Best known these days for her long running role as Audrey Roberts in the even longer-running TV soap Coronation Street, Susan Frances Nicholls (born 23 November 1943) got her first big break in the infamous soap opera Crossroads.
Sue Nicholls played Marilyn Gates on Crossroads from 1964-68. A storyline saw waitress, occasional receptionist (and, later, Vicar's wife) Marilyn become a nightclub singer, performing the song Where Will You Be?, co-written by husband a wife team Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent (Hatch also wrote the theme tune to Crossroads, later covered by Paul McCartney and Wings) on the show. Issued as a single by Pye Records, Where Will You Be? charted in July 1968, eventually reaching number 17 in the UK Singles Chart.
Although goodness knows why, because it’s awful.
Sue’s clipped RADA vocals betray her ‘posh bird’ roots, and she sounds, frankly, ludicrous. Not a surprise really: her father was Sir Harmar Nicholls, later Lord Harmar-Nicholls, Conservative MP for Peterborough (1950–1974) and MEP for Greater Manchester South (1979–1984); Sue should be correctly addressed as ‘The Honourable Susan Nicholls’.
Still, Sue clearly thought she had something, because she left Crossroads to pursue a career in music. Her character, however, stayed: actress Nadine Hanwell took over the role. It’s testament to the pulling power of TV that her first disc was ever a hit – the follow up All the Way to Heaven/I’ll be Waiting For You (both also written by Hatch and Trent) failed to chart. Undeterred, she enjoyed a short career in a cabaret – at one point singing between strip acts at a nightclub in Vienna – before returning to the stage and, eventually, to our TV screens.
She played the role of secretary Joan Greengross in the hit BBC sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–79) and its seldom-seen sequel The Legacy of Reginald Perrin (1996), and will be remembered by people of a certain age as as Nadia Popov in the kids’ TV series Rentaghost. In the same year that The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin finished she joined the cast of Coronation Street, playing the part of Gail’s mother Audrey ever since.
Here are both sides of Sue’s first 45, Where Will You Be? and its flip Every Day.
Credited as Freddy Davis on the disc’s label (the spelling of his Christian name appears to have been interchangeable for a number of years), Freddie ‘Parrotface’ Davies was born into a showbiz family – he’s the grandson of music hall comedian Jack Herbert – in Brixton in 1937 (not his son, as Wikipedia would have you believe).
Evacuated during the war, he ended up in Salford (now part of Greater Manchester), where his passion for comedy and theatre began. From the age of four he was taken to watch his grandfather and other acts from the wings of the Salford Hippodrome, and after he was demobbed from National Service in 1958 he became a Butlins Redcoat, working alongside fellow comedians Dave Allen and Jimmy Tarbuck. By the time Freddie left Butlins to be a full time comic – at one point becoming a member of a sub-Beyond the Fringe quartet that also featured TV legend Johnny Ball – he had already started to fashion his stage alter ego Samuel Tweet, or Parrotface, and an appearance on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks shot Freddie/Freddy to fame.
‘That Opportunity Knocks appearance in 1964, which happened entirely by chance, started everything for me,’ Freddie told The Independent’s Martin Kelner in 1995. ‘I was dying on my arse in Dunoon, where I was supposed to spend the summer, so I escaped from that to the Candlelight Club, Oldham. As it happens, that was dead handy for Opportunity Knocks, which I stepped into when someone dropped out.
‘I remember I turned up there at the last minute with my own music and they said, “These are tatty music-hall arrangements.” I said, “What do you want? I'm a tatty music-hall comic!”’
Over the years he has appeared in over 500 TV and radio productions shows, more recently as a ‘straight’ actor in drama series including Casualty, Heartbeat, Band of Gold, Harbour Lights, and in the films Funny Bones and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. His autobiography Funny Bones: My life in Comedy was published in 2014, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of his debut appearance on Opportunity Knocks.
Unsurprisingly, on several occasions Freddie was offered the chance to make a record. He made albums of children’s stories, and in the 1970s had a major hit in Brazil with a dreadful slice of cheese written by Last of the Summer Wine’s Bill Owen, but it all began in 1966 with the novelty 45 Santa Face is Bringing me a Budgie, for HMV. He followed this witha brace of singles for the Major Minor label, Semolina/I Want me Seed and the two cuts you find here today – Cynthia Crisp and its flip (the A side, bizarrely) Sentimental Songs.As you can no doubt ascertain from these titles, the discs he cut made good use of the staples from his stage act, his long-running budgie joke and his heavy lisp (produced for comic effect only: I cannot imagine the PC brigade would put up with someone taking the rise out of a speech impediment these days). I Want me Seed and Sentimental Songs were both written by Tommy Scott, previously featured on this blog for contributing the English lyrics to the infamous Equipe 84 single Auschwitz.
It’s a shame that Cynthia Crisp is played for laughs, as it has a nice, chuggy baroque pop beat: I’d love to hear an instrumental version of this, or perhaps a Eurovision take on it with new lyrics (or even just without the stupid raspberry blowing). It could have been something quite special. Unfortunately it’s not: we end up with this ridiculous and annoying novelty instead. Unsurprisingly, Cynthia Crisp/Sentimental Songs did not trouble the charts. Major Minor later released an EP coupling both 45s together. That too sank without a trace.
Pretty much unknown in the UK, Webster was an American situation comedy that aired on ABC from September 1983, until May 1987. Drawing heavily on the earlier show Diff'rent Strokes, Webster starred Emmanuel Lewis as a young boy who, after losing his parents, is adopted by his godfather (played by Alex Karras), and his socialite wife (Karras’s real life wife Susan Clark). Originally titled Another Ballgameand to be based around Karras’s character (a former NFL player), the show was quickly remodelled after an NBC studio executive saw Lewis in a Burger King advert and drafted him in to the show.
