You’d expect a song about pretending to originate in Las Vegas: what better setting than among the neon and casinos of the strip, drive-thru wedding chapels and ersatz scale-model tributes to the architectural wonders of the world? In 1955, The Platters’ manager and songwriter Buck Ram, pressed for a follow-up to their previous hit, “Only You”, quickly drafted “The Great Pretender” in a washroom of the desert resort’s Flamingo Hotel. The song’s delivery is full of cheap and effective flashy touches, from singer Tony Williams’s hicuppy “Oho-oh oh-oh yes” that opens the song to the soaring high-register harmonies that back him.
A year later, both “Only You” and “The Great Pretender” found their way into the soundtrack for Rock Around the Clock, a film musical about the fall of big bands and the rise of rock and roll. Stan Freberg, the “Weird Al” Yankovic of his day, parodied the song as a dialogue between a hyped-up, Jerry Lee Lewis-inspired vocalist and a drawling beatnik piano-pounder. The Platters weren’t quite the right targets for this parody, though: they weren’t just modish stylists. Ram had begun his career writing for big bands, and The Platters’ work with him was shot through with a seam of retro yearning, including an overly earnest cover of Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”.
There’s a kitsch religious element to “The Great Pretender”, too, in the supporting chorus of backing vocals, and the lyric’s suspension between swagger and confession, preening and sincerity: “Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal”. Is this the plea of a charismatic preacher, or a smarmy televangelist? Roy Orbison interpreted the song in a straight gospel take in 1964, despite his otherworldly falsetto swoops; Dolly Parton’s cover, 20 years later, with patched-in choir whoops overwhelming a weedy, wheezing synthesiser organ, sets her voice high in the mix, mugging like a tarted-up Tammy Faye Bakker.
Surprisingly, Bryan Ferry has never recorded it in any of his collections of dubious lounge crooner covers. Nor did his erstwhile Roxy Music collaborator Brian Eno, though Eno did name a track on his 1974 solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), after it. Eno spent his childhood near Bentwaters air base in Suffolk, entranced by the alien, echo-loaded sounds of American doo-wop. His biographer David Sheppard claims that The Platters’ track held “youthful resonance” for Eno, and the resulting homage is full of bizarre mechanised percussion, lyrical cut-ups and an outro of cicadas — Vegas-like in their artifice.
“The Great Pretender” also has a pivotal place in the claustrophobic and overstyled lesbian fashion melodrama of Fassbinder’s 1972 film, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. (An earlier scene is set to The Platters’ cover of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, about self-deception.) As her world crumbles around her, designer Petra is shown abandoned, curled up in bed, stripped of her gowns, wigs and makeup, as her mute servant packs and walks out. When pretence is gone, what remains?
By the 1970s, mainstream ’50s nostalgia had had most of its camp edges rubbed away and was beginning to slide into a lazy sentimentality. If Sha Na Na had startled Woodstock audiences with their tongue-in-cheek squareness in 1969, television programmes and films such as Happy Days and American Graffiti (in which “The Great Pretender” appears) reduced the decade to a whitewashed, all-American mulch of finned Chevrolets and poodle skirts.
It was left to Freddie Mercury’s 1987 cover to restore the song’s full power. Its knowing video references Queen’s past glories, Busby Berkeley dance sequences, drag and Frankie Avalon’s Teen Angel scene from Grease, as Freddie Mercury belts, “I seem to be what I’m not (you see)/I’m wearing my heart like a crown”. It was released in February of that year, months before Mercury learned of his HIV diagnosis in April. How much he knew or suspected about his health at this point is unknown, but Mercury’s version may be the greatest use of the song, revealing as much as it conceals: the sparkling façade, the vulnerability beneath, and the layers of glamour and bravado that hold it all together so the show can go on.
What are your memories of ‘The Great Pretender’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: The restoration project; K-Tel; TNA records; TP4 Music; RCA/Legacy; Virgin UK; Universal Music Group International
Picture credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images