Dog Rose - Paradis Row/ Sunday Morning

Label: Satril

Year of Release: 1972

Well, this is a thorny mess.  Nobody can seem to agree on the band line-up for this recording at all.  The press release Satril Records put out for this single quotes entirely different personnel to the members eventually listed on their solitary 1972 LP release "All For The Love Of", and the only reasonable explanation is that as soon as this group imploded, the label quickly hired another bunch of musicians together to carry on under the Dog Rose name.  It's also possible that the name was owned by the label and musicians were hired for songs accordingly until a hit came.  

Confusion aside, "Paradis Row" occupies the same area as a great many early seventies pop singles, with a tiny drop of popsike in its veins, some anthemic McCartneyesque melancholy (the same strand inhabited by the theme to "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?") and a streak of Edison Lighthouse bubblegum.  Gently slapped bongos introduce swaggering riffs and beatnik-styled lyrical patter, and this eventually cascades into a huge rainbow streak of a chorus.  Regardless of who may or may not have been responsible for this, it's a bit of a buried gem, a could-have-been that never was.

The flip is much  more bizarre.  The press release describes it as "back to the fifties and rocking and rollin' down the avenue", but the jaunty pub piano, distortion and treble seem to be recalling The Kinks if anyone else.  Virtually absent of bass and overloaded with top-end screech, Graham Coxon would probably nod in approval at the lo-fi approach on offer here, though God knows what anyone made of it at the time.

If you were in any line-up of Dog Rose at any particular point and want to conclusively clear up a mystery here, please do get in touch.  

Sounds of Lancashire - Sliced Tomatoes/ Back to Bach

Label: Pye Disco Demand

Year of Release: 1975

I suspect the fact that Fatboy Slim sampled large chunks of The Just Brothers "Sliced Tomatoes" and plastered them all over "Rockafeller Skank" is a known fact even to the laziest of sample-spotters these days.  Already a Northern Soul classic by the time Norman Cook found other uses for it, the Brothers' sparse yet strangely brilliant track enjoyed a revival in clubs and on the airwaves after his plundering, and hasn't really gone away since - in fact, Demon Records put out a 7" vinyl reissue only last month, much to my relief as I'd been after a reasonably priced copy for some time.

What is perhaps less appreciated is the fact that Fatboy Slim was not the first person to get his grubby paws on it.  Back in the seventies, numerous record labels in the UK - Pye and Spark being the most notable criminals here - were quick to spot trends on the Northern Soul circuit and often put out cover versions of the main floor fillers which had often been long unavailable over here, if they were ever available at all.  Largely consisting of session musicians watching the studio clock, these rush-released discs veered in quality from being fair facsimiles to downright shoddy.  If you look on ebay, you can still see many of them, even the rarest ones, up for sale at bargain basement prices. There's a simple reason for this - nobody wants them.  They're the vinyl equivalent of the boyfriend or girlfriend everyone went out for a week because they looked a tiny bit like somebody else they fancied a lot more.  Do not DJ with any of them if you value your life, or at the very least your reputation.

"Sliced Tomatoes" by the mysterious Sounds of Lancashire takes things one step further, however. Noting the sparseness of the original, the session musicians in this case have decided to "helpfully" spruce the gaps in the record up with some burbling analogue synthesiser tinsel, creating a Moogy Wonderland disco record where a Northern Soul one should more logically be.  It bubbles and squeaks its way through the familiar Just Brothers riff like something out of a parallel universe where a Lieutenant Norman Cook of NASA was born twenty years earlier and dicked around with early synthesisers rather than turntables, probably wearing a spacesuit and saluting a lot during his routines.  I'm not making a case for this actually being good, mind you. Anyone expecting a Northern Soul version of Stereolab is going to be horribly disappointed.  However, it's absurd enough to warrant coverage on a blog as ridiculous as this one.

The actual proper A-side "Back to Bach" is another remake, this time of the brilliant "Bok to Bach" by Father's Angels.  That version covers similar territory but doesn't do so in as interesting a way.

Happy New Year everyone, by the way! I do have some genuinely good and completely obscure records lined up for the next couple of months at least, so don't surf away just yet. Please. 

Reupload - Five Go Down To The Sea? - Singing In Braille EP

Label: Creation

Year of Release: 1985

This entry has largely been triggered by me uncovering a review of Creation's first fifty singles over on the mothballed Stylus Magazine website. In this particular retrospective, the resident critic Todd Hutlock states that it is one of the worst pieces of vinyl Creation ever issued, and dismisses the whole affair very tartly indeed, ranking them alongside The Legend in the 'Alan McGee blind spot' stakes.

As you will doubtless appreciate, I seldom get a cob on when people reveal wildly different musical tastes to my own. If this were my general inclination, there would be whole days or possibly weeks when I'd do little more than walk around London foaming at the mouth, demanding to know why Misty's Big Adventure weren't occupying the Christmas number one slot, or why perfectly good friends of mine have been known to state that The Stereophonics are a good band. It's not worth it, and it's easier just to relax, have a nice glass of sherry and allow others to feel differently from your good self, however outright wrong they may be.

