Bandylegs - Silver Screen Queen/ Lonely Girl

 

Label: Pye

Year of Release: 1975

A huge number of metamorphoses occurred in the seventies as everyone jumped aboard the glam rock juggernaut. It saw everyone from old rock and rollers to balladeers to Denmark Street desk jobbers suddenly wearing make up and trilling and pouting to a trucker's beat. As such, very few stylistic jumps from the period are especially surprising, but nonetheless, the one this group took at the tail end of their first lifespan is quite breathtaking - and not at all glam.

Bandylegs were from Birmingham and consisted of Derek Arnold on bass, Geoff Nicholls on keyboards, Malcolm Cope on drums, Mick  Hopkins on guitar and Mike Taylor on vocals. Mike Taylor will be familiar to a number of readers of this blog as the singer for The Lemon Tree who released a psychedelic pop masterpiece in "William Chalker's Time Machine". This record really doesn't match up to that dayglo performance, and nor should we really expect it to given that it was released in 1975. Instead, the Bandylegs ensemble ooo-weee-oooo their way through a piece of fifties fantasy, singing about the good old silver screen. Its melodies feel replete with soda pops, ice cream and tootsie rolls which surely can't have been very prevalent in Birmingham in the mid-70s, but the band do a fair job of giving you the impression that it's all they've known.

The next steps the group took, however, were alarming. One reason this single has become relatively collectible since is that the group eventually morphed into the Heavy Metal band Quartz, who issued several albums between 1977 - 1983. To be fair to them, the break wasn't entirely sudden - their final single as Bandylegs, "Bet You Can't Dance", has a glam rock fuzz in its grooves, and acts as a reasonable bridge between their middle-of-the-road leanings and the future. By the time their debut single as Quartz emerged, under the name "Street Fighting Lady", it's safe to say they had changed from delicate pop caterpillars to heavy hawk moths. 

While they should have been ripe to plunder rewards from the emerging New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Quartz never really did sell many records outside their loyal fanbase, and finally disbanded in 1983. However, the group reformed again in 2011 for some gigs, before Mike Taylor sadly passed away in 2017 from lung cancer.

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