Break

Merry Christmas everyone! I'm typing this blog entry from the safety of an old 19th Century fisherman's cottage somewhere on the south coast of England. Could I have timed my stay at such a place better? Well, yes. It coincided with one of the cruellest winter snaps in recent memory, and this place doesn't really have proper central heating and was somewhat draughty when we got here. Still, it's our cabin for the festive period while (you guessed it) the legal matters surrounding our house move go through their final motions.

It goes without saying that I have neither a record player here nor the means to digitise vinyl, so that's going to impose another blog break. It's also true to say that when I do finally get the removal lorries to turn up to my new address in the Midlands with all my worldly possessions, getting new entries online here isn't going to be my first priority.

How long before matters are resolved? Who knows? Could be a few weeks, could be a couple of months, could be longer, but keep visiting the site, or like our page on Facebook or follow the blog's Twitter feed and I'll keep you updated as best I can.

But in the meantime... I hope everyone has a good Christmas. Thanks for sticking by this blog during a year which has been riddled with breaks of this nature, and also a time where there are thousands of other distractions online. The fact I still have people logging on to this site to read my waffle about extremely obscure records is a constant source of surprise to me.

Reupload - Next of Kin - Merry Christmas/ Sunday Children Sunday Morning

 

Interesting attempt at festive ska from Mitch Murray and friends

Label: MCA

Year of Release: 1969

Well, ho ho ho, what have we here in Santa's sack? Blow me down if it isn't a bit of cod-ska co-written by the songwriter Mitch Murray, of "How Do You Do It?", "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Is This The Way To Amarillo?" fame. Ho ho ho, off you go young man, get off my knee, there are others waiting, this record didn't bloody sell and I've got tons to get rid of, you know.

Mitch was, it's safe to say, not a man who had probably even holidayed in the Caribbean, much less been a member of a ska band. The Mike Leander production credit also indicates that there wasn't somebody from that background present to steer the ship towards those waters, so by rights, this disc should be a hopeless shambles.

It's interesting to find out that it's not terrible, then. It wouldn't pass muster with the average sixties skin who would almost certainly sniff out the distinctly Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da styled fake accents, but those cheap brass sounds, the raw production and the repetitive nature of the tune make it a strong parody of a late sixties ska track at the very least. It's unquestionably a cynical cash-in on a "current sound", but the attention to detail is impressive.

Rick Jones - Cameraman/ Seen All Her Faces

Yoffy off "Fingerbobs" with melancholy folk single

Label: Fontana

Year of Release: 1967

A lot of cliched nonsense has been written about British seventies children's television by people determined to hear lewd, suggestive or druggy lines in the scripts of innocent shows. Most of these accusations come from people who see bright, colourful and imaginative programmes and assume they're the product of dopeheads who have munched through a buffet of spacecakes, rather than made by educators and producers who just happen to know what small children want to watch and how they best learn. The fact that you enjoy the Teletubbies or In The Night Garden while stoned out of your mind doesn't actually mean to say the creators are (or were) in a state of constant delirium too.

All rules have exceptions, though, and Rick Jones was the black sheep of children's TV. He claimed to have been high on hash on the set of Play School, adding to a journalist that marijuana "was like cornflakes" at the Beeb. Besides his work on that show, he is perhaps most famed for the low budget oddity "Fingerbobs" (a huge favourite of mine as a child) though his career stalled after a "fan" sent him two spliffs to the BBC's address and the package was intercepted. He subsequently returned to the world of music from where he first emerged, and this 45 gives you an idea of what he was up to before fingermice and fingerbirds entered his beardy life.

"Cameraman" is an orchestrated folk ditty which suits Jones' deep, sleepy vocals very well, rolling you around in its deep melancholy. He's not quite Leonard Cohen, but his performance is that of a sleepless, lovelorn lump abandoned unexpectedly, and damn convincing it is too (no doubt aided by some herbal cigarettes). 

 "Seen All Her Faces" is essentially more of the same, although Jones kicks some life into it, and the swelling jazzy arrangement gives it a bit of swing and optimism the A side doesn't have.

His early records didn't sell well which indirectly led to his career as an on-screen children's entertainer, but after he was shown the door at the Beeb he joined country rock band Meal Ticket who signed to Logo Records, reigniting a career a world away from puppetry for pre-schoolers. 

