1959 The Platters: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Now then, how did we get from there to here? 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' was originally a Kern and Harbach showstopper from their 1933 operetta 'Roberta'. In the 1935 film version, it's sung by light opera diva Irene Dunne in suitably flamboyant light opera style at a dinner table, ending with her breaking down in tears (I'm going to keep Dunne's interpretation as a reference point here). So much for 'then' anyway. As for 'now', for at least the past thirty years it's difficult to tag any fifties based film, TV series or stage show that doesn't have The Platters' version of the song on the soundtrack somewhere (usually at a prom scene where the prom queen has been jilted by some jock). Nevermind that the song has been recorded by over thirty different artists from across all genres since, it's always this version that's returned to as the standard.

I'd peg the reason for its ubiquity largely on the striking lead vocal from Tony Williams. Falling into a hinterland between Broadway and street doo wop, Williams starts out with a slow fuse on "They asked me how I knew, my true love was true" before igniting and leaping out to grab you by the collar on "Oh, I of course replied" with a lunge of confidence that dares you to disagree. Yet disagree we must because, as Williams recounts, his love turned out to not be true at all ("Yet today my love has flown away") and by the close when it's all gone sour he's shedding "Tears I cannot hide" through a brave face that insists "Oh, so I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes".

But these lyrics are there for everyone; Williams neither wrote nor modified them so why has his take endured where Dunne and her like haven't? Again, I'd put it down to impetration; Dunne had sophistication in spades and trilled the song as pretty as a canary, yet its central imagery of "Oh, when your heart's on fire, you must realise, smoke gets in your eyes" rings hollow in her mannered delivery that doesn't make it sound like she'd get into much of a lather about anything. To compensate, the film version has her with her head in her hands at the close to hammer home the message, but in wrapping it up in a more immediate and youth friendly doo wop package, Williams and The Platters ensure such visual aids are not required.

Williams' more earthy tone veers from an in your face assuredness to a less cocky hubris, painting no less vivid a picture of hurt and generating a general atmosphere of emptiness that mines a layer of depth you don't get from a surface reading. It's not rock and roll, but then neither is it tin pan alley. There's an eerie, ghostliness about the arrangement; Williams sounds like he's singing to himself in some empty dancehall long after everybody else has paired up and left for home but what blows it is an orchestral backlash of an ending that shatters the solitude with the subtlety of a nailbomb, puncturing the drama rather than accentuating it. Such bombast didn't work for Shirley Bassey and it doesn't work here - the song isn't ruined, but it ends it on an awkward note of defiance when Williams sounds like he'd rather slink out through the back door unnoticed. Luckily for him and the song, he's done enough by then for such indulgence to be overlooked by all but the hardest of hearts.