Gene Pitney: the all-American crooner adopted by the British invasion
Clean-cut, all-American crooner Gene Pitney was a massive star in the 1960s and remained popular in Europe long after that, but, oldies radio aside, he is all but forgotten today in the country of his birth.
Pitney possessed one of the most distinctive male voices of the 1960s, a high-pitched, quavering vibrato that made his songs of unrequited love and losers promising to prove themselves to their women particularly moving.
Starting off as a songwriter—Pitney wrote ‘He’s a Rebel’ for the Crystals and ‘Hello Mary Lou’ for Rick Nelson—and recording engineer, Pitney racked up an impressive string of 16 top 40 hits. Along with but a small handful of American performers (Roy Orbison, Beach Boys, The Supremes), Gene Pitney not only survived the British invasion but also practically became an honorary member of it.
In fact, he played piano on the first Rolling Stones album. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reciprocated by gifting him with ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’, a top ten hit in Britain and the first hit song they would write together. Pitney also had an affair with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, who allegedly said he was the “best lay” she ever had. She also called Pitney pompous and a “complete asshole” in her autobiography.
By the 1970s, Pitney’s fortunes sagged in the US, but he was still able to play to packed houses in England and Italy. In 1989, Pitney scored a month-long British number one with a duet of his ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ recorded with Marc Almond, and the pair famously appeared on Terry Wogan’s TV program.
In the UK, Pitney didn’t just ride out the years—he ruled them. The Americans had quietly filed him under “oldies” while across the Atlantic, he was selling out every provincial theatre from Aberdeen to Brighton. You could stumble into some windswept coastal ballroom in ’84 and find him there, suit pressed to within an inch of its life, voice as crystalline as it was in the Kennedy era. In Britain, Gene Pitney never stopped being Gene Pitney.
He didn’t really update his act to suit the times, either. There was no awkward synth phase, no punk haircut, no pandering to radio trends. Pitney did it the old way—walk to the mic, flash the crowd that conspiratorial smile, and pour the song out of himself like it was the only thing that mattered. It was so defiantly unfashionable that it looped back around to being the coolest thing in the room.
And then came Marc Almond, the spectral crooner of Soft Cell, hauling Pitney into the late ’80s for a reimagined Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart.
On Wogan, they looked like a surreal double act—Almond all decadent vamp, Pitney still the clean-cut heartthrob. Yet when they sang together, the years collapsed. It wasn’t a revival or a reinvention. It was a reminder: Gene Pitney didn’t need saving—he’d been biding his time, waiting for the spotlight to find him again.