Phil Brady & The Ranchers - Exeter By-Pass/ Papa

Scouse country stalwart's solitary Pye release

Label: Pye

Year of Release: 1970

Imagine, just as the Merseybeat scene really began to get swinging, having the sheer misfortune but pure artistic honesty to be fronting a country group in Liverpool. More unscrupulous folk would have dropped the cowboy hat in a jiffy in favour of a Beatle haircut and some copped Motown rhythms, but Phil Brady carried on as he started in 1962 - performing and releasing a series of anglicised country songs, indifferent to the trends around him.

In spite of - or perhaps because of - this singular vision, he began to build a strong live following in the North West of England, which caused the Cavern Club to offer him the chance to release the novelty track "An American Sailor at the Cavern" on their own record label. Sadly, the Cavern's financial demise occurred at almost exactly the same time this record was pressed up, and as a result very few copies made it into the shops. If you spot a copy, snap it up - it's one of the rarest singles of the period, and certainly one of the most unusual Cavern souvenirs.

His other releases are more commonly chanced upon, especially his LPs which were at one point a fairly regular sight in the record sections of department stores in particular. This release for Pye, however, marks his last release on 45, and is a charming, warm and mellow lovelorn contemplation of the Exeter By-pass of all things. You won't hear that in Nashville. In this instance, Brady clearly had the courage to drop distinctly English images into a country track, and it pays off in a way it simply wouldn't if he'd copied from the same rulebook as numerous plastic anglo-cowboys and played the broken hearted, troubled but rugged man from a place he'd yet to visit. "Exeter By-Pass" is equal parts English rain and Southern Comfort (though what an appalling drink that would make in reality).

Phil Brady and The Ranch Set - Please Come Back

Label: Go

Year of Release: 1967

First, a disclaimer - sometimes I feel obliged to upload things not because I necessarily feel that they're great, odd, groundbreaking, interestingly awful or even historically relevant, but because I know there are several people online who have spent years wondering what they sound like. I know that feeling only too well. You browse through a label's sixties back catalogue, spy the name of an artist who is utterly unfamiliar to you, and you want to hear it. It doesn't matter that you've been told it's not worth worrying about, you have to sample it for yourself. And it would be so, so rude to deny you good people the chance to scratch that particular itch in this instance.

Records on the "Go" label, or its sister operation "Strike", are quite highly sought after by gap-plugging sixties collectors, mostly because it's an early example of a British cottage indie label. This curiosity has never been sated by the fact that almost all of the label's output is actually middling fare, consisting primarily of tracks which were never hits because they never had any particular right to be. Had they been operational in any other decade, it's fairly unlikely we'd even be discussing them right now, and they'd probably be consigned to the same 50p curio-bin that releases on D'Art (a seventies indie label), Plastic Speech (eighties) or Rotator Records (nineties) are now. The sixties, however, are deemed much too important for anything scarce to be entirely ignored - thus this entry has been born.

I can't dig up any meaningful information about Phil Brady & The Ranch Set anywhere, beyond the fact that they were a UK-based Country Rock outfit. "Please Come Back" is a trotting, twanging little thang with rich-as-Bisto vocals which is - and I'm conscious of the fact that when I'm slightly indifferent I use this word far too much - pleasant. The chorus is riddled with some interesting Joe Meek-esque echoes, which is curious when you consider the parallels between the go-it-alone operations of Go/ Strike and his own production work, but most of the rest isn't startling to the ears, sounding like a standard live band run-through of a toe-tapping ditty.

Lovers of authentic Country music frequently dis British country records for striving to sound like the real thing, but making fundamental errors in their arrangements which give away their country of birth far too easily. I'm absolutely no expert on the genre, but that definitely sounds like the case here - Phil Brady and His Ranch Set (what ranch had they worked on, I wonder?) so badly want to sound American that this borders on pastiche. I have to admit that this is one of the track's strengths for me - I do find the winks and nods to the range life quite charming, especially as they were probably from Wembley or somewhere. Still though, this is hardly worth bidding a ton of money on e-bay for, and I'd strongly advise you good people not to do so.