JohnTem82387976

7 September 2016

Peter Fenton - Marble Breaks, Iron Bends/ Small Town



Label: Fontana
Year of Release: 1966

Pity the sixties artists who nearly had hits. Oh, the torture. "Near-hits" counted for bugger-all back then, and usually the record label would only give them one or two additional shots before dropping them. Take Peter Fenton here as an example - his driving, propulsive take on "Marble Breaks, Iron Bends" climbed to number 46 in the charts (very slowly at that, across three steady weeks) before dropping out again, and one single later he was off Fontana's roster.

That's a bit harsh. Both sides of this are actually impressive pieces of work. "Marble Breaks", as stated already, is a kicking little track which is far superior to the Drafi take on the song, and the flipside "Small Town" is arguably even better, being a Howard and Blaikley penned pean to suburban tedium with a mod beat groove behind it. Fenton even shoots off an impressive little monologue at the end, declaring "Forget it! What can you do in a small town anyway? It's all over by nine o'clock!" Stop exaggerating, sir, The Carpenter's Arms is open until late and you might even get your head kicked in in the car park afterwards.

Fenton hailed from Yorkshire originally, though I've also seen reports online suggesting he originated from Canada - I'm going to take those with a lorry-load of salt given that the accent at the end of "Small Town" is absolutely not North American. Despite his relative success, certainly in comparison to most artists on the blog, he's pretty much disappeared under the radar since. It would be good to find out what he got up to in the years after this.



2 comments:

gela said...

Hi from The Netherlands,

Is Peter Fenton’s cover version of Marble Breaks Iron Bends far superior to the original version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_74YzFnQbzg)? I don’t know …

The original version in German was by Drafi Deutscher who ‘wrote’ the dam-dam part of the music/lyrics. Christian Bruhn came up with the rest of the music, where Günter Loose supplied the lyrics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafi_Deutscher

Some radio stations refused to play the song because Marmor Stein Und Eisen Bricht wasn’t correct German – it should be: Marmor Stein und Eisen Brechen.
And in the GDR a song about breaking stones was absolutely out of the question ...
Notwithstanding these malheurs the record sold over a million copies (nr. 1 in Germany and Austria, nr. 3 in The Netherlands).
Drafi hat lots of other hits, also under (in a Jonathan King-way) other names.
He died in 2006:
http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article222499/Dam-Dam-Dam-Dam.html

Christian Bruhn (mostly with Georg Buschor as lyricist) wrote many, many German Schlager-hits, for instance these ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_JruJDFfqA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX5SC6DQsgo

Gerrit


Unknown said...

Hmmm.... Can I hear the DC5 or The Hollies doing a version of, Marble breaks..., or is it my imagination?