A group's biggest hit is not always their most artistically successful, and this is certainly the case with Warm Sounds, a group who released a trio of singles on Decca Records' more hip imprint Deram during 1967/68.
Thier first single, Birds And Bees, was their sole hit, reaching No. 27 in the UK charts, a heavily orcestrated and rather ornate number with a vaguely fey, psychedelic feel. Follow up Sticks and Stones, with its music hall vibe, proved to be a flop, and so it appears that a change of sound was adopted for their third and final single.
The resulting record, Nite Is A-Comin' is considerably heavier than what had come before, opening with wild guitar and chants of 'Hallelujah' and then launching into a gloriously chaotic tune that sounds like The Mamas And The Papas on particularly strong acid, namechecking The Grateful Dead before launching into a killer, maracca driven chorus.
It really is an impressive disc, one of those late 60s pieces where it functions both as pop and art, a situation that would become rarer as the decade grew to a close.
Despite the acclaim they receive today, the late 1960s releases by The Kinks met with haphazard success. It was also a prodigious period for group leader Ray Davies, and many tracks were recorded in the 67-68 period that ended up dribbling out on single B sides and eventually the US-only 1973 release The Great Lost Kinks Album.
Lavender Hill is one of these outtakes, dating from 1967. Like No. 2 hit Waterloo Sunset, Lavender Hill mythologises another part of London - this time a busy thoroughfare near Clapham Junction.
If anything, it's a southerner's counterpoint to the Beatles' Penny Lane. Opening with a harmonium drone, the song settles into a lysergic groove, like a more zonked out Lazy Old Sun or Big Sky, two of the trippiest original Kinks releases. The backing vocals are some of The Kinks' most atmospheric, sounding like an attempt to emulate the sound of backwards masking, while the instrumental break features rather uncharacteristic wah-wah guitar.
In the song, the protagonist views a walk down the street as an eternal trip into a fantasy world, feeling the sun, watching the clouds roll by and being dimly aware of people shining their shoes and eating biscuits with tea, but with a disassociative sound rarely heard on Kinks records.
If you ask an American chum who the biggest acts of the British Invasion of the 1960s were, don't be Suprised if Herman's Hermits come up. For a period in the States they rivalled the Beatles, but many of their biggest stateside hits were not even released as singles in their home country.
Originally a beat group from Manchester, the group were taken under the wing of producer and emerging pop empresario Mickie Most, who moulded them into a pop band of little sexual or intellectual threat, helped by the toothy gauchness of frontman Peter Noone, who resembled a singing Bullwinkle the squirrel.
Of the American market only singles which hit Billboard No. 1 in the Hot 100, Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter (from a British television play) has a period whimsical charm, whilst I'm Henry The Eighth I Am must be one of the oddest chart toppers ever - a beat rendition of an old music hall number.
By 1967, their time had passed in the USA, although hits continued in the UK, including their second-biggest over here, My Sentimental Friend, an elegiac pop number that made it to No. 2 in 1969.
By 1971, Noone had decided to forge a solo career, still under the aegis of Most, and for his first single, it was decided to use a song by a one-hit wonder from south London, which had recently been circulated as a demo.
The one-hit wonder was David Bowie, whose Space Oddity had been a huge hit, but one he'd failed to emulate with subsequent singles. The song, Oh You Pretty Things, was quite different sonically to Bowie's most recent single, the Turgid Holy Holy, being an upbeat number that just happened to retain the apocalyptic lyrical thrust of Bowie's current LP, The Man Who Sold The World.
The sound of Noone breezing his way though Nietzschen lyircs about homosapiens having outgrown their use just doesn't seem appropriate, but the British record buying public disagreed, and took it to No. 12 in the charts - which presumably helped Bowie get his contract with RCA Records in the September of '71.
Nell Campbell, better known as Little Nell, is but a footnote in the history of pop, but an important one nonetheless. She's best known for her appearance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and secondly for an unfortunate television outtake for a performance where her breasts repeatedly stole the limelight.
In the wake of Rocky Horror's success, she released several records between 1975 and 78 on A&M Records, and one on the PRE Label in 1980. None were particularly successful, and to be fair, Nell's brittle helium vocals are not everyone's cup of tea.
It's a real shame though, as her music is pretty charming, good humoured and fun, and The Pop Archaeologist wishes she's had the chance to record an album.
Do The Swim is the best known of Little Nell's solo work, due to her exposure in the outtake clip mentioned above. Written by RHPS alumni Brian Thomson and Richard Hartley, Do The Swim is a postmodern kitsch collage, opening with a descending Duane Eddy guitar and then pinching the opening bars of The Ohio Express' Yummy Yummy Yummy, before a disco beat kicks in. The backing vocals in the chorus is pure Rocky Horror, mixing falsetto with baritone. It's inexplicable that this was relegated to the B side.
On her follow-up disc See You round Like A Record, written by Campbell with Thomson and Hartley, the excesses of Do The Swim were reined in, and the result is a heavily Phil Spector influenced number, all thumping grand piano and castanets, and throwing in references to Desert Island Discs and Twist And Shout. It's quite reminiscent of Wizzard, but the trouble is that by 1976, that group were a spent force commercially.
After the release of this, Nell spent 1977 working on the TV programme Rock Follies of '77 and Derek Jarman's Jubilee (the latter along with a young Adam Ant, Toyah and Siouxsie and the Banshees), and her remaining 70s singles comprised of reissued tracks.
