The Time Machine - Summer of Love

Label: Bam Caruso

Year of Release: 1986

From the original press release:

"It's Summer Time again - and to mark the occasion Bam Caruso are releasing what is sure to become this summer's most played record...

THE SUMMER OF LOVE by THE TIME MACHINE.

A catchy tribute to summers gone, this tune is a medley of hits from the summer of '67.  Included are such gems as 'Paper Sun', 'Flowers in the Rain', 'San Francisco', 'Whiter Shade of Pale', 'California Dreaming' and 'All You Need Is Love'.

THE TIME MACHINE faithfully reproduce these hits with amazing accuracy and skill (you can't see the joins!)

A MUST for all beach parties this year!!.. and not a chicken in sight".

Now, Bam Caruso were a fantastic label in the eighties, unearthing and issuing tons of hidden sixties gems for the general public's enjoyment, and their crowning achievement was unquestionably the Rubble series of albums.  Seldom will I hear a bad word said against the organisation.

This single, however, baffles me.  Its purpose was surely to lampoon the Stars on 45 styled discs which cluttered up the charts at one point, but their time had come and gone when "Summer of Love" was issued, and Jive Bunny had some years to arrive.  More to the point, the comment about "seeing the joins" - whilst clearly ironic - also jangles on the nerves a little when you consider that the joins are so apparent on this single in places that it sounds like an ITV Chart Show rundown rather than a medley.  At least Starsound and Jive Bunny kept a consistent rhythmic flow going, for all their obvious faults.

It is a thoroughly bizarre part of their catalogue, and does have a curiosity value of sorts, but more worthy of your attention is the flipside "Another Scene (In Black and White)" which is eighties psych revival pop to a tee (or perhaps that should be 'to an English tea'), with squeaking Casio keyboards switched to a sixties setting, vocals delivered in a Robyn Hitchcock style, and mystical guitar lines.  The eighties psychedelic revival material somehow could never quite escape the decade of its origin, and - as is also apparent on the Syd Barrett tribute album "Beyond the Wildwood" - always had a smoothness and clarity to it the original material lacked.  

I doubt that many people will seriously regret missing this first time around, but it's a nice enough addition to your mp3 playlist, and may prove to be a party talking point should you ever feel like digging it out for that purpose.

Group X - There are Eight Million Cossack Melodies - And This Is One of Them

Label: Fontana
Year of Release: 1963

The sixties guitar-based instrumental act is seldom looked upon with much fondness or regard. True, there are some Joe Meek productions out there which some like to spin, and few would object to the likes of Dick Dale on their stereo, but there were sheer volumes of twangy-guitar playing, foot shuffling smiling boys (they usually were boys) on the circuit back in the early part of the decade. The NME et al would generally have "Best Instrumental Group" categories in their year end polls, which The Shadows normally won hands down.

Perhaps the spectre of The Shadows and Hank Marvin's perceived naffness eventually did for instrumental acts everywhere, but it's when you come across inventive little ditties like this one that you almost mourn the passing of the genre. Group X were apparently a studio-based affair, but this oddly titled tribute to the Ukraine/ Russian region (I wonder if Peter Solowka out of the Wedding Present was listening?) is everything an instrumental pop record of the period should be - fizzing, buzzing and twanging with so many hooks it earworms its way into your brain immediately. Here seems to be the primary difference between vocal acts and their instrumental cousins of the time - when lyrical phrases were lacking, the melody lines had to have an extra added potency to hit home, and so they frequently did. Once again, this is hyperpop stuff, very very infectious and with little time for subtlety.

"There are Eight Million Cossack Melodies..." wasn't a hit despite (or perhaps because of) its preposterously long title, but the number of online mentions its received on forums recently would suggest that its remembered by many. Group X never did go on to any sort of faceless success, but I'm sure they found other session work to occupy their time.

Venus and the Razorblades - I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are

Label: Spark

Year of Release: 1977

Kim Fowley, bless him, has given us so much over the years, from novelty UFO records to warped pop music about taking drugs, to early Soft Machine recordings, to Gene Vincent comebacks.  He also apparently went through a phase of greeting any would-be business partners with the explosive phrase "Hey! Grease me some of that teenage dogshit!" which is possibly the best business greeting in the world, although so far it's done my career no favours whatsoever.  

Venus and the Razorblades were his attempt at creating a female-fronted New Wave band, although like many of his projects, the whole thing appeared to run out of steam in a matter of months.  "I Wanna Be Where The Boys Are" sounds not unlike one of the songs off the flop film "Times Square", having a grit which sounds slightly more glam than punk - although there's admittedly a Star In Their Eyes-styled Patti Smith feel to the whole thing too.  "I wanna fight like the boys fight!" spits Dyan Diamond defiantly, who Fowley later tried to groom for solo success.  

This single does sound very dated and slightly contrived, and it's not surprising it regularly gets overlooked in favour of other records for punk compilations, but it has a very rough and ready charm which means it shouldn't be completely disregarded, and it does showcase Fowley's ridiculous flexibility when it comes to fashions and genres in Rock.

Download it Here

Update - Marnie and Blessed Ethel

The phrase "slim pickings" springs to mind. If it weren't enough that I'm personally quite overworked at the moment, on the recent occasions when I have had a chance to nip into a second hand record store to consider their wares, I've found very little to get excited about. The overpriced sixties hits are all present and correct, but there's little else to shout about. If the only thing you've even been marginally tempted by is a copy of Rory Bremner's legendary "Nineteen Not Out" satirical cricketing disc, then that's a poor month by anybody's standards. Do second hand record stores have summer lulls just the same as everyone else, I wonder?