Webster was a huge hit, especially with kids, and Lewis immediately became a star. The shows popularity led to several spin offs, an hour long special starring Emmanuel Lewis in which he appeared with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Bob Hope, a Star Trek TNG crossover episode and – obviously – a number of records. Lewis released two singles in Japan (City Connection– which was actually released before he became a star on Webster - and Love is Dandan, both ‘sung’ in a mix of English and pigeon Japanese) and the ‘Must Have Recording for Every Parent and Child’ Good Secrets! Bad Secrets!, ‘the Important New Recording that teaches children how to AVOID molestation!’
Dear Lord! Why is it that American TV shows feel the need to ram a moral code down their viewers’ throats? Released in 1986 by Kid Stuff Records, the producers of the schlock may have had good intentions, but this whole album is just creepy, featuring a 20 minute story about Webster’s friend Todd who gets ‘tickled in places I don’t want to be tickled’ bookended by a brace of songs, Good Touch and It’s Your Body, both of which I’ve included for you below. You can find the whole thing on YouTube if you want. Don’t say I haven’t warned you.
Lewis – who was once close to Michael Jackson, the two having met on the set of the Thriller video - has continued to act sporadically, occasionally appearing on TV in reality shows and and in low budget movies.
I’ve also included the A-side of Emmanuel Lewis’s first 45, City Connection.
Just in case you didn't know (or you've been living under a rock for the past few months), I've written a book, and it is officially out (in the UK, at least) from today.
Available from all good booksellers (it says here) Florence Foster Jenkins, the Life of the World's Worst Opera Singer is the first ever full-length biography of the infamous Diva of Din.
Here's some blurb from the press release: 'Madame Jenkins couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket: despite that, in 1944 at the age of 76, she played Carnegie Hall to a capacity audience and had celebrity fans by the score. Her infamous 1940s recordings are still highly-prized today. In his well-researched and thoroughly entertaining biography, Darryl W. Bullock tells of Florence Foster Jenkins’s meteoric rise to success, and the man who stood beside her through every sharp note.
Florence was ridiculed for her poor control of timing, pitch, and tone, and terrible pronunciation of foreign lyrics, but the sheer entertainment value of her caterwauling packed out theatres around the United States, with the ‘singer’ firmly convinced of her own talent, partly thanks to the devoted attention from her husband and manager St Clair Bayfield. Her story is one of triumph in the face of adversity, of courage, conviction and of the belief that with dedication and commitment a true artist can achieve anything.
With a major Hollywood movie about her life currently due for release in May 2016 starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant and Simon Helberg, the genius of Florence Foster Jenkins is about to be discovered by a whole new audience."
Should you feel like investing in such a thing, links to your favourite online booksellers van be found here
Thanks for your time: I'll be back tomorrow with a proper blog post!
Born in December 1936, Isadore Fertel (pronounced Fur-Tell) was rapidly approaching his forties when he struck up his on-off friendship with the man who would become his mentor, champion and producer - Herbert Khaury, aka Tiny Tim.
After Tim’s career hit the skids – and after he was dropped by Reprise for failing to promote his own records and constantly criticising the company in interviews - he tried to start his own company, issuing several singles on Vic-Tim (acidly named after Tiny and his then-wife, Miss Vicki and distributed by song-poem shysters Brite Star) before setting up a second imprint which he named Toilet Records ‘because that’s where my career was going’. Toilet Records had a slogan – ‘sit and listen’. For his new label he set out to find new talent, although Tiny ended up signing just one other artist, the equally eccentric Mister Fertel.
Izzy Fertel was a short (and short sighted) Jewish man who claimed to be the only male member of a local Women’s Lib organisation (the Radical Feminists) and who performed a Yiddish version of Rock around the Clock as part of his repertoire. Fertel, whose greatest wish was to have a sex-change operation, had been married although that was only consummated once, and even then under the supervision of his sister-in-law. His wife’s family clearly indulged him: ‘On Father’s Day,’ he once revealed, ‘As a treat her Mother would get me a dress, do my nails and make me up.’
Known within his family as Izzy, according to his cousin Randy (in his book The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir) he ‘swore to his dying day’ that he went to a women’s college. That wasn’t true: he went to Loyola University, a mixed sex establishment in Chicago (he served on the university’s Social Service committee for the year 1959-60), but who cares?
Izzy recorded two tracks for Tiny’s Toilet Records – A cover of Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman and his own composition Susan B, a tribute tothe social reformer and feminist Susan B. Anthony, who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. ‘The most important thing I did as head of Toilet Records was discover a new talent – Isadore Fertel,” Tiny once admitted. ‘I paid him $100 to cut two songs for me.’
It’s long been believed that the 45 (which was given the catalogue number RB-102, and was produced by Tiny under the lurid nom de plume Ophelia Pratt) was never actually pressed, but it was certainly offered up for sale: it was advertised as available via mail order in five consecutive issues of Billboard magazineover May/June 1973. The Joe Cappy mentioned in the ad (above) was Tiny’s erstwhile mobster manager Joseph Cappelluzzo: Joe had been Tiny's best man when he married Miss Vicki on Johnny Carson's Tonight show. Quite what anyone who actually received a copy of the record would have made of it is anyone’s guess: Izzy’s lispy, nasal and atonal voice is accompanied by solo piano, and both tracks sound like they were nailed in one solitary take.
