The Majority - I Hear A Rhapsody/ Wait By The Fire

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1967

Despite their appearance on the "Nuggets II" box set with the slightly rocking "One Third", Kingston Upon Hull's The Majority weren't really a garage band at all, or even a mod act. The vast bulk of their output was harmony pop, and "I Hear A Rhapsody" is a particularly smooth, silky example. So smooth and silky that the band felt that it was unrepresentative of their output and chose to jettison it from their official compilation CD "The Decca Years". Oh well - you can hear what the fuss was about (or rather wasn't) for yourselves now. 

I suspect that it was the record label's idea of a probable Big Ballad Hit, and I've heard far worse examples in my time. The fact that the group sound dangerously close to crooners here possibly hurt their credibility, however, and it's perhaps been the most ignored release in their catalogue ever since - neither a chart hit nor sufficiently loved by the band who recorded it for them to bother to draw attention to it since.

The group, at this point consisting of Barry Graham on vocals, Roger France on lead guitar, Don Lill on drums, Rob Long on guitar and Ken Smith on bass, were heading towards the end of the road at this point. Two singles later they'd pack up all their big ideas about becoming stars in their own right and become a backing band for Barry Ryan, playing on his major hit "Eloise". Once that session stint finished, a different line-up called Majority One continued their career on the continent with mixed results, eventually changing their names to Black Label and then eventually Rocky Cabbage (really, you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?) before splitting.

The brace of eight singles they put out on Decca through the sixties is actually an impressive tally for a group who never had a proper UK hit, and most of them are collected on the "Decca Years" CD, including the B-side "Wait By The Fire" here - and as a consequence of that, I've only included a brief clip of it here.