BANG Showbiz English
Richard Carpenter believes The Carpenters would still be making music if his sister was still alive.
The 75-year-old musician is “certain” his late sibling and bandmate, Karen Carpenter – who died in 1983 from a cardiac arrest after struggling with anorexia – would have still had a “fabulous” voice even in her seventies and thinks their group would still be growing strong.
He told America’s Closer magazine: “She’d be like 71 one right, and I’m certain she would be absolutely fabulous. Perry Como sounded great at 75 because he sang properly. Karen was the same. We would have hundreds of recordings of the two of us already done, and we’d still be making more.”
Richard reminisced about how he and Karen would jam together in their childhood bedrooms with the first tracks they wrote when they were teenagers.
He shared: “I was 13 and Karen was 16. I was a budding songwriter, so I asked Karen to sing a couple of these songs I’d come up with. At the time, she didn’t have the marvellous voice that developed later.”
But the ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ hitmaker admitted Karen didn’t enjoy singing when she was younger and always agreed to his requests “begrudgingly”.
He said: “So every now and again, I would ask her to sing some new song that I’d written. She’d do it begrudgingly because she didn’t care to be singing at all.”
And Richard admitted he was in “shock” when his sister died as he was confident he was in a good place after kicking his own addictions and was looking forward to the future.
He recalled@ “After Karen passed away, I was in shock. I had gone to rehab, and I had gotten off the sleeping pills. I was healthy and full of life and full of desire to keep making records. So I polished up and finished as many [Carpenters] outtakes as I could.”
