The Whales - Come Down Little Bird/ Beachcomber

Label: CBS

Year of Release: 1968

Televised talent shows are unforgiving affairs - they enable club acts or even aspiring bedroom singers to give a mass audience their best shot, but if they lose (and especially if they lose ignobly) they are likely to forever be considered damaged goods. A performer who didn't impress either a panel of judges or a television audience of several million people may even never work professionally again. 

And the winners? Well, the preferred narrative is that they will become new superstars, but even in today's market that's usually only the case for a brief period of time. The victors in talent contests usually sell well in the media aisle to supermarket shoppers for the first six months after receiving their gong, and are regarded as a safe booking by live venues and cruise ship events organisers, but only in rare cases do they really shake Britain or the world with their abilities. 

Barnsley's The Whales, for example, were Opportunity Knocks winners in 1968 and were given a fantastic opportunity to break through afterwards; a contract with CBS was duly inked, and the group were paired with the brilliant Mark Wirtz to produce a debut single. "Come Down Little Bird" was the outcome, and while it has since been compiled on "Piccadilly Sunshine", making it well known amongst the popsike cognoscenti, it was perhaps a bit too lacking in pizazz for the mass market. Wirtz clearly offered them a solid enough tune, but not one which sounded like a hit - the chorus is gently lilting rather than forceful, while the verses are too childlike and gentle to compensate. It's not bad, it's just clearly no "Teenage Opera".

Halifax Building Society - Rock Solid (EP)

Label: Air-Edel
Year of Release: 1978

"By the way, if anyone in here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself" - so grumbled Bill Hicks to a live audience on his CD "Rant In E Minor", adding "do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call". He certainly wasn't the first to complain about creative people selling out with adverts, and the idea that engaging with advertising is evil, even if undertaken simply to make a quick buck while in a financial corner (which even leftists like Ken Loach have done in the past) was a dominant one for decades. It's something which tends to get brought up less frequently now, but still occasionally gets trotted out when a respected artist "whores themselves" for a major business on prime time television.

This was certainly the case when a couple of young people I'm acquainted with (but won't pretend to know well) received some crisp bank notes from the Nationwide to do some adverts recently. I had to watch with dismay as a cascade of abuse filled up my social media timelines, and while the Bill Hicks "Off the artistic roll call!" line was not repeated, it was certainly paraphrased a number of times, despite the fact that Hicks added the disclaimer "If you're a struggling artist [which they were] I'll look the other way". These, it seems, were people not worthy of their calling for taking the Building Society ruble in order to spend more time developing their careers ("Real poets don't have careers!" one angry individual shouted, while staying oddly silent about John Cooper Clarke's Sugar Puff adverts). 

Building Societies have always had one eye on the youth market, though, way before banks seemed to get their claws into teens and children. As organisations, they've always been keen to emphasise the possible to people who have perhaps heard rather too often that what they are demanding is unattainable. These days, that seems to be the very idea that a young person can actually have a mortgage, and in the seventies... well actually, the opening sales pitch really wasn't much different then either.

This promotional EP was put together for the Halifax Building Society in 1978, and seems to be, once again, about young whippersnappers saving enough to buy a house, or at least be somewhere they feel they belong. It's a very decadent promotional item indeed, coming housed in a glossy, full colour gatefold sleeve with a printed paper inner sleeve inside, very akin to the plush affairs major labels used to create in the nineties for up-and-coming alternative groups (all it would need is a colour vinyl pressing to complete the effect). It's also pressed up on proper vinyl rather than a flexidisc, and only the sprayed silver "plasticrap" label looks cheap.

It also opens very unexpectedly with a desperate, agitated slice of Pete Townshend aping rock. "Where Are We Going" begins like "Pinball Wizard" (itself used in a bank advert for NatWest in 1988). "Lose all our money in the Palace Arcade/ I swear the one-armed bandit knows that we just got paid!" exclaims the Townshend clone at one point, before adding "When we get together, everybody thinks we're bad/ but all we're doing is searching for things we never had". 

