THE BARGAIN BUY: Cilla Black; The Very Best of Cilla Black

Although in the last deacdes of her life she turned in to some weird Margaret Thatcher doppelganger (it was the new choppers as much as the hair, wasn't it?), no one could deny that when Cilla Black was a contemporary of the emerging Beatles in the mid Sixties she had a vocal power which could scrape clean pots on the far side of a crowded room (Your My World).

She was however also capable of great emotional expression (the lovely McCartney-penned Step Inside Love, Alfie, the street-dirt Liverpool Lullaby thankfully included on this double disc, Anyone Who Had  Heart) and was one of the better Bacharach-David interpreters.

She was loved by the individual Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein (who changed her name from Cilla White and managed her) and by a generation which simply admired her common touch -- she never changed her Liverpudlian accent or humor -- as much as the raw talent.

On her death in August 2015 she was widely mourned. 

Her early life was however a struggle but she was exceptionally determined to escape the poverty trap, working life and religious divides of Liverpool (as portrayed in the excellent bio-flick Cilla of  2015, previously also a Bargain Buy) and so it was hard to not be supportive when she made the move to mainstream television and became a household name when her singing career was effectively over by the early Seventies.

This double disc of remastered tracks scoops up mostly her formidable Sixties career and a live TV special from '66 at the Savoy Theatre in London.

As part of the two-for-$20 deals at JB Hi-Fi stores here, this really is a Bargain Buy with a massive dollop of nostalgia for many seniors, but you could also pick up albums by Bowie, Broods, 5 Seconds of Summer, Lorde, Hozier and others to haul yourself closer to the 21st century.