Amen Corner – If Paradise Is Half As Nice (1969)

The Tremeloes Said No — So Wales Said Yes

On January 17, 1969, Amen Corner released what would become the biggest record of their career. “(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice” entered the UK Singles Chart on February 4th, climbed straight to the top, and sat there for two weeks. For a band from Cardiff who’d been quietly racking up Top 10 hits since 1968, this was the moment everything clicked — and it nearly went to someone else entirely.

The song spent eleven weeks on the UK chart in total, a remarkable run for a record that almost didn’t exist in English at all. While other bands were chasing the psychedelic zeitgeist, Amen Corner had delivered something warm, soulful, and irresistibly hooky — a record that felt both perfectly of its time and oddly timeless. It remains their one and only number one.

The backstory starts in Italy. The song was originally written by Lucio Battisti and lyricist Giulio Rapetti Mogol, and first recorded by Italian pop star Patty Pravo as “Il Paradiso” in late 1968, complete with lush string arrangements. When the song reached British shores, lyricist Jack Fishman rewrote the words into English, keeping the central idea — that love beats paradise every time — while stripping away some of the Italian grandeur. The first band offered the English version was The Tremeloes. They passed. Amen Corner did not make the same mistake.

The band recorded the track at Olympic Studios in London in under two hours, under the production of Shel Talmy — the man who had already shaped the early sound of The Who and The Kinks. Talmy pushed the arrangement toward R&B, adding muscular guitar and organ that suited Andy Fairweather Low’s soulful voice perfectly. The band’s twin saxophone lineup — Allan Jones and Mike Smith — gave it a punchy, almost brassy swagger that no string section could have matched.

Amen Corner had taken an unusual path to this point. Named after a soul night at Cardiff’s Victoria Ballroom, they’d started out playing blues and jazz before their labels nudged them toward a more commercial sound. Their debut hit had been a cover of “Gin House Blues”, and “Bend Me, Shape Me” and “High in the Sky” had kept them firmly in the upper reaches of the charts through 1968. Signing to Immediate Records for 1969 turned out to be the move that got them over the line.

The follow-up single, “Hello Susie” — written by Roy Wood of The Move — reached the Top 5 later that year, but the band dissolved shortly after. Andy Fairweather Low went on to a respected solo career and later became one of rock’s most in-demand session guitarists, working with everyone from Eric Clapton to Roger Waters. The song itself was lovingly compiled on the 2000 anthology If Paradise Was Half As Nice: The Immediate Anthology, cementing its place as the crown jewel of the band’s catalogue.

“(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice” is one of those records that sounds effortless precisely because so much craft went into it — a two-hour session that produced a number one, built on a song another band threw away. Fairweather Low’s vocal remains one of the most underrated performances of the entire British pop era, warm and guileless and completely convincing. The Tremeloes’ loss was, quite definitively, everyone else’s gain.