According to Tiny’s biographer Justin Martell, Fertel ‘hoped to make enough money in show business to get a sex change. Tiny Tim met Isadore Fertel in the early 1970's and was “impressed with his songwriting.” Tiny featured Fertel as his opening act at many shows and promoted Fertel with what resources he was able to muster during that period’.
Izzy Fertel has been described by others as ‘Tiny Tim’s Tiny Tim’. So in awe of Tiny was he that Izzy attempted to follow in Tiny’s footsteps, getting a job as a messenger boy (Tiny had worked as a messenger boy for Loews/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the 50s) and taking the occasional gig on the amateur circuit. As eccentric as his mentor, Izzy is reported to have been obsessed with winter weather, and would move around from state to state in search of snow. He also is said to have occasionally performed dressed as a woman, calling himself Isadora. As he once said: ‘If I were a woman – and how I wish I were – I’d probably be a lesbian’.
Tiny can be seen on YouTube, accompanying Izzy on the New York cable TV chat show Coca Crystal on Susan B and on his later composition, The Reagan-Begin Song. Although the two were clearly close, as an avowed feminist Izzy found it hard to accept Tiny’s 19th century views on women, and after he encouraged Miss Vicky (along with their daughter, Tulip) to leave Tiny the two men did not speak for a year.
The colourful Isadore Fertel died on September 9, 2008 at a retirement home in the Bronx, New York.
Released in the US in January 1985, Night Rocker was the debut studio album by American actor and infamous burger muncher David Hasselhoff. Produced by the Grammy-nominated Joel Diamond (Gloria Gaynor, Engelbert Humperdinck and dozens of others), the album bombed in his home country, but went to Number One in the Austrian charts and was a number 30 hit in Germany. Suddenly David had a new career: he would continue to trouble the Euro charts for many years to come. Lucky for him, as the year after Night Rocker was released his hit TV show Knight Rider was canned.
Three songs from the album were featured in the Knight Rider episode Let It Be Me; a fourth was featured in the third season episode The Rotten Apples”. To drive home the message, the front cover shows the Hoff standing on the bonnet of a Kitt-alike Pontiac. The vomit-inducing homily on the back cover - ‘believe in yourself. Keep a positive attitude and never, never give up. Dreams do come true’ - tells you everything you need to know.
A thick, thick slice of synth-driven cheese, Night Rocker is an appalling album: it’s everything you hate about mid-80s music rolled up in one awful, ego-fuelled audio abortion. As one reviewer put it: ‘think of the absolute worst 80s pop song you ever heard, cross it with enough adult pop contemporary clichés to make Barry Manilow throw back his head in unadulterated, mocking laughter, sprinkle in vocals that sound something like Neil Diamond after having his throat ripped out, throw in lyrics that make Chad Kroeger resemble a young Bob Dylan, and you might have a small inkling of the rotting, pungent stench this album leaves in its wake’. There’s not much I can add to that.
Have a listen to a brace of tracks and decide for yourself: here's the opener Night Rocker and the thoroughly nasty Our First Night Together, delivered by a voice that Time magazine once described as 'as smooth as silk but twice as thin'.
Not a lot, if truth be known. I believe that he was of Italian extraction, and that he recorded his self-financed and self-pressed albums in and around Miami during the late 60s and early 70s.
He issued several albums, including Vinny Roma Sings His Head Off (1968) and the 1972 release Sunset in Rome (which, according to a brief mention in Billboard, was issued by his own Vinny Roma Enterprises label). The latter may be the same album as Vinny Roma Sings (which was also issued in 1972). It’s equally possible that these three albums were simply reissues of the same material: all of the songs on Vinny Roma Sings are also included on the earlier Sings His Head Off, including the song Sunset in Rome. There was also at least one 45, again on Vinny Roma Enterprises (‘produced solely by Vinny Roma’, as the disc’s label grandly states and presumably released around 1972/3) which coupled a cover of Love Story with Vinny’s self-penned Sunset in Rome. Again, both songs appear on all three (or is it two) known albums. Sammy Davis Jr. owned a copy of the single, presumably sent to him or given to him by Vinny himself.
I can also tell you that Vinny Roma was not his real name: in his day-to-day life our man went by the name Vincent J Tozzo.
Vincent J Tozzo was born on November 2, 1929, and served in the US Air Force in Korea; I found a reference which claims that he also saw action in World War Two, but as he was just 15 when that particular conflict ended this seems slightly dubious. Mr Tozzo appears to have suffered some sort of injury whilst in combat, as his name appears on a list of disabled war veterans published in the 1980s. He married, and he and his wife had at least one son, also called Vincent. He died on May 31, 1994 at 64 years old. He was buried in Florida National Cemetery, Bushnell, Fl.
And that’s it. Copies of Vinny Roma Sings His Head Off occasionally turn up for sale on Ebay and usually command high prices. It’s certainly the easier to find of his two (or is it three) albums, but I’ve yet to track down a copy for my own collection. Luckily, one of Vinny’s songs – Ah, Music– was included on the 2012 collection Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958 – 1992, and it’s that sole track, which was first brought to my attention by WWR regular Graham Clayton, that I present for you today. If any of you possess any of Vinny’s other recordings, please do share!
Rock Hudson: film actor, TV star and, sadly, the first major celebrity to die from an AIDS-related illness. But singer?
Apparently so, if the album Rock, Gently is anything to go by. Subtitled Rock Hudson Sings The Songs Of Rod McKuen, Rock, Gently wasn’t Rock’s first foray into pop: he recorded solo versions of several tracks from his hit movie Pillow Talk (co-starring Doris Day), two of which were issued on a 7” in 1959: Roly Poly and Pillow Talk. He also recorded a version of the film’s hit song (You’re My) Inspiration.