For some reason, this particular piece did get me rattled, though. I happen to believe that "Singing in Braille" is actually one of the best early Creation singles there is. Whilst it doesn't quite top "Velocity Girl" by Primal Scream or "Ballad of the Band" by Felt, it is a seriously unique, charged and thrilling bit of work. There's nothing very "Creation" about it in sound, this is true - there's none of the dalliances with walls of feedback which The Jesus and Mary Chain, Slaughter Joe or Meat Whiplash treated us to, and nor are the lo-fi retro-sixties garage jangles overly apparent. What the track does have instead is a decidedly angular, dischordant thrust, with spitting Screaming Lord Sutch styled vocals, wobbly basslines and sledgehammer rhythms. Whilst it does have a chorus of sorts, the entire structure is as gloriously messy as the sleeve, seemingly hanging by a thread but holding together nonetheless. The energy you get from watching good musicians improvise is also apparent here - you expect the entire act to collapse, but instead everything holds together, and is shot through with adrenalin.

Cork's "Five Go Down to The Sea?" would probably have been more at home on Ron Johnson Records than Creation, having a similar style to a great many of their acts. The brilliant biography of Creation "My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize" hints that McGee found the band impossible to work with, his doubts possibly being raised when he went around to their houseshare for dinner and was presented with a plate of Jelly Babies.

However easy they were to deal with - and I'd be willing to bet they would have presented anybody a few challenges - they did create a fantastic noise which they allegedly felt was partly cribbed by Stump at a later date. Sadly, the band ceased to be in 1989 when the frontman Finbarr Donnelly drowned in Hyde Park serpentine pond whilst drunk. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no CD retrospectives available of the band despite numerous vinyl EP issues worming their way on to shop stalls, and that's something somebody should consider rectifying. In the meantime, here's what I consider to be their best moment.

Tracklisting:

1. Singing in Braille

2. Aunt Nelly

3. Silk Brain Worm Women

(This blog entry was originally uploaded in December 2009).

The Pipkins - Pipkins Maxi Party

Label: Columbia
Year of Release: 1970

The Pipkins were an absurd and frankly faintly irritating novelty group created by songwriting supremo Roger Greenaway working in tandem with sometime Edison Lighthouse (and Brotherhood of Man and Flower Pot Men) singer Tony Burrows.  "Gimme Dat Ding" went top ten in both the USA and the UK as numerous people wigged out to the sounds of two respected music industry men putting on silly voices.  Like a high-budget version of your Dad and Uncle's drunken Christmas turn after the last dregs of Vermouth have been supped from the bottle, it remains something of an anomaly. The saloon room piano boogie may have slightly helped invent Lieutenant Pigeon, but beyond that the hit is something of a solitary twig on pop's family tree (and perhaps thank God for that).

Given the international success of "Ding", it's probably not that surprising that The Pipkins brand continued for several years as Burrows, Greenaway and various record labels tried to milk the concept for more hits.  There was even a long-playing record where you could apparently hear the pair's footsteps walking down into the distance as the run-out grooves pulled the needle towards the record's end.

Of all the examples I've heard, however, this single remains the most ludicrous.  The third outing for the project, "Maxi Party" tried to get the pair to do a big hits medley, but sounds utterly deranged - too deranged to sell, in fact - and actually genuinely funny.  Sounding less like Jive Bunny and more akin to Vic and Bob's bizarre approximation of Paul Simon and Neil Sedaka, Burrows and Greenaway growl and squeak through "Mama Told Me Not To Come", "Give Me Just A Little More Time", and "In The Summertime", backed by a cheap and nasty, out-of-tune sounding piano.  I admit that side one is probably all you need to hear to get the gist of the joke, but there is something strangely delightful about hearing grown men with falsetto voices squealing through Randy Newman and Chairman of the Board songs with all the respect of a demolition crew.

Perhaps to prove that the whole thing was just a big jape and there were no hard feelings intended, Greenaway even kicks two of his own compositions in the balls, namely "My Baby Loves Lovin'" and "Melting Pot", the latter of which descends into scatological humour and leaves the single nowhere to go but off the turntable.  Nice work, lads, and it's pleasing to know that your careers survived this strange diversion, but please don't reform under this guise and make any more records of this ilk.

They Said There'd Be Peace On Earth

It's often the tradition at this time of year for me to slip into my Santa Claus outfit and throw various vintage flop singles out of my grotto for all of you to enjoy.  However, I won't be bothering this year.  Why not?  Well, because I posted up a lot of Christmas entries last year at a rapid rate and they remain among the least read on this blog.  As a result, I guessed you weren't really all that interested.

They're all still live and waiting to be read and appreciated, though, so if you do decide you're interested please click on the Xmas link and go hither and hear the sleigh bells.  A normal common-or-garden "Left and to the Back" entry will follow in due course, or at least something as "normal" as this blog gets.

Apologies also to any readers who noticed the technical problems we were having with some of the mp3s in preview mode this week.  It looks as if they've been fixed now, but if anything unusual happens, please let me know.