Bryan Evans - Turnaround Sunday/ Re-united

 

Glam-tinged gospel from Mumbles star of the stage

Label: Columbia

Year of Release: 1972

We've stumbled briefly upon Bryan Evans before on this blog, documenting his unexpected efforts to de-campify the Howard and Blaikley glam flop "Don'tcha Like Boys" and turn it into a chart sensation. He failed miserably, of course, but had the project been launched a few years earlier than 1978 he may well have been on to something. Timing is everything in pop.

For most of the seventies, though, Evans was an ever-present background figure in light entertainment, appearing in West End productions and also having a long recording career across multiple record labels, starting with CBS in 1971 and finishing with EMI International in 1979. It's rare for an unsuccessful artist to be given so many chances by the music business, and it's usually a display of enormous faith in their abilities, suggesting that Evans was seen as a highly polished performer capable of competing with the big boys (and girls) of the day. 

"Turnaround Sunday" was actually his third single and first for Columbia after a two-single stint with CBS. It's an interesting mix of styles, combining happy clappy gospel influences with a faint tinge of glam. The first time I played this, I accidentally left my laptop speaker on and ended up hearing the track with an unintentional and tinny slap of reverb delay, and when I found out it wasn't supposed to sound like that and the extra high-end slap was just due to my own absent-mindedness, I was faintly disappointed - but still, even without such gimmicks the track has its own euphoric stomp.

Reupload - Carnegy Hall - The Bells of San Francisco/ Slightly Cracked

 

A psychedelic Christmas single? Oh, go on then

Label: Polydor

Year of Release: 1967

Let's face it, it's doubtful anyone's surprised by the fact that a psychedelic Christmas single was released at the tail end of 1967 - what's truly surprising is that the market wasn't flooded with kaleidoscopic Christmas elves and festive carols with groovy phasing. (Though at the very least Syd Barrett said that "Apples and Oranges" had a 'touch of Christmas' about it, I suppose).

Sadly, anyone expecting anything authentic here is going to be sorely disappointed. It's a rather flippant novelty cash-in, and while it starts promisingly with its bells and an ominous whirring sound, it quickly descends into child-like whimsy. While we're informed that Father Christmas is on his "psychedelic way", the track itself is more akin to Scott MacKenzie on a tight budget than Soft Machine. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling, a very hippy Christmas Day" the track continues, making you wonder if this was one of the key markers towards the "hippy wigs in Woolworths" moment in society. 

The songwriter Geoff Stephens seems to be the driving force behind the track, who by this point had already chalked up an impressive tally of enormous hits for Manfred Mann ("Semi Detached Suburban Mister James"), Dave Berry ("The Crying Game"), The New Vaudeville Band ("Winchester Cathedral"), and The Applejacks ("Tell Me When"). He would later go on to write "There's A Kind of Hush", "Sorry Suzanne", "Silver Lady" and "Lights of Cincinnati" among others, so the fact this record flopped probably hasn't featured in his nightmares much over the last fifty years. 

Sharon Campbell - All The Loving You've Got/ Did We Ever See The Sun

 

Chirpy pop with a breezy summery feel 

Label: Trend

Year of Release: 1970

Trend really was a peculiar little label. Run out of a record shop in Westbourne Grove, you would have thought its independence would have led to a heap of underground artists tumbling on to its roster. While it did boast relatively hip bands like Swegas and Warm Dust, it also seemed to have a bit of a fetish for straight-ahead, smoothly produced and orchestrated pop. 

In some respects, this should have lined it up neatly for success as the sixties waved goodbye. At that point, sunshine melodies with lush arrangements were selling in huge quantities, but despite their production stylings living up to their company name by 1970, business problems were never far away and it was wound up by the High Court in 1971.

Sharon Campbell's "All The Loving You've Got" is another example of a string-laden pop sound with jollity and breeziness at its core, bit parts sixties girl-pop and the New Seekers. It's impossible to dislike and while its production occasionally feels a bit too hemmed in to really let Campbell's performance fly as much as you suspect she'd prefer, it's still another one for the list of obscure summery pop songs that existed on the cusp of the sixties and seventies.

Differing accounts of Campbell's identity are given depending on who you ask, with some people identifying her as the singer who would later enjoy success as a session vocalist in the seventies and eighties (most notably with Leo Sayer, Neil Innes, Dennis Waterman and Sheena Easton) and others insisting she's a different performer. Given the fact that the name is unbeliveably common - to the extent that I was once in a band with someone called Sharon Campbell, and no, it's definitely not her either - I should probably exercise some caution here, but it doesn't seem improbable that this was a very early release for her before her session career took off.