Radioinfo is taking you back 50 years to the songs of 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.

There are several parallels between Olivia Newton-John and Taylor Swift, with 1974, and its events good and bad, setting ONJ on the path of global superstardom. I could have chosen any one of several songs from her two 1974 albums Let Me Be There (pictured below) and Long Live Love, but I selected I Love You, I Honestly Love You as a nod to Peter Allen, another Aussie expat finding his way in the industry at that time, who co-wrote the song with legendary writer and producer Jeff Barry.

Olivia, in 1974, was already a well-established star in Australia and the UK. She’d move to England with Pat Carroll, her friend and often singing partner. Carroll married John Farrar in 1970, and Farrar would go on to become instrumental to ONJ’s success through the 70s.

To start the year off Olivia was chosen to represent the UK at Eurovision with the British public getting to choose the song she sang from six alternatives. They chose Long Live Love, not Olivia’s favourite, and she ended up in a three-way tie for third, behind winners, and soon to be superstars, ABBA, and Waterloo.
The Long Live Love album had all six of the Eurovision songs on it, but not in the US, where ONJ was gaining momentum as a country artist. Her 1974 album there was called If You Love Me Let Me Know, which doesn’t include any of the Eurovision tracks at all. The title track there was a top ten hit.

Also, on both those albums was I Love You, I Honestly Love You, which was just called I Honestly Love You in the US.

In 1974 Peter Allen and Liza Minelli divorced, and Peter had met Gregory Connell, who would be part of his life personally and professionally until Connell died of AIDS related pneumonia in 1984. I’ve always believed that the lyrics, especially the lines:

“If we both were born in another place in time
This moment might be ending with a kiss”

Were for Connell, in a time when such things couldn’t be openly articulated, and I always think of Peter Allen when I hear the song.

Peter Allen never intended for anyone but him to sing I Honestly Love You, but it somehow made its way into the hand of John Farrar who thought it would be perfect for Olivia. She loved it, I’ve always wondered how much she know of Peter Allen, and his story when she received it, as it feels like she knows, in how it is sung, and her reflections on it afterwards.

She did three takes in a cramped studio. This was the first, and she and Farrar knew that it was the most authentic and the best, but still did another couple just in case. It was just an album track, which Olivia really pushed to have released as a single. As it turns out album buyers started ringing US radio stations asked them to play it, forcing EMI‘s hand. It became Olivia’s first US No 1, and also put Peter Allen on the map as a writer. Peter also recorded and released the song in 1974.

At the 1975 Grammy Awards the song won Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. It missed out on Song of the Year to Barbra’s Streisand’s The Way We Were.

Note that it won in the ‘pop’ category.

At the 1974 Grammys she also won Best Female Country Vocalist for Let Me Be There, a much more traditional country music song.

Then she was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association of America. The first Australian/British artist to do so, beating Loretta Lynn, Tanya Tucker, Canadian Anne Murray and Dolly Parton (whose Jolene and I Will Always Love You were part of the 1973/4 year). John Denver was the Best Male Country Vocalist.

So annoyed were certain purist country music artists and fans that an organisation called the Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) was formed to kind of blacklist artists like ONJ and Denver from being included as “true” country artists. You can read more about this via John Denver’s 1974 hit Annie’s Song.

This must have hurt personally but it didn’t in any way affect Olivia’s future career.

In 1977, a dinner party at Helen Reddy’s place saw ONJ get offered the role of Sandy in Grease which became the highest grossing musical film and is still one of the best selling soundtracks. Physical (which I just HAD to attach the video clip for, below), from 1981, was US Billboard‘s No 1 single of the 1980s, and she is still the highest selling Australian female recording artist of all time.

It’s been two years since Olivia died after a long battle with breast cancer. She’d already been embraced by the country and pretty much every other community by this stage, and was beloved in Australia. A duet of Jolene, with Dolly Parton was posthumously released, which I’ve also included below.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo