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Mary Weiss brought streetwise realism to the Shangri-Las – and let 60s girl groups flirt with danger

Weiss’s piercing voice gave the trio’s songs about bad boys – with their unusually high body count – a lasting punch

She had quite an emotional range – distraught on Never Again, stoical on The Train From Kansas City, sweetly lovestruck on Heaven Only Knows, consumed with lust at the end of Give Him a Great Big Kiss – but always sounded tough and streetwise: far from the matching gowns worn by her fellow girl groups, you somehow got the feeling she might be chewing gum or filing her nails as she sang. There’s something telling about the fact that their hit making career drew to an end with 1966’s Long Live Our Love on which they were required to salute a boyfriend conscripted to fight in Vietnam to the strains of When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again: “Something’s come between us and it’s not another girl / But a lot of people need you – there is trouble in the world.” It wasn’t just that releasing a patriotic, ostensibly pro-war song was a questionable idea in 1966, although it was: the anti-war movement and the counterculture alike were burgeoning. Essentially a spoken-word monologue with a musical accompaniment based on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, you could read Past, Present and Future as yet another song about a failed teenage romance, but between the portentous strings and Weiss’s soft, understated delivery lurks the implication that the problem isn’t merely being dumped, that something far worse has happened to the protagonist: “Take a walk along the beach tonight?

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