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(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice — Amen Corner
Doing some research for this article, I stumbled across the answer to something that has always vaguely troubled me about “(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice”.
I wouldn’t say it jarred, particularly, or reduced my listening pleasure in any way. But every time I hear Amen Corner sing it on the radio, I always notice, and wonder.
And that happens more often than you might think. At least on the radio stations I listen to, “(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice” gets played relatively frequently. After all, it was a UK Number One single in early 1969 and sold a lot of copies back in the day. Plenty of people still remember it.
What is the little thing that vaguely troubles me, you might ask? Well, it’s a missing definite article in the lyrics.
That might not seem like a big deal, and to be fair it probably isn’t, but it always catches my attention.
Andy Fairweather Low was the lead singer of Amen Corner, and he would go on to have a decent chart run himself as a solo artist in the early- to mid-1970s, which included a spell at UK Number One with “Wide Eyed And Legless” (for non-Brits, that’s a slang term used to describe someone who has consumed a greater quantity of alcoholic beverages than their body can process).
