Reupload - Rainbow Cottage - Cloppa Castle/ Take Good Care Of My Love

Nirvana's Patrick Campbell-Lyons pens kids TV theme for 70s hit-makers, and everyone wins

 

Label: Pye

Year of Release: 1978

Wigan's Rainbow Cottage were a rum bunch of coves - formed as a band consisting entirely of left-handed members (presumably for the novelty factor rather than as an act of protest) they were a club act who toured the UK relentlessly and made most of their money as a covers band. However,  they did occasionally pop into recording studios to put out original material. Their most successful effort, "Seagull", reached number 33 in 1976, and was penned by Brian Gibbs of popsike wonders The Answers. 

It's possibly due to Gibbs' involvement that "Seagull" sounds uncannily like a late sixties group ballad which has somehow found itself in the charts in 1976. It's whimsical, gentle, contemplative and actually quite sweet, and wouldn't have been completely out of place on a "Circus Days" compilation LP. 

The group tried to build on the track's unlikely but modest success and failed, and continued to make most of their money from the live circuit. However, another opportunity for fame and fortune arose in 1978, namely the chance to record the theme tune for the stop motion animated children's series "Cloppa Castle", based on warring tribes in some peculiar fictional alternate reality battling over the rights to oil. 

The theme tune is a busy but datedly analogue synth driven beast, beginning with psychedelic phasing and steadily building into something both strident and ridiculous. "Everyday at three o'clock/ they all sit down for tea!" we are informed forcefully, as the group summarise the general activities of the puppets in the programme with passion and gusto. 

Erehwon - The Hero (I Might Have Been)/ Tiny Goddess

Godfathers of British Psychedelia decide to go New Wave - what you hear might really surprise you!!!

Label: Harvest

Year of Release: 1980

While most of the non-first division sixties groups focused on the nostalgia circuit to earn their crust when the decade ended, a few tried to move with the times to varying degrees of success. Perhaps one of the most successful were The Easybeats, who renamed themselves Flash and The Pan and bothered global hit parades with wigged-out New Wave styled tracks with Knopfler-esque vocals, such as "Down Among The Dead Men" and "Waiting For A Train". 

Were Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos of Nirvana (the British psychedelic group, not the nineties grunge one, obviously) closely watching the activities of their antipodean friends closely, pencils and bookie's notepads in hand? If so, they've never said, but this one-off single under the name Erehwon certainly seems as if they were hoping for similar trojan horse action.

The A-side here is so far away from Nirvana's usual style it's actually genuinely astonishing. "The Hero" isn't just New Wave in its stylings, it also shows an art-school leaning that their sixties records perhaps never went overboard on. The droning synth rumbles and pulsing bass patterns of the track recall Gary Numan and eighties Wire far more than they do the light and airy world of their past. So dark and moody is the single that it sounds more like an album track than something which had any rightful place in the charts, but it's such an impressive shift away from the group's norm that I can only look on aghast. Very few groups can shift genres as convincingly and as successfully as this.

The track later re-emerged on Campbell-Lyons' solo LP of the same name in 1982, alongside tracks like the bafflingly titled "Naked Robots Watching Breakfast Television".