Reupload - Fuzz Face - Mighty Quinn/ Voices From The Sky

Label: Page One

Year of Release: 1968

Anything I write about the progression of "Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)" from a "Great White Wonder" Dylan bootleg track to a major hit for Manfed Mann is probably going to be a bit of a waste of energy - everyone knows the story, after all. Dylan's songbook was continually plundered throughout the late sixties (and indeed beyond) by bands desperate for both cred and hits, and the adventures of Quinn the Eskimo were possibly the poppiest of options on offer, as well as handily buried on an unofficial release.

While Manfred Mann had shot to number one with their version of the track by February 1968, Fuzz Face here - who I'm 99.9% confident were some sort of American studio group - were latecomers to the party, issuing their version in April of that year. In fairness, it puts a slightly different spin on things, loading an instrumental version of the track with guitar effects, sitars, organs and decidedly "groovy" backing rhythms, making it prime fodder for anyone's house party. You can dance to this with much greater ease than the Mann's rather stompier take. 

Commercially, though, there wasn't much room in the charts for two versions of the same song at roughly the same time, and this sank on both sides of the pond. A shame, but it wasn't at all unusual for instrumental versions of pop hits to do this, however innovative or otherwise faintly psychedelic they were.

Ulysses Smith - Jet Aeroplane/ The Next Train In The Morning

 

Label: RCA

Year of Release: 1968

For a songwriter who experienced such huge success with Sandie Shaw, and a reasonable run of hits in his own right as a solo artist, it's surprising how many of Chris Andrews' compositions failed for other people. What should have been a guaranteed badge of hit status and press attention sometimes slipped unhelpfully under the radar.

In this case, the oddly named Ulysses Smith is the benefactor of Andrew's helping hand. His real name was actually George Davies, a Barnsley-born singer and guitarist with the hitless act Me And Them. The group recorded for Pye in 1964, but none of their singles had any impact, from the inappropriately peppy Buddy Knox penned pop of "Think I'm Gonna Kill Myself" to their cover of The Beatles "Tell Me Why". 

Following their failure, Davies appears to have struck out on his own under a new name to try his luck under Andrews' production and songwriting guidance with this 45. In common with a lot of Chris Andrew's later work, it's a record which whiffs of Soho basement bars, with its brassy arrangements, swinging rhythms and punchy vocals sounding as if they would be more at home on the live circuit than tightly hemmed in a recording studio.

It probably wasn't confident or strident enough to be a bona-fide hit. Still, the occasional bursts of reverb and fruity brass on the flipside make it a much more groovy listen.

The Fantastics - Waiting Around For Heartaches

Label: Deram

Year of Release: 1970

Unlike most of the artists who get featured on this blog, The Fantastics were arguably proper pop stars. They produced a hit single in 1971 in the form of "Something Old, Something New", which despite only getting to number 9 feels like a deathless disc - never far away from an advertising campaign or a mid-afternoon oldies playlist.

Prior to their run in the top ten, though, they were an American act called The Velours who released an eye-watering number of singles across the pond, including the in-demand soul disc "I'm Gonna Change". They changed their name to The Fantastic Temptations and hopped over to the UK to cash in on the demand for the Temptations material on the live circuit, mainly performing covers of their hits for soul-hungry audiences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were forced to eventually change their name to The Fantastics - tribute bands weren't really "a thing" in the sixties and confusion was always best avoided - and that name change also coincided with a brace of original recorded material. 

They slipped out a version of "Baby Make Your Own Sweet Music" on MGM in 1968 before moving to the Deram label and releasing "Face to Face With Heartache" followed by this effort. In this case, the B-side, a cover of the Four Tops "Ask The Lonely", has had the largest share of the attention, popping up on so many Northern Soul compilations that you can head over to Spotify or iTunes to enjoy it with enormous ease. 

While that cover is deftly done and unsurprisingly popular with the in-crowd, it's meant that the pep and strut of the A-side has been unjustly ignored over the years, so it's presented here for your attention. "Waiting Round For Heartaches" is, as you'd expect, energetic and thrusting while dripping with heartbroken melodrama, and as such it's surprising that it's heard so infrequently in the outside world.