Her final single, released in June 1980, was the theme song for the documentary film of Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World, a humourous yet subversive and feminist take on beauty competitions founded in 1972. The sound of this waxing is distinctly new wave - no suprisingly, considering her association with Jarman's circle, although it is pure pop, lamenting that 'Oh this competition's tough, I'm up against those boys'. Her 'Ambitions are to be a mum and gain my PHD'.
Dancing around in a 'Miss World's End' (notorious punk enclave, and the location of the Sex boutique) sash in front of a life sized photo of Logan in his traditional half man/half woman drag at the start of the movie, it's chances of being a hit were probably doomed, even though gender bending was to become a hot property in pop once more within a few years.
Tommy James and The Shondells had an unusual route to fame and fortune. Their first single, Hanky Panky, was only a local hit in 1964, and was not picked up by any national labels. However, a copy made its way to a Pensylvanian DJ, whose airings of the record proved so popular that tens of thousands of bootleg copies were pressed until James was able to negotiate a deal with Roulette Records for national distribution. Two years after its initial release, the song hit No. 1 in the Billboard Top 100.
With new Shondells, James had a string of top ten hits in the USA, with an energetic sound that was pure pop - exemplified in the fact that one song, I Think We're Alone Now, became a huge 1980s hit for pop ingenue Tiffany.
One thing the group did lack was credibility, being considered a bubblegum act, much to the chargin of James. In a bid to gain recognition as artists, the single Crimson And Clover, written by James and the group's drummer Peter Lucia Jr, was released in November 1968.
Although in strict musical terms the record was of a recognisably bubblegum structure, it was performed at what can only be described as an etherial pace, with long instrumental breaks between the appropriately tripped-out vocal. A tremelo effect is also used to good ends on both the guitar track and the vocal coda towards the end of the song.
Like Hanky Panky previously, the success of the record was taken out of James' hands; having played a rough mix to some personell of a radio station he had worked with previously, he was suprised to find that they had surruptitiously recorded the track and broadcast it. In the end, it was this rough mix that was issued due to public enthusiasm for the track.
Music obsessives like the Pop Archaeologist go nuts over unreleased material from our fave pop acts. A lot of the time, however, tracks remained unreleased for a reason - perhaps they were never finished, or judged to be substandard. Sometimes though, you hear an archive recording that makes you wonder if fate would have taken a different turn for the artist had it been released at the time.
By 1974, the career of Marc Bolan and his group T.Rex was severely on the wane. The group would never see the top ten again, and the latest album managed only three weeks in the charts. Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow was certainly full of interesting ideas, reflecting Marc's fascination with soul music (a whole year before Bowie's Young Americans), but its production was over ornate and many of the recordings smeared with coke-induced ponderousness.
Bolan at this point had become increasingly confident that he could produce his own records, alienating long term producer Tony Visconti with whom he parted with acrimoniously, and his first post-Visconti 7" was the May 1974 single Light Of Love.
On this record, the increasingly baroque stylings of the group were banished, giving way to a much more lightweight feel, both sonically and lyrically. Poorly received in the UK, it made it to No. 22, and a release in the USA as part of a new deal with rcently established disco label Casablanca Records failed completely.
This period in Bolans career has gone through some critical appraisal over the years, helped in part by the flood of unreleased and alternate takes that have appeared on the market over the years, one of the most intruiging series of which was the release of alternate versions of each studio album released between 1972 and 77.
Light Of Love was the opening track of the 1975 LP Bolan's Zip Gun, his first studio LP to fail to reach the charts since 1968. The alternate version of this album, Precious Star, kicks off with a version of the song whose feel is quite different to the official release.
This recording is much more obviously disco than the released take - the slightly awkward drum track and hand claps of the original give way to a much sleeker pounding sound, echoed in the rythym guitar. In fact, in places it bears a remarkable resemblance to Blondie's Heart Of Glass, one of the biggest hits of 1979. Quite remarkable, given that in 1974, the dico sound was only just emerging.
'What might have been' is always a fun game to play, and it's hard not to with this recording.
The first half of the 1960s was a golden period for girl groups; the second half rather less so. As pop became increasingly sophisticated, the girl groups appeared rather anachronistic and even kitsch - the only group that managed to continue selling records were Diana Ross and the Supremes, who tried to remain contemporary by performing 'socially conscious' numbers and cover versions of Dylan and Sly Stone tunes.
Reparata and the Delrons were not a terribly successful girl group; their biggest hit in the USA, making No. 60 in the pop charts, was Whenever a Teenager Cries, released in late 1964, and bearing more than a passing resemblence to the Dixie Cups' Chapel of Love, a US No. 1 earlier in the year.
That should have been it for the group; certainly by 1968 they should have been dead in the water. But that year they managed one final hit single, which only made No. 127 in the USA, but was a top 20 hit in the UK, making No. 13.
Captain Of Your Ship has a very stripped down, predominantly acoustic feel considering its genre, with a definite Beach Boys influence, especially in the throbbing bass and swelling keyboards at the end of the verses and the use of sound of effects, in particluar the 'Morse Code' on the bridge before the chorus, which was a gloriously dated pat-a-cake affair.
The video here is from German televison, and features some wonderfully period special effects, while the group perform dated dance moves in their Quant like mini dresses.
Some of the song will sound familiar to any British person who was aware of the pop charts at the turn of the 1990s; the bridge was sampled by cheeky pop minx and early advocate of retro style Betty Boo, for her first solo hit, Doin' The Do.