The year before Rock, Gently was issued McKuen and Hudson were to issue a co-credited 45 coupling Wingswith a cover of the classic Love of the Common People. Promo copies were pressed, and full page ads were taken out in the music press, but I’ve yet to see a stock copy listed anywhere, which makes me think that it never reached the shops. Neither track was included on Hudson’s debut (and only) album as neither song was composed by McKuen. I’ve just tracked down a copy on eBay and purchased the same. I’ll let you know how terrible it is in due course!
Rodney Marvin John Michael James McKuen and Hudson (born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr) had been friends since the late 50s; they appear to have met when McKuen was contracted as a bit-part player to Universal. At that time Hudson was a worldwide star, but McKuen’s own career had been patchy, involving meagre movies roles as well as stints as a poet, activist and folk singer. Then there were the infamous Bob McFadden sessions which yielded the Brunswick single I’m a Mummy, subsequent album Songs our Mummy Taught Us and the follow up Dracula Cha Cha,before he hit it big – writing English lyrics for Jacques Brel. He’s responsible for, among others, the mega hits Seasons in the Sun and If You go Away. He also wrote the Oscar nominated-song Jean, which appeared on the soundtrack to the hit movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which Hudson covers on this collection.
Recorded in London, and documented in book form as First Recordings, London, March 1970, Billboardliked the album: ‘Hudson comes of strong as a compelling balladeer’, their reviewer wrote, declaring that ‘this package offers much for MOR programming and sales’. Rock, Gently was issued in 1971 on McKuen’s own Stanyan Records label. The name Stanyan came from McKuen’s hit poetry anthology Stanyan Street And Other Sorrows.
Stanyan was an interesting set up with an eclectic roster, and although the company had a distribution deal with Warner Brothers Records, McKuen preferred to sell direct to the independent trade and via mail order: ‘By selling my records directly to the customer or retailer, I am able to hold the list price down,’ he revealed to Billboard in January 1973. Hudson, who was very pleased with the results, fell out with McKuen when he discovered that orders for the album would not fulfilled by Warners but rather by McKuen’s own mail order operation. Consequently Rock, Gently didn’t sell, didn’t chart and there was no follow up.
Anyway, have a listen to a pair of tracks from the album – the opener Open the Window and See All the Clowns and Things Bright and Beautiful and see what you think. Enjoy!
Now, cast your mind back to last week, when I introduced you to the horror of Rock Hudson’s lone album release Rock, Gently. As I told you at that time, Hudson and his co-conspirator Rod McKuen had also recorded a 45, coupling Wings(a Hollies song which first appeared on the charity album No One’s Gonna Change Our World)with a cover of the classic Love of the Common People, a song first issued in 1967 by the Four Preps. Promo copies were pressed and full page ads were taken out in Billboard to promote the release, but it appears that – probably due to lack of airplay – that the single never reached the shops.
I told you that I had tracked down a copy (unlike most of Rock’s other recordings, this coupling seems to have been ignored by YouTube), and I promised that I would let you know how terrible it is. Thankfully, the disc is just as hideous as I had hoped.
Recorded in London in 1970, unlike Rock Gently, which features Hudson as sole vocalist, Wingsand Love of the Common People feature our two protagonists duetting with each other like some other worldly Simon and Garfunkel. Given their sexuality (Hudson, of course, although he had been married for a few years in the 1950s was gay; McKuen’s sexual preferences were rather fluid, with the writer telling a reporter from the Associated Press that ‘I’ve been attracted to men and I’ve been attracted to women. You put a label on,’) and their long friendship, the two songs could easily be construed as duets between a couple of same-sex lovers – something that certainly would have hampered airplay.
Not that that makes one iota of difference. Irrespective of if the singers are gay, straight, bi- or poly-sexual, it’s still a dreadful disc. And that’s after Hudson took five years worth of singing lessons ‘because I said to myself, someday a musical will come along and I want to be ready.’ Years of singing in his high school glee club hadn’t prepared him for this.
‘Rock and I first met and became friends in the 1950’s when we were both under contract to Universal-International as actors’, McKuen (who died in 2015) wrote in answer to an fan’s enquiry on his website. ‘He had been through some rough times in his personal life and I spent a lot of time with him on his set. He was pretty much of a loner and I certainly related to that.
‘It’s no secret that Rock and I both liked a good drink, in fact, other than Johnny Mercer he was the best drinking buddy I ever had. We spent a lot of nights knocking a few back and, with or without friends, the nights usually ended up around the piano. Rock loved singing on or off key and I liked the timber of his untrained voice. I guess in the back of my mind even then I always thought someone should produce an album of Rock singing but I certainly had no idea that it would eventually be me or that he would be singing my songs.
‘After finishing three films for Universal I was put on suspension by the studio because I turned down a script I didn’t like. This meant that because I was still under contract to them my days as an actor were over. I moved to New York to try my hand as a full time singer-songwriter. Rock and I stayed in touch and in April of 1961 he called and asked if I’d like an early birthday present. Sure. Six days before I turned twenty-eight our mutual friend Judy Garland was to make her first (now legendary) appearance at Carnegie Hall and Rock had tickets. What a night.
‘Eight years later I made my debut at Carnegie Hall and of course Rock was there to share my own triumph. We had already started talking about Rock singing my songs and he even knew Jean and The World I Used to Know by heart.’ Hudson and McKuen set up a company together, R & R Productions, and discussed the idea of issuing at least two albums – possibly one musical and one spoken word, and even a film, Chuck, starring Rock with a script by Rod.
