In January 1959, the Rank Organisation, having dominated British cinema for a quarter of a century, but in terminal decline as a film-maker and seeking to diversify, launched the Top Rank record label. Among its early signings was Craig Douglas, who has died aged 85.
Douglas, a 17-year-old billed as the Isle of Wight’s “singing milkman”, already had two unsuccessful Decca singles behind him. Eighteen months later, the record company, having been provided with a diet of has-beens, middle-of-the roaders, no-hopers, failed US imports and novelties, had run up losses of £800,000, and was sold on to EMI. With the deal went Douglas, the teenage sensation of the label and Top Rank’s sole British success story.
By then, he had had four British Top 20 hits. While rock’n’roll, just a few years old, hinted at mean streets, quiffs and disreputability, the ballad style of Douglas belonged instead in a world of repressive yet understanding grown-ups and pining, respectful teens. Douglas, chirpy, fresh-faced, short-haired and cardiganed, caught that moment in Macmillan-era Britain of new towns, new affluence, the kid who could be welcomed in by parents with teenage daughters.
It was also a time when domestic pop culture was almost completely dependent on American songwriters and arrangers. Douglas stuck to domestic remakes of American hits. His first Top Rank release, in April 1959, a cover of the Fleetwoods’ Come Softly to Me, flopped, and his version of Dion and the Belmonts’ classic of the Bronx, Teenager in Love, lost out domestically to the more dangerous Marty Wilde, but it did put Douglas into the Top 20.
Then came his breakthrough. When the great soul singer Sam Cooke had a US hit with Only Sixteen, it was Douglas, in July 1959, who spent four weeks at No 1 in the British charts with his cover version, which became the calling card of his career.
Douglas was born Terry Perkins in Newport, Isle of Wight, one of the three sets of twins among his parents’ nine children. He was educated at the local school – and did a holiday milk round that led to the “singing milkman” label.
He won a talent contest with Pat Boone’s Love Letters in the Sand – rather than the Elvis hits favoured by his rivals – and got a slot on the bill of a Newport variety show. There, he was spotted by the wife of Bunny Lewis, an agent-cum-songwriter who had co-written the 3.5m-selling 1954 hit Cara Mia with Mantovani.
As agent to the teenager, Lewis provided him with singing lessons, a new name and an entry into what was still very much Tin Pan Alley. Six appearances for Douglas on the BBC’s first quasi-pop programe Six-Five Special in the autumn of 1958 were followed by the two singles for Decca.
Only Sixteen was Douglas’s sole No 1, but Pretty Blue Eyes and The Heart of a Teenage Girl (both 1960) and A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Time (both 1961) all made the top 10. So did When My Little Girl Is Smiling (March 1962), his last success on Top Rank. After Our Favourite Melodies, in June 1962, he returned to Decca.
In that year, he featured in two films, The Painted Smile, a British crime B-movie, and, with Helen Shapiro, It’s Trad, Dad!, a film that encapsulates pre-Beatles British pop culture. That October, Douglas’s cover of Don Gibson’s country hit, Oh Lonesome Me, peaked at No 15, but in that month, too, Love Me Do became the Beatles’s first, minor, hit. A time had passed for performers like Douglas, and there would be no more top 20 records.
Douglas had the voice and following to work on into the 21st century, in stage shows, pantomimes and television. While, in 2009, osteoporosis meant that he began using a wheelchair, he did not stop performing. In 2013 he released a new album, The Craig Douglas Project.
His past persisted. It was his version of Teenager in Love that featured in Cold Lazarus (1996), Dennis Potter’s last, posthumous television drama. As for the Top Rank label, it vanished soon after Douglas’s departure.
• Craig Douglas (Terence Perkins) singer, born 12 August 1941; died 4 September 2026
