Take 6 - Whiter Shade Of Pale/ There Goes My Everything/ Carrie Anne/ Groovin/ Okay/ Here Come The Nice

 

Pocket money covers of tip-top chart hits, from the faithful to the ghastly

Label: Take 6/ Avenue

Year of Release: 1967

While they're probably never going to command huge prices, budget sound-a-like hits compilations have been picking up casual interest from collectors of late, not least because some of the session players on these stocking filler discs later went on to become famous. Elton John grabbed the opportunities that were afforded keenly and was noted for his adaptability in the studio, although sometimes the results were rather unexpected. Likewise, David Byron of Uriah Heep wasn't averse to popping in for a cup of tea and a rendition of one of the day's hits in exchange for a few pounds (such as this cover of John Lennon's "Cold Turkey").

"Take 6" was a short lived and not particularly successful six-track EP series issued by Avenue Records which worked to the same familiar business model as all the others - get some seasoned musicians in quickly to accurately record the hits of the day (and absolutely no fannying about with "alternative interpretations" or fresh arrangements) then get the product on the shelves whip-smart to rival the official versions. They retailed at the cost of a standard seven inch single and must have been tempting to the uniformed or the unfussy who deemed it worth their while to own six A sides for the price of one. 

To give them full credit, the session musicians mostly managed to produce fair forgeries of the original work, and that's borne out by track one here, a cover of "Whiter Shade Of Pale" which just about manages to retain the mystical heat haze of the original. True, it sounds more like Van Morrison singing than Gary Brooker (but don't get excited, it's almost certainly not) but the rest is a faithful replica with only the thinness of the production showing itself as a marked difference.

And so the pattern follows throughout most of the EP, being filled with competent, efficient versions of top hits,  until you get to the main track I bought this for, The Small Faces under-the-radar paean to drug purchasing "Here Come The Nice". This was actually a very smartly, carefully produced and arranged number in its official incarnation with a depth, tricksiness and slickness which was going to be very difficult to pin down by any would-be interpreters, and so it proves. The pinging guitar notes at the start quickly give way to ludicrous falsetto vocals somewhere between Tiny Tim, The Pipkins and Donald and Davey Stott, then the session players deliver a Youth Club bash-through the song, which it really didn't deserve. Still, it's as terrible as I'd hoped, and sometimes hearing people fall flat on their arses trying to perform something wonderful is actually masochistic fun. I hope for their sake that nobody famous was involved in this monstrous three minutes; as no credits are ever given on these releases, we will probably never know.

Avenue Records were prolific producers of budget sound-a-like records besides the "Take 6" series, releasing dozens of them from the late sixties right up until 1972, by which point the market seemed to shift to favour long-playing twelve inch versions instead, with "Top of the Pops" and "Hot Hits" mopping up the majority of the sales. 

The whole EP is available to download here if you're that way inclined, but previews of the two tracks most likely to be of interest to Left and the Back readers can be found below.

Oh, and somebody is bound to want to resurrect the debate about whether David Bowie was responsible for a budget cover of The Beatles "Penny Lane". This seems to have been completely debunked, but the argument rages on... sometimes collectors will believe what they want to.