‘As 1969 ended we had selected the songs and arrangers for the Rock, Gently album,’ McKuen continued. ‘He chose the title based on a song from my album New Ballads. 40 songs made the final cut and we ended up recording 30 tracks plus several duets.
‘The marathon sessions began in March of 1970 at Chappell and Phillips studios in London. Arthur Greenslade, my principle conductor for both concerts and recording was the leader on every session. I went for good tracks, knowing we could overdub vocals later back in LA. The sessions were documented by ace photographer David Nutter in a limited edition book entitled “Rock Hudson/Rod McKuen: First Recordings March 1970, London”’
Hudson described the sessions as ‘terrifying,’ telling the Reuters press agency in July 1970 that ‘it was such a shock to hear myself on playback. What I thought was right was so totally wrong.
‘It took three days to loosen up properly. It took two weeks to do all the songs. We were supposed to do enough for one album but we ended up with enough for three.’
‘A full album of unreleased material is still in the can,’ McKuen revealed. ‘The material still in the can includes several duets I did with Rock. Warner Bros. Records did release one single we did together, Wings and Love of the Common People. My favorite of the released recordings is Gone with the Cowboys, a song I wrote with Rock in mind and one that given my own past has a great spiritual connection for me.’
The album, as I noted in last week’s post, didn’t sell. It was reported at the time that ‘according to Rock his buddy mistakenly forgot to arrange for a distributing company to pass the disk along to retailers. As a result, thousands of copies of Rock, Gentlyare gently gathering dust in McKuen’s warehouse’.
‘Rock was a misunderstood, complicated man but one of the good guys,’ McKuen added. ‘More stories on our relationship personally and professionally will have to wait for an autobiography if I ever get around to writing one.’ Maybe, now both of them are no longer here, the whole story will one day come out.
‘Three funky cats, all brothers, having just as much fun on stage as their audience,’ as the sleeve notes to their second album read. ‘What kind of sound do the Kaplans have? Three parts of harmony coming together with a new contemporary sound as well as a healthy golden Oldie Show. Interwoven voices along with guitar, congo drums and bass blend together in a crisp fresh sound of today that doesn't forget the best of yesterday.’
Playing around the Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin area, the Kaplan Brothers released their first album, The Universal Sounds Of The Kaplan Brothers, on their own Kap Records imprint in 1969. At that point the Chicago-based duo consisted of brothers Richard (aka Dick, guitar and lead vocals) and Ed (percussion and flute), backed on their recording by guitarist Scott Klynas and bassist Jeff Czech. Very hairy, very Jewish (their first two albums both feature covers of Hava Nagila), very oddball, the Kaplan sound mixes spaghetti western whistles with South American congas and a splash of Greenwich Village folk.
For a while the two brothers performed on stage by Larry Andies (bass and backing vocals), before teaming up with younger brother John and issuing a second album, the much more pedestrian lounge folk collection The Kaplan Brothers which features three Beatles covers amongst its tracks. It’s a record that, according to Dick Kaplan himself ‘Hasn't gotten any better over the years’.
For their third – and last – album the boys shot off in an altogether different direction: quite literally. In early 1974 they relocated to California and, a year later, issued their magnum opus Nightbird, a mellotron-drenched slice of kitsch like nothing else you have ever heard in your life. Timothy Ready, on his blog The Progressive Rock Hall of Imfamy, described it rather well when he called it ‘Yom Kippur and Purim combined, in one mega-dose of cheese’.
Nightbird is a classic of wrongness, a prog-rock nightmare which is so gloriously perverse it somehow works. A song suite of sorts, Nightbird even includes a hideous (and hysterical) cover of the King Crimson classic Epitaph and an overwrought reworking of the Jose Feliciano song Rain. Small wonder that the Acid Archives called Nightbird‘The ultimate lounge-rock extravaganza. A self-proclaimed 'electric symphony' that mixes Ennio Morricone with King Crimson as recorded by a Holiday Inn/bar mitzvah band from outer space. Crooner vocals soar on top of overly-elaborate keyboard arrangements as the music abruptly throws you from one intense mood into another in true psychedelic fashion.’ Although uncredited on the record, the title track Night Bird was written by Larry Andies. According to Kaplan Brothers’ fan James Webster (writing on Bad Cat Records in 2011), Larry ‘was also the composer of most of their original music’.
You need to hear this record. In fact for a couple of quid you can own a CD reissue of it. Search eBay for a copy of the (less than 100% legit) Erebus Records release from around 2009: I found my copy for 99p plus postage! You won’t regret it. But for now, here’s a couple of tracks to whet your appetite, the aforementioned Epitaphand the nutso album closer He, a rewrite (of sorts) of the folk classic He Was A Friend of Mine. As a bonus, I’ve also added a track from each of the Brothers’ earlier albums: Running Scared from The Universal Sounds Of The Kaplan Brothers and, from their second album The Kaplan Brothers,their batshit crazy interpretation of Eleanor Rigby.
Anyone who watched Saturday morning cartoons in the 70s will recognise that as the exclamation uttered endlessly by Botch, assistant zookeeper at the Wonderland Zoo on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Help! It's the Hair Bear Bunch. If you were an attentive child you would have noticed that the actor who voiced Botch also provided the voice of Sergeant Flint in another H-B Saturday morning staple, Hong Kong Phooey.
If you were a little bit older, or perhaps if you later watched the BBC2 re-runs of the US TV sitcoms The Phil Silvers Show and Car 54, Where Are You?, you would have eventually realised that Botch, Flint and both Car 54’s Gunther Toody and Bilko’s Rupert Ritzik were all portrayed by the same man – actor Joe E. Ross.
