulting Coca Cola commercial, featuring a crowd of young people singing the song on a hilltop, went on to become of the most popular and well known commercials of all time. The TV show "Mad Men" even kind of had a finale that promptly featured it, decades later. Coca Cola made variations of the commercial for decades. But in 1971, it proved so popular as a song that people kept calling radio stations, asking just to play the music of the commercial! So the songwriters quickly rewrote the song, adding three verses and removing the Coke references. Two groups had huge hits with it, the Hillside Singers, and the New Seekers. The New Seekers version in particular hit Number One in many countries, and went on to sell 12 million copies, making it one of the most popular songs of all time.
This album is 45 minutes long.
01 You've Got Your Troubles (Fortunes)
02 Lovers of the World Unite (David & Jonathan)
03 I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman (Whistling Jack Smith)
04 Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (Gene Pitney)
05 Melting Pot (Blue Mink)
06 Hallelujah (Deep Purple)
07 A Way of Life (Family Dogg)
08 Gasoline Alley Bred (Hollies)
09 My Baby Loves Lovin' (White Plains)
10 Home Lovin' Man (Andy Williams)
11 United We Stand (Brotherhood of Man)
12 Hey Willy (Hollies)
13 Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again (Fortunes)
14 I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (New Seekers)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/pvag5fAy
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/Ncm8Mo4MhDGinR8/file
The cover photo is from 1965. That's Greenaway on the left and Cook on the right. In the original image, Cook was holding a telephone receiver in one hand, on the side close to Greenaway. But I thought that didn't fit. So, with the magic of Photoshop, I erased the phone and the hand holding it.
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