Still, such disappointments give me a chance to do a bit of an update on people we've previously featured on the blog. Ever since starting this site up I've noticed that no sooner do you write about a band and upload their material than you spot another single or album of theirs weeks later you could quite easily have added to the original entry. It may seem as if I'm lumping two female fronted indie bands together for the sake of it here, but the reality is just that more material of theirs showed up quite recently.

Artist/ Title: Marnie: "Voices/ Vision"
Label: Progression
Year of Release: 1996

First out of the traps here is Marnie. I put out a request for further information about them last time around, and got no responses at all from anybody. I will repeat my plea again now - it's extremely rare for any band, however marginal, to simply "disappear from view" after they released a few records in the nineties. Most acts from that era leave a dirty great Internet snail trail, or are such keen vanity Googlists that they pop up to say hello within weeks of you posting the original entry. Unlike the sixties hippies and beat bands, they don't simply get dayjobs running pet supply stores and forget that anything ever happened. This single is really more of the same scratchy, angsty melodrama from the girls known as Olga and Michelle, with the same snappy A-side/ doomy, atmospheric B-side combination as their last release. Once again, Roman Jugg out of The Damned was at the producer's controls, but beyond that I know nothing. Come on, somebody must have seen Marnie live once or have something to report about them.

Artist/ Title: Blessed Ethel: Dog (b/w "Something Weird" and "Crystal Tips")
Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1993

Then, of course, there's Blessed Ethel, the band who famously beat Oasis in a Battle of the Bands contest, winning a battle but plainly failing to win the war.

Information on them is rather more conclusive since they generated quite a bit of press at the time, but I have nothing much to add beyond my last entry. "Dog" is a bit psychotic, sounding part Suzi Quatro, part grunge fed through a variety of gnarling studio effects.

Download it Here

End of update. Soz kids - there is some new stuff waiting in the wings, but I'm waiting until I've got a decent enough pile of it before I have a vinyl ripping session.

Thurman - Lux

Label: Righteous

Year of Release: 1995

This may turn out to be the least popular blog entry I've ever written on here.  To most critics, you see, Thurman were considered a dreadful band, so mind-bogglingly awful that even their plagiarism was unsubtle.  Their lead singer's hair was mocked in Select magazine (and to be fair, it did look rather like a Royal Guardsman's Busby at one point) the album was derided in the weekly press, and the fact that nobody bought it and it regularly appears in second hand store bargain bins today should surely be no surprise.  It was cursed.

Thurman allegedly bought much of this upon themselves.  Rumours circulated throughout the mid-nineties that they had originally been a heavy metal band who had been asked to change their style to Britpop to get signed.  Wikipedia is still quoting this as fact today.  I feel somewhat ambivalent about this story.  Interfering A&R executives do indeed tamper with the sound of bands regularly in order to get chart action out of them, but a leap from heavy metal to Britpop sounds rather like asking a techno artist to change tack to recording soul ballads.  Why not simply sign one of the several thousands acts out there playing the right genre already?  It may of course be that Thurman did indeed change tack when Britpop was brewing out of their own choices, but they'd be no less guilty of doing that than certain members of Menswear if other popular rumours are to be believed, and the latter didn't exactly have negative press to start with.

Despite this, it's impossible to ignore the fact that "Lux" does sound like a very cheeky, chancey little album, and it's actually that aspect of it which makes me grin from ear to ear at times.  Numerous tracks are so derivative that it's a wonder the band didn't get their arses kicked by a team of lawyers, and in fact I'm sure they would have done had the album sold in any reasonable quantities.  "Loaded" is "Children of the Revolution" all over again, right down to the vocals.  The opening riff to "Cheap Holiday" is as close to "All The Young Dudes" as you can possibly get without directly cribbing every single detail.  There are numerous other naggingly familiar sounding riffs and melody lines throughout the album that show a band determined to pilfer their way through the classic rock catalogue, stopping at nothing.  However, as Elastica were doing much the same thing at the same time to widespread praise for their supposed post-modern daring, why were Thurman rapped around the knuckles by the critics for having keen ears for somebody else's tune?

There have been some rabid online defenses of this record since, but the truth frequently lies between two stools, and in my humble opinion, "Lux" is actually quite a good album - neither a lost classic nor a complete dud, just an enjoyable listen.  There's a gleeful cheek to the whole thing which makes it sound very much of its time even though its clearly in thrall to the past, and rather like the neo-psychedelic bands which littered the eighties, Thurman appeared to be taking elements of mod and glam into their work and parodying them affectionately rather than tip-toeing gently around them.  "Oh... what a luv-er-ly day/ To drink some English Tea" they proclaim during the rather Move-ish track of the same name, banging most of the period details firmly on the head.  Other tracks such as "Famous" chime along in the manner of so many mid-sixties pop 45s, feeling breezy and effortless.

Part of me wants to believe that this album is indeed the work of metallers pissing around and parodying a movement - if so, that makes tracks like "English Tea" pieces of Spinal Tap-esque genius.  Whatever the truth, it's not a bad record, and is probably actually the most typical record of its era that's ever been made.  In the year 2050 when they've finally invented a computer which can produce an album in any style you care to name, and you ask to hear the mighty Hal's version of mid-nineties Britpop, this will be what the great machine spits out, and not "Parklife" like you thought.  Relax with it, and have fun - it's only an album nobody bought.

Tracklisting:

1. She's a Man

2. Loaded

3. Cheap Holiday

4. Strung Out

5. It Would Be

6. English Tea

7. Famous

8. Now I'm a Man

9. Clowns

10. Lewis Brightworth

11. Talk to Myself

12. Automatic Thinker

13. Flavour Explosion

Download it Here