The Exception - Jack Rabbit

Label: President
Year of Release: 1969

Birmingham based band The Exception are probably best known amongst aficionados of sixties beat for "The Eagle Flies On Friday" (quite unbelievably, there is a clip of The Exception live if you click on the link) an aggressive, snarling piece of work about threatening bosses with baseball bats which appeared on the "Chocolate Soup for Diabetics" compliation.  Their other output remains rather less well explored, and perhaps not without good reason - whilst they were capable of cooking a mean enough groove, not much of their work truly excels.

Their penultimate single "Jack Rabbit" is a neat enough piece of pop, however, which is snappy, to the point and urgent, getting its business over and done with in under two minutes.  For my taste, the B-side "Keep The Motor Running" is preferable as a really neat piece of mellow, bluesy work which manages to be moody and rock and roll in what must have seemed like a very retro way by 1969.  I won't pretend that either side is an essential piece of work, but the sound does pre-empt a lot of early seventies pop, with the flip almost (but not quite) coming close to Mungo Jerry territory.

Members Dave Pegg and Roger Hill later became members of Fairport Convention, with the whereabouts of lead singer Bugsy Eastwood being less well known.

These Animal Men - Speed King

Label: Hi-Rise
Year of Release: 1994

Many years after the event, it feels odd to be talking about These Animal Men.  Odd in a "Did that really happen?" way.  The band smelled suspicious to many right from the very off, launching their career with a series of slogans such as "Never trust a crustie" and "Don't be ashamed of your adolescence", and subsequently ended up seeming like an exercise in hype and branding rather than a proper band.  The sleeve of "Speed King" followed this sensationalism neatly, including an amphetamine wrap (although Pulp would do something similar on "Sorted for Es and Whizz" a couple of years later to much greater effect).

With the benefit of distance, the whole phenomenon does seem a tiny bit silly and dated now (especially the references to speed - honestly, who on earth has seen such a thing recently?) but the band weren't incapable of sounding urgent when they wanted to, which gives everyone an inkling of how the music press hooked on to them.  "Speed King" isn't without charm, and rollicks its way along in such an urgent and aggressive way that you can almost believe the band were under the influence when they recorded it.  The NME tagged the act with the label "New Wave of New Wave" alongside S*M*A*S*H and Echobelly, but only the latter managed to get reassessed as a Britpop act as soon as the phenomenon died its predictable death nine months later, with dire consequences for the other contenders.  Most of their follow-up material was ignored, and is now widely available on iTunes for further investigation if anyone seems tempted by the idea.

Hitless until the end despite a Top of the Pops appearance, and seldom (if ever) referenced in the music press today, These Animal Men are a strange example of how hype can sometimes create a bright and powerful spark without causing the kindle to burn enough to create the flames of an entire career.

Ex-members later went on to form Mo Solid Gold with soul singer KA Hepburn, creating a new and rather more interesting sound.  Despite major label backing, this failed to go much further as well (and may prove another topic for another day).

Double Feature - Baby Get Your Head Screwed On

Label: Deram
Year of Release: 1967

Whilst the Madchester/ Baggy revolution of the late eighties and early nineties is widely regarded to be the moment where psychedelia, guitar pop, soul and dance collided, in truth such dabbling around with the audio palette was occurring long before the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.  There are tons of examples of singles released throughout the late sixties alone which tried to tick as many genre boxes as possible.

Cat Stevens's track "Baby Get Your Head Screwed On", for example, is given a particularly soulful psychedelic rendition here (or should that be psychedelic soulful rendition?) complete with parping horns, proto-Electric Light Orchestra styled string solos, and a gritty, gnashing vocal.  Whilst there's very little doubt that the track is actually quite ahead of its time, it falls just short of being brilliant by dint of the fact that the tune gets rather repetitive once they've set out their stall within the first minute.  There are very few fuzzy, psychedelic records of this era which will tempt you on to the dancefloor in a similar way, however, and for that reason alone it deserves the share of attention it has since had from aficionados.

The flip "Come On Baby" has an insistent groove which isn't dis-similar to The Equals, but again ploughs a similar furrow and fails to progress as much as it perhaps could do across its full two-and-a-half minutes.

Double Feature were a duo consisting of Bill Hall and Brian Lane who hailed from Birmingham, and following the failure of this and the follow-up "Handbags and Gladrags" to make a commercial impression they seemed to fade from view.  If anyone knows what happened after that or if they're up to anything now, please do pass the information on.

Rum Do - 12 March

London dwelling readers might be delighted (or horrified) to learn that I've been invited to do a DJ set at the long-running "Rum Do" event at The Castle in Whitechapel on 12 March.  Naturally, I'll be working within the rubric of the evening which tends to be sixties mod pop, Northern Soul and rock and roll, although I'm sure I'll find a way of sneaking in some beat and popsike as well.  

Sadly, this means that anyone expecting to hear hot toe-tapping discs by the likes of Nanette Newman, Bernard Manning, Julian Clary and Big Cherry is going to walk out very disappointed, but I wouldn't suppose that many of you were (and I'm not sure what night you'd go to if you genuinely wanted to hear stuff like that, but if you ever find a venue, please let me know).

Also on the bill are "Dylan Moran's favourite band" The De Selby Codex, Wol and a special secret guest.  The Facebook invite and details can be found here, but just in case you can't access that, the details are:

Rum Do, The Castle, Whitechapel, London, E1 1LN


8:30pm - midnight


Saturday 12 March

Come over and say hello if you make it down.

Re-upload: Beacon Street Union - Speed Kills/ South End Incident

Label: MGM
Year of Release: 1967

The Boston-based Beacon Street Union were a psychedelic rock band who achieved some moderate and very culty success in America in the late sixties, and pop up on compilations rather less frequently than you'd expect for some baffling reason. They weren't half bad in their arty, hippy-ish ways, as the "Speed Kills" side of this single proves, whose 1:45 two chord rush actually predates some of Wire's more interesting miniatures by a whole decade.

According to other online sources, the band used to enjoy throwing bags of flour around on stage to create a low budget "fog" effect (is this what Fields of the Nephilim were also trying to do, then?) and messed with the audience's ears where expectations of volume were concerned, blasting eardrums out frequently without warning. They had enough of a following to get a few albums out in their career, and they certainly had their fans, but ultimately never achieved much in the USA apart from some very low-rung Top 75 placings.

In Britain it's safe to say they achieved even less, although somebody clearly cared enough to get this single imported - the hole through the middle of the label indicates that this was shipped over rather than purchased on holiday. Perhaps they were a Southend-on-Sea resident who had their own interpretation of the "South End Incident" side, which is drenched in sheer paranoia and foreboding, very much like the Honeycombs "Eyes" track I placed on this blog not too long ago.


(This blog entry was originally posted on 9 October 2008.  Since that time, somebody has left an anonymous comment to suggest that Beacon Street Union only used flour on stage once.  Presumably that's once more than is strictly advisable).