Born in 1914, Ross was a blue comedian whose career was interrupted by World War II: he served in the United States Army Air Corps and was stationed for a time in England. Discharged after the war, Ross went back to his former career of announcer and comic in Hollywood. He appeared in Irving Klaw's feature-length theatrical film Teaserama (1955), a re-creation of a burlesque show which starred Bettie Page and Tempest Storm. Before making the movie Klaw was principally known for producing bondage photographs which he sold through the mail.
In 1955 Ross was spotted by Nat Hiken and Phil Silvers, who were planning a new TV show called You'll Never Get Rich (which became The Phil Silvers Show but is probably best known as Sgt. Bilko). Ross was hired on the spot and cast as the mess sergeant, the henpecked Rupert Ritzik. Ritzik was a hit with viewers, his ‘Ooh! Ooh!’ catchphrase, which came from Ross's frustration when he couldn't remember his lines. After The Phil Silvers Show ended in 1959, Nat Hiken created Car 54, Where Are You? casting Ross as Patrolman Gunther Toody of New York's 53rd Precinct. Fred Gwynne (better known as Herman Munster), played Toody's partner, Francis Muldoon.
Like The Phil Silvers Show, Car 54, Where Are You? was a huge success, and it wasn’t long before an enterprising producer at Roulette Records decided it would be a good idea to drag Ross into a recording studio. The resulting, Love Songs from a Cop, was issued in 1964, the year after Car 54 went off the air. Roulette was run by Morris Levy, a notoriously shady individual, described as ‘one of the record industry's most controversial and flamboyant players’ by Billboard and as ‘a notorious crook who swindled artists out of their royalties’ by Allmusic. Featuring covers of such staples as Hello Dolly and When You’re Smiling Love Songs from a Cop is a horrible record, and about as funny as herpes. Produced by the infamous Hugo and Luigi, at least the sleeve notes acknowledge that Ross ‘is not about to give Frank Sinatra concern’. Surprisingly the album was also issued in the UK, by Columbia.
This would not be Ross’s only foray into the recording world: in 1973 Laff Records, which usually specialised in African-American comedians, released his album Should Lesbians Be Allowed to Play Pro-Football? On the cover Ross looks tired and bloated. Apart from a few cameos in some terrible exploitation movies, and the occasional job as a voice artist for Hanna-Barbera his career was over. Ross died in 1982: his grave marker reads ‘This Man Had a Ball’.
Anyway, here’s a brace of tracks from Love Songs from a Cop:Ma (She’s Making Eyes at Me) and Are You Lonesome Tonight.
Everything is better when it comes with a ‘four to the floor’ beat.
Or so it seemed for a short while in the early 80s, when the British charts were deluged with discs featuring a medley of hits stapled roughly to a disco rhythm. The trend started back in 1976, when the Ritchie Family scored their biggest hit with The Best Disco in Town, which incorporated various pop hits of the day.
In1977 Disconet, a DJ subscription service that put out discs exclusively for club and radio use, issued The Original Beatles Medley, official recordings by the lads, snipped and stapled together over a disco beat. Although the Disconet 12” has long been believed to be a bootleg, Disconet was a legitimate operation and that all of the medleys they produced (including those for Elvis and Michael Jackson) were officially sanctioned. However for one reason or another – presumably because Apple hated the rough and ready medley that Disconet’s Ray Lenahan produced but that capitol seemed to endorse – the Original Beatles Medley soon vanished and it quickly became a collector’s item. Pirate copies appeared and, in an effort to fill the void, Atlantic records issued the dreadful Disco Beatlemania, which featured a covers band imitating the Beatles over that relentless disco beat rather than snippets of the original recordings, and EMI France issued the similar Unlimited Citations by Café Crème.
Then, in January 1981, as the world was recovering from the shock of John Lennon’s murder, came Stars on 45. Another Beatles medley, this time recorded by a studio band put together by former Golden Earring member Jaap Eggermont, Stars on 45 was a huge international hit – Number 1 in Holland and the USA, Number 2 in the UK. Suddenly the floodgates were open, and anyone who was anyone had a disco medley of their songs issued, either by their own record company (remember Squeeze and Squabs on Forty Fab?) or by cover acts climbing on a very lucrative bandwagon, such as Platinum Popby This Year’s Blonde (Blondie). There was even the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra whose Hooked On Classics (Parts 1&2) was a massive UK hit, and spawned it’s own imitator in the guise of the Portsmouth Sinfonia and Classical Muddly– itself a Top 40 UK hit!
It was endless: Lobo’s Caribbean Disco Show, Tight Fit’s Back to the 60s, Gidea Park’s Beach Boys Gold and (Four) Seasons of Gold and so on. Unsurprisingly EMI, the company that owned so many of the original recordings that were being plundered, decided to get in on the act with official medleys from the Hollies (Holliedaze), the Beach Boys and, naturally, The Beatles (The Beatles Movie Medley).
There are many, many records I could have chosen from this era to illustrate just how awful it was, but this obscurity is a prime example of how any tu’penny ha’penny band could, and would, sell it’s soul for a stab at chart stardom.
Antmania is,obviously,a medley of hits by Adam and the Ants (then at the height of their popularity). However this is not an officially sanctioned CBS release (although, by a quirk of fate, it was distributed by a company owned by CBS), rather it’s a cover issued on the tiny Eagle Records label in 1982 by the otherwise unknown Future Heroes... a band that clearly knew nothing whatsoever about the post-punk, new wave stylings of Mr Ant and his crew.
