Billie Davis: Whatcha gonna do? Singles, Rarities and Unreleased (1963-1966)

Girl singers didn't have much of a chance in the ‘60s, but the few that made it achieved instant and lasting success. Billie Davis would have joined the select patheon of ‘60s Britgirls had the momentum in her early career breakout in 1963, following an incredibly gritty Top 10 UK cover of the Exciters' ‘Tell Him’, not been disrupted by a car accident. By the end of the decade, Billie had gone full circle with recording labels from Decca to Columbia to Pye then Decca again but not before making another classic record (‘I Want You to Be My Baby’) in 1968 that should have been a monster-sized hit, but ended up just missing the Top 30 due to a factory strike that halted the record's distribution. The split of Billie Davis' 1960s recordings between these three different labels also seems to have made it impossible to compile a truly definitive retrospective of her work, which would take two CDs if it were to be complete. Should you want everything she recorded between her two separate stints with Decca Records, however, this compilation is exemplary, even if its omission of that Decca material means that this shouldn't be mistaken for a best of. All of her singles for Columbia and Piccadilly (including the releases as half of blue-eyed soul duo Keith & Billie and the fantastic 'No Other Baby', 'Hands Off' and 'Ev'ry Day') are on this 28 track anthology, along with five previously unreleased 1963 cuts (tracks 1 to 6). I promise I will post the anthology ‘Tell Him: The Decca Years’ -which is a perfect complement to this, and even better-, any other time soon.

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Billie Davis' groovy performance of the freakbeat/mod anthem ‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’, which appears in the film Pop Gear (1965):