Reupload - Claire - Mouth/ Hole In My Shoe

 

Sandie Shaw penned single for actress Patti Somers operating under another name

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1973

The twilight years of Decca are a delight for obscure pop pickers. Once the label lost their distribution rights to RCA and The Rolling Stones jumped ship, they entered a long, slow demise filled with increasingly desperate kicks against their inevitable end. A quick visit to the marvellous 45cat site reveals that Decca's seventies catalogue was filled with one-record wonders, artists signed to the label who were presumably supposed to be new stars, but whose records are so scarce that they probably only sold a hundred or so copies nationally (if that) before being dropped. 

What must have been a rather grim time for employees at the label has ended up being an adventure for us, then. Take this record, for example. There are few clues of interest on the label, but it's actually the actress and singer Patti Somers operating under a pseudonym and recording a track Sandie Shaw penned with her husband Jeff Banks. 

"Mouth" on side A is a twanging piece of Brit-country which is nicely performed and written, but was always going to be very unlikely to break Sandie as a songwriter or Somers as a pop star. While it doubtless picked up some promotion and airplay as a result of her involvement, it sounds more like an album track than a single suitable for launching a "new artist".

It's the B-side, a cover of Traffic's psychedelic classic "Hole In My Shoe", that's most likely to tweak the interest of collectors. And it's... not quite what you'd expect, but an interesting take all the same. Removing all the psychedelic elements from the track, it instead pares it down to its root basics and adds a faint country tinge to the effort. It sounds cracked and rugged and as if Claire is singing about a trip she took the week before and hasn't quite recovered from yet. 

Patti Somers had previous recording history - the track "My Four Walls", issued under the name Pattie Lane in 1968, is starting to become a major collectible and shows that there was a lot more to her range than this single. You can visit her website here.

Of course, I would hope we all know what happened to Sandie Shaw. 

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