To get an idea of what Future Heroes were actually like, flip the single over for Hold On, a poor disco/funk number written and produced by Dave Myers. Information on Future Heroes is impossible to find: I do not know, for example, if the Dave Myers that wrote and produced this dross is the same Dave Myers of Hairy Bikers fame (although I’m trying to reach him to find out). He produced a number of non-hits around 1981/82 then seemed to disappear. This was, unsurprisingly, the only single issued by Future Heroes.
Still, here it is, a sad footnote in a sad period for pop music.
It’s Father’s Day (or very nearly), and what better way to celebrate that to enjoy the heartfelt strains of a little girl, and her love for her daddy?
Wendy Sings With Mommy and Daddy was issued some time in the early 70s. Although not credited on the front cover, little Wendy and her parents are otherwise known as the Folmer Family, a cute and happy collection of Christian worshipers, singers and occasional preachers.
Little Wendy Folmer was just six years old when her parents dragged her into a recording studio to do her stuff all over this horror. Wendy Sings With Mommy and Daddy was issued by Baldwin Sound Productions, a Mechanicsburg, PA based label that specialised in wholesome Christian pop and that was run by one Donald P Baldwin. Don also owned a well-equipped recording studio that was established in 1966 and was more open to secular activity: blues harmonica legend Sonny Terry recorded there, as did Dan ‘Instant Replay’ Hartman (who produced a single there by an act called the Hydraulic Peach!)
I can’t tell you much more about this album, although one listen to the brace of tracks I’ve selected for you today should tell you just about everything you need to know. Luckily all three of the Folmers seem to still be with us, and they are still involved in the Christian community. Even more luckily they have decided not to carry on with the family singing business. If you need more after listening to Something's Happened to Daddyand How Far Is Heaven then you can find the whole album on the internets (thanks to fellow bloggers Music forManiacs and Mr Weird and Wacky) if you want. God help you.
Another ridiculously obscure record I know next to nothing about, but felt compared to share with you.
I Won’t Say I Love You, recorded by Don and John Lampien, is a pretty standard, pretty dull country tune, but what pushes it well in to the realm of the absurd is the outrageously out of time and out of tune drumming. It’s Helen ‘Shaggs’ Wiggin terrible: whoever is playing drums on this (and I have my theory) is almost as bad a drummer as Paul McCartney!
The record does not credit an author, but I’d hedge my bets that Don wrote it himself. But what on earthy is going on with the B-side? A ‘medley’ of the standard Sheik of Arabyand the uncredited (on the label, anyway) 1910 show tune , the song is sung as a duet between Don Lampien and Quacker, the cute duckling who appears in several Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Lavender Records, of Seaside, Oregon, had previously issued 45s by The Impacts (Don't You Dare b/w Green Green Field, around 1968) and local beat band The Fugitives. There were at least two dozen singles released on Lavender, with one of the first being Jerry Merett and the Crowns’ Kansas City Twist (1960). Owned by Pat Mason, an agent and promoter who for two years managed Gene Vincent (the story has it that Gene spent a year living in Pat Mason’s basement!), Mason also owned the Cascade Club and booked both national acts and local bands to perform there. Groups played the Cascade (which was at 3202 Jasper Road) at weekends: during the week the premises served as a recording studio, and it was here that Pat would cut his Lavender 45s.
‘I had a nice club here in town in the 1960's,’ Mason told Blue Suede News magazine. ‘This is a resort town, so we had some national acts in the summer time. My club is where bands like the Kingsmen, Don and the Goodtimes, and Paul Revere and the Raiders cut their teeth musically. This is the part of the country where these future national bands started.
‘I had a small record label called Lavender, and we would press a few hundred copies of a song to promote a band. Sometimes we gave the records out at teen dances or sold a few copies. We never dreamed the records would be collector items like they are today. I asked Jack Ely and the Kingsmen to cut "Louie, Louie" for Lavender Records for promotion reasons. It turned out so good that it was a local hit on another label and finally hit nationally a full year later on the Wand label out of New York.’
It seems like the Lampiens were from Seaside itself, and that their record was more a vanity project than a tool for a band to book gigs. Although definitive information is non-existent, from what I can make out Don and John were a father and son act, rather than brothers, with Don on vocals and the very young John trying his best on percussion. Donald Max Lampien was born on June 13, 1928 and died, aged 74, on September 11, 2002; John Lampien, as far as I know, is still alive, somewhere in his late 50s and living in Toledo, Washington. If my theory is correct, John L would have been born around 1956 and probably hadn’t reached his teens by the time this 45 was recorded. Pat Mason died in 2001 at the age of 93.
Wow! Just wow! This will split listeners: some of you will find the vocals irritating, but I have to tell you that I absolutely love this album.
Welcome one and all to the world of kid-funk superstar Angela Simpson. In a similar vein to the Jr and his Soulettes album Psychodelic Sounds (which I featured way back in 2009) this, I promise you, is killer stuff!
Young Angela Simpson was born to sing: she started performing before she was three years old when, reciting bible verses in church, she would punctuate her praise with arm swoops and the occasional drop to her knees, James Brown-style. The Harlem-born Miss Simpson went on to perform at the legendary Apollo Theatre before, at the age of six, recording her only album Angela.
Issued by Spectrum Records in 1972, many of the proto-rap songs on the album were based on the poetry of Langston Hughes, an American social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist who was one of the earliest innovators of jazz poetry. Angela’s mother was also a poet, and she instilled in her daughter a love of literature.
L’il Miss Simpson would go on to appear at several large-scale gospel gigs and a couple of 45s were culled from the album, but none of her releases troubled the charts, and the child prodigy soon vanished from the New York stage.
