Helen Shapiro

Helen Kate Shapiro (born 28 September 1946) is a British pop and jazz singer and actress. While still a teenager in the early 1960s, she was one of Britain's most successful female singers. With a voice described by AllMusic as possessing "the maturity and sensibilities of someone far beyond their teen years", Shapiro recorded two 1961 UK chart toppers, "You Don't Know" and "Walkin' Back to Happiness", when she was just 14 years old.

Shapiro first achieved prominence in 1961 when her debut single, "Don't Treat Me Like a Child", reached number three on the UK Singles Chart. Her success continued in 1962 with further hits including "Tell Me What He Said" and film appearances in Play It Cool and It's Trad, Dad! In 1963, Shapiro toured with the Beatles, who were her supporting act. Since the 1970s, she has branched out as a performer in musical theatre and jazz; she appeared in the West End and toured extensively with the British jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band.

Shapiro was born at Bethnal Green Hospital in the East End district of Bethnal Green, London. Her early childhood was spent in a Clapton council flat in the London Borough of Hackney, where she attended Northwold Primary School and Clapton Park Comprehensive School until Christmas 1961. She is the granddaughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants; her parents, who were piece-workers in the garment industry, attended Lea Bridge Road Synagogue. The family moved from Clapton to the Victoria Park area of Hackney, on the Parkside Estate, when she was nine. "It was, and remains, a beautiful place", she said in a 2006 interview.

Although too poor to own a record player, Shapiro's parents encouraged music in their home (she had to borrow a neighbour's player to hear her first single). Shapiro played banjolele as a child and occasionally sang with her brother Ron in the skiffle group of his youth club. She had a deep timbre to her voice, unusual in a girl not yet in her teens; school friends nicknamed her "Foghorn".

At the age of 10, Shapiro was a singer with Susie and the Hula Hoops (together with her cousin, 1960s singer Susan Singer), a school band that included Marc Bolan (then using his real name of Mark Feld) as guitarist. At 13, she started singing lessons at the Maurice Burman School of Modern Pop Singing, based in London's Baker Street, after the school produced singing star Alma Cogan. "I had always wanted to be a singer. I had no desire to slavishly follow Alma's style, but chose the school merely because of Alma's success", she said in a 1962 interview. Burman's connections included John Schroeder, a young songwriter man at EMI's Columbia Records, who recorded a demonstration tape of Shapiro singing "Birth of the Blues", and motivated by her singing, signed her to the label.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.