Hot Shots - Mellow Yellow/ Come On Susie

 

Glam rock stab at the Donovan classic

Label: Gull

Year of Release: 1975

Readers who know their seventies chart pop will have come across the group Hot Shots (or The Hotshots are they were usually known) before. They scored a top five hit in 1973 with a plastic reggae cover of "Snoopy Versus The Red Baron", which is barely ever heard on the airwaves these days but nonetheless caused a minor stir at the time.

The recording was the work of reggae stalwarts Cimarons, but as the record began to sell the group actually used to tour and do public appearances consisted of John Jones, Yanni Flood Page, Malcolm Player and Chris Haig-Harrison. They also recorded all the subsequent follow-up singles under the Hot Shots name which, lo and behold, utterly flopped.

To confuse matters further still, while their singles were all inauthentic Dairy Lea reggae, this - their final effort - aped the glam rock style instead. "Mellow Yellow" was of course an enormous sixties hit for Donovan, and the group decided to apply its groovy whimsy to a fey glam arrangement. A solid glitter swagger is built up, with some of the lead guitar lines and vocals clearly trying their hardest to impersonate Marc Bolan, and by the time the track ends you find yourself wondering why Donovan Leitch didn't always apply the bacofoil boogie to the track. Probably because the glam genre hadn't emerged by 1967, I expect.

By 1975, though, it was also beginning to seem like old hat, and doing vague impersonations of Marc Bolan effectively meant aping an individual who was already dripping further and further down the charts. This single really was never going to be anything other than dead on arrival, ignored by the Radio One funsters as a dated exercise and tied to a group who had no previous form for producing this kind of noise.

However, it's exactly this kind of thing "Left and to the Back" was built for, and the B-side "Come On Susie" is actually a faintly Status Quo tinged bit of seventies glam rock which until now seems to have become lost to the world - so you get two treats for the price of one here, the subtle studio joke on the top side and a convincing bit of glam on the flip. Don't thank me, what am I here for?

(If you can't play the previews below, please go straight to the Box website).