1957 Paul Anka: Diana

Set to a busy, saxophone drenched layer cake of sound, 'Diana' is a catchy enough pop song that never quite rings true. Although fairly typical of its genre, at this remove it sounds more like a pastiche of the honking r&b and street doo wop it's celebrating than the real thing (to my ears it presents the sort of 'Angel Fingers' vibe that Wizzard came up with in the seventies). And I think that's chiefly down to Anka himself; there's something smug and patronising about hearing a sixteen year wailing "I'm so young and you're so old" in a voice that mistakes cockiness for confidence, especially one that contains neither grit nor grease. Instead, Anka's performance reminds me of someone reciting their twenty three times table by rote instead of mentally working out the figures as they go. He seems to believe the sheer force of his presentation and personality will be enough to knock the girl off her feet, and maybe it would have had the relentlessly ascending verses resulting in a hundred megaton pay off instead of limping to a close with an almost apologetically understated mumble of 'Diana' that sounds like a red faced schoolboy asking for condoms at the chemist. It's solid enough, but whether that's damning it with feint praise will be up to the listener.