Eddy Adamberry - I Am The People/ I'm A Bloodhound

 

 

 

Heavily John Lennon inspired "protest" 45 from the prolific Adamberry

 

Label: Pye

Year of Release: 1973

 

The seventies were riddled with artists who had already endured long and fruitless careers throughout the previous decade, from the much-loved (David Bowie) to the now commonly derided (Gary Glitter). Eddy Adamberry was no exception to this rule, although sadly the seventies offered him little in the form of payday opportunities either.

He began with the Gibraltar group Los Cincos Ricardos with his brother Joe in the mid-sixties. Their three singles on Philips are agonisingly hard to track down now, although the third and final release in Autumn 1966 - a cover of The Kinks "Most Exclusive Residence For Sale" - occasionally pops up for sale at inflated prices on various auction websites. 

After that, Adamberry seemed to go to ground until 1972 when he popped up with the phased, flowery and actually rather lovely Mike Batt produced solo single "Captain Jones", which failed to progress his career further. "I Am The People" was his next release, and for my money is a delightful surprise which seems to have become surprisingly overlooked in Pye's otherwise heavily plundered archives since. 

It is, to be blunt, the noise of someone who has been listening to Lennon's angry protest records very closely indeed and has decided to siphon off the best bits of them and marry them with a pounding "I Am The Walrus" bounce of an arrangement (which also bears a slight resemblance to the yet-to-be-recorded "Mr Soft" by Steve Harley, strangely. Clearly lots of singers were drinking from the same water fountain at the time). It's a throaty roar of a single, and while it's hard to gauge how much Adamberry really means it - he's very non-specific about the political issues he's ticked off about, and you'd never have got Lennon ducking the issue in the same way - it's got a persuasive thrust to it and a suitably anthemic chorus. All it lacks is an instrumental break or middle eight to vary the tone.

Predictably, this wasn't a hit either, and he jumped to Polydor to release "Once Upon A Love" under the name Adamberry in 1976, and could eventually be found on Decca in 1979 with the slightly punkier Airship performing the track "Get Out, Take Your Mother With You". For this record, he went to the trouble of declaring his age as 26 on the press release, which as anyone can probably guess from the timeline I've offered, was a fat lie. 

Even after that, Adamberry pushed ahead, creating the record label Niteshift in 1989 and releasing at least two tracks he composed himself there, "Gettin' Better" by Jadu and "Lies" by Sha Sha. For all I know, he's still beavering away now and writing potential new hot hits, but "I Am The People" is the most intriguing of all the tracks of his I've unearthed so far. 

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