1959 Buddy Holly: It Doesn't Matter Anymore

"When a young singer dies to our shock and surprise
In a plane crash or flashy sports car
He becomes quite well known
And the kindness he's shown has made more than one post mortem star"

So wrote Paul Williams on "Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye" from his soundtrack to The Phantom Of The Paradise. Buddy Holly, of course, had been killed two months previous by a plane crash in a snowy field, and in what will become quite a depressingly regular scenario, his record company Coral saw mileage in releasing a back catalogue single to cash in, thus giving popular music its first ever posthumous number one.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh there, after all, 'It Doesn't Matter Anymore' was only recorded the previous year and it's hardly the sound of a barrel being scraped. A Paul Anka song, Holly's take keeps the basic tune but overhauls its presentation by replacing Anka's more pedestrian chug with a ball bearing quick orchestration of pizzicato strings repeatedly pulling the tablecloth from under Holly's sharpshooter vocal that manages to both spit out bile at his departing lover while dosing them in couldn't give a toss sweetness for her benefit.

Holly's vocal tics are there to rub her face in his indifference ("Well whoops a daisy how you drove me crazy, well I guess it doesn't matter any more") though by song end his true feelings poke through when the 'it' of their love gets personal ("I'll find somebody new and baby, we'll say we're through and you won't matter any more"), making it just as well that the song is barely two minutes long - given any more rope and things could well have got nasty.

I've always liked Holly's 'It Doesn't Matter Anymore' and I've always believed it was number one material even had he not caught that small airplane in Iowa. Holly was a class act before death made him a "post mortem star", and whilst it's true he didn't write this, he'd already written enough stone cold classics to let someone else provide a song for him without diminishing his own talent. In fact, his approach to this shows his versatility and originality extended to redrafting the texts of others as well as creating new ones on his own songs, defying anyone to pigeonhole him as just another rock and roller. A fitting enough memorial on the whole.