Ken Boothe – ‘Everything I Own’

31 October 1974

It’s not a great sign for the track as a whole when the singer keeps getting the chorus lyric wrong. But that’s what happens here on ‘Everything I Own’, which Ken Boothe insists on singing as “anything I own”. Maybe it’s intended as a tweak to suggest the narrator owns little or nothing, making him even more desperate. Then just change the title to ‘Anything I Own’, says you.

My own theory is that it’s a tactic to divert your attention from how poor the rest of the track is. Boothe has a decent voice, and the song is solid enough to have also topped the Irish charts a decade later in a correctly-worded version, so I blame the production. The whole thing sounds bloodless. It doesn’t swing; the bass drum thuds to a stop like a shoe falling on the floor. And the brass in the chorus is so far down in the mix as to be in another room. ‘Everything I Own’ puts me in mind of dreary, flimsy mid-’80s Casio-keyboard lovers rock like Boris Gardiner’s ‘I Wanna Wake Up With You’. Join us next time for Ken Boothe’s covers of Bryan Adams’s ‘(Anything I Do) I Do It For You’ and Cole Porter’s ‘Everything Goes’.