Reupload - The Endevers - Sunny and Me/ I Really Hope You Do

 

Bouyant, optimistic, orchestrated pop song from the 60s beat merchants

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1969

The irritatingly named Endevers have had their meatier, beatier moments slipped on to a couple of sixties rarity compilations lately, with their debut single "Taking Care of Myself" popping up on "Beatfreak" and "She's My Girl" being the opening track on volume 4 of "New Rubble". This, their final single, has yet to be given another outing.

That's possibly because unlike the two stormers that preceded it, "Sunny and Me" is a fluffy piece of sunshine pop, filled to the brim with feelgood arrangements and hopeful lyrics. It's actually a version of a Farrell and Romeo penned track which originally landed (equally unsuccessfully) in the laps of country poppers Douglas Good and Ginny Plenty the year before, and the arrangement doesn't take any radical steps away from that flop record. The vocals here are much more confident and punchy, though, and so for my money it's the better version.

Warm Dust - It's A Beautiful Day/ Magic Worm

 

Paul Carrack of Ace in early jazz prog mode

Label: Trend

Year of Release: 1971

Warm Dust is a very inviting band name for a record collector, evoking those summer days spent on your knees in dusty old second hand shops and bazaars, rifling through cartons of records coated in fluff... or perhaps the accumulated dust bunnies you pluck off the record players stylus, hot from the latest vinyl rotation... mmm, nice, even if these possibly aren't the images they were trying to put in people's minds.

The group possibly aren't every vinyl lover's cup of tea, though, being from that awkward, unfashionable and frequently pretentious progressive jazz rock genre. And it's certainly true to say that some of their material veered close to the pompous; their 1970 debut LP was entitled "Peace In Our Time" and subtitled "Neville Chamberlain 30th September 1938" and contained a lot of fussy, busy rhythms alongside the unexpectedly pretty melodies. 

While their excesses seem rather quaint from our current perspective, they weren't the kind of fools to let musicianship overshadow songwriting ideas, and both sides of this single are brief windows into that side of their world. "It's A Beautiful Day" is a jaunty skip through summer replete with puffing flutes and keen vocal melodies. Over on the flip, on the other hand, gives them a bit more room to stretch out and use the full ensemble to huge effect with some of the proggy fussiness leaking through. 

Willy Flascher and the Raincoats - (Everybody Wants To Be A) Streaker/ Run Rabbit

 

In the past, our privates were all famous for fifteen minutes

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1974

At some point in the early eighties, I was sat in the living room while my Dad watched the cricket. I cared not for the test match, but my attention was briefly caught by a man running stark bollock naked across the pitch while my parents sighed. "Another attention seeker's disrupted a game," my Dad muttered, while the rest of the family gazed up for a split second before going back to our own interests. A streaker again. BORING. By the eighties, streaking felt like the realm of sad arses desperate to be noticed, drunken rugger buggers and sex pests, and it's probably not much of a coincidence that the phenomenon didn't really grab headlines much throughout that decade.

In the seventies, though,  something about streaking was deemed sufficiently cheeky and carefree - and not dodgy at all - and captured the media and the public's imagination. Ray Stevens "The Streak" got to number one in 1974 on the back of all the anarchic public nudity, and no doubt the mysterious Willy Flascher here (no points for the choice of name) fancied a slice of the tittybum pie profits.

If Ray Stevens' record was all whoopsy-daisy larks and laughs, like a cornball Benny Hill number retranslated to smalltown America, this one is more of a bar-room novelty ditty with woodworm infested piano and oompah rhythms - somewhere between Gilbert O'Sullivan and Lieutenant Pigeon without quite capturing the wit or eccentricity of either. "You can have a lot of fun when you're flashing your bum" they sing as if they know from experience.

The B-side is more interesting, having an almost glam grooviness to it which is utterly unexpected given the unvarnished spit and sawdust scruffiness of the plug side. It sticks rigidly to its groove without changing tack much, but is brief enough to not wear out its welcome. 

Hollywood Freeway - I've Been Moved/ Cool Calamares

 

Superb bit of pounding plastic soul from a mysterious source

Label: Deram

Year of Release: 1972

A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside a conundrum, this one. "I've Been Moved" was originally slated to be released on the Moody Blues "Threshold" label in April 1972, but only emerged as a promotional demo copy there. It finally hit the shelves in July 1972 on Deram, the jump to a different label and the release delay seemingly remaining unexplained. Was the release just too "pop" for the Moody Blues progressively inclined label, or was there some kind of business disagreement? Who knows. 

What I do know is that "I've Been Moved" is another example of the criminally under-rated sunshine pop/ plastic soul sound the British market seemed riddled with in the early seventies. For every single of this ilk which broke through, another dozen perfectly good examples seemed to dip unloved into the vinyl recycling melters at the pressing plant - and in the case of "I've Been Moved", this would have been a harsh ending. The record pounds, parps and joyously speeds its way towards euphoria, like a Denmark Street employee's streamlined idea of a Northern Soul sound. 

The group Hollywood Freeway are something of an unknown quantity, though, and once again the temptation to conclude that they're just a studio group is strong. Jobbing producer Michael Aldred was clearly at the mixing desk here and also wrote the B-side, so I was initially tempted to say it's a project of his, but their second single "You're The Song (That I Can't Stop Singing)", released by Pye the following summer, was co-penned and produced by Tony Rivers and had no Aldred involvement.