In 2005 – still living in Harlem - Angela quit her job as a teacher of Black Literature to home school her children. She is not – I hasten to add - the same Angela Simpson who, in August 2009, murdered the wheelchair-bound Terry Neely in Phoenix, AZ.
Here are a couple of tracks from Angela – the super funky Rapping and Angela’s description of her hood, Lenox Ave. Enjoy!
Saturday's Warrior is a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-themed musical written by and serial WWR offender, the three-times married father of 10 Alexis “Lex” de Azevedo (Ric King, Mrs Miller). The musical tells the story of a group of children that are born into a Mormon family but whose relationship with each other goes back to a time before they became mortal.
Two of the children, Jimmy and Julie, encounter personal struggles that help them rediscover and fulfil their mission in life. The musical explores the Mormon doctrines of ‘premortal’ life, ‘foreordination’ (the idea that, before birth, God selected particular people to fulfil certain missions during their mortal lives), and eternal marriage. It depicts abortion and birth control as being contrary to the divine plan: in the same year that the musical was first staged the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a statement which read ‘The Church opposes abortion and counsels its members not to submit to or perform an abortion except in the rare cases where, in the opinion of competent medical counsel, the life or good health of the mother is seriously endangered or where the pregnancy was caused by rape and produces serious emotional trauma in the mother. Even then it should be done only after counseling with the local presiding priesthood authority and after receiving divine confirmation through prayer.’
That still hold true today, and what else would you expect from a ‘faith’ that teaches that God used to be a man on another planet, that he became a God (that’s ‘a’, not ‘the’) by following the laws of the God on that planet, that he came to earth with his wife, and that their children included Jesus, the devil, and you – oh, and that you have the potential of becoming gods of your own planets and are then able to start the process all over again. And don’t get me started on gold plates, magic hats, seer stones and whatnot.
As an aside, what would be the point of praying to God to allow you to have an abortion after being raped? Surely if God existed he/she would have prevented the rape in the first place? Just sayin’…
Saturday's Warriorwas first staged in 1973, with the soundtrack issued by Embryo Records the following year. A huge hit with the LDS community, in 1989 a horribly overacted video version of the musical was produced (which you can find on YouTube if you have nothing better to do). In a peculiar twist, a year after the video was issued two men – Karyl Eugene Harkins and Peter R. Jepp – were sued by Robert Williams of Fieldbrook Productions Inc (who owned the rights to the video performance) for illegally producing 1,000 copies of the videocassette for sale in Utah. Williams claimed that Harkins had copies made from another copy (i.e second generation) and that they were of poor quality. Selling them would ‘irreparably damage the reputation and marketability’ of the original video. Harkins, who has practiced in naturopathic and homeopathic medicine at Salt Lake Homeopathy since 2002, is no stranger to run ins with the law: in 2014 he was charged with Unlawful and Unprofessional Conduct for practicing homeopathic medicine without a license. According to charging documents undercover agents went to Harkins' practice and claimed to have various ailments like pressure in the head, shoulder pain, frequent urination, and frequent thirst. Harkins allegedly placed two fingers on the investigator’s arm, asked him questions, then diagnosed him with ‘Worms, fluxes, bacteria in his body, and 26 kinds of tape worms.’ Harkins then allegedly sent the undercover agent home with $259 in supplements.
Anyway, I digress. This ridiculous mish-mash of American cheese, religious cliché and rock ‘n roll has - a staple of LDS households for the last 40 years - hit the big screen this year, after a Kickstarter campaign raised over $10,000 to fund it. Universally panned (outside of the LDS community, that is), according to the movie’s website ‘When Lex de Azevedo wrote the iconic chords that have become immediately and emotionally recognizable to fans around the world, he had no idea the impact that they and Saturday’s Warrior would have. The story and the songs gave voice to, and filled a need for, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In the 60’s and 70’s rock music had become the pulpit of a generation and that pulpit was preaching values that were opposed to what the LDS church believed. Saturday’s Warrior was the first time that LDS people saw their culture represented through the medium of popular music and it was an immediate phenomenon.’
And there you have it; clearly the LDS chose to ignore the phenomenal rise of the Osmonds – who, naturally, de Azevedo had also worked with. Four years after Saturday’s Warriordebuted, our Lex lent his musical chops to another Mormon musical, the much less successful My Turn on Earth, and in 2007 Lex’s co-conspirator Doug Stewart debuted The White Star, the sequel to Saturday’s Warrior, only this time without Lex’s involvement.
I'm not sure what, if anything, I've learned from listening to this - apart from that stuttering is a mortal sin, or something. Still sit back, put a hat over your face and indulge in a brace of cuts from the soundtrack to Saturday’s Warrior: Pullin' Together (complete with awful, shrieking children), and the apocalyptic power ballad Zero Population.
The Greek Fountains were Danny Cohen, Tommie Miceli, Don Chesson, Duke Bardwell and Cyril Vetter. Formed in 1962, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based quintet were a popular attraction, and over a five year career the band supported visiting acts including The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, Paul Revere and The Raiders and Sonny and Cher.
The Greek Fountains issued at least half a dozen 45s including Countin’ the Steps/Blue Jean (with the odd credit of ‘vocal producer Shelby Singleton Jr’) on Philips in 1966. They also put out a fuzz-drenched version of the Monkees classic (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone, a rocking cover of Donovan’s Hey Gyp (as Buy You A Chevrolet), and a reasonably faithful copy of The Who’s I’m A Boy - although they clearly did not have access to a copy of the lyrics at the time.
Failing to score a hit, they acquired a couple of new members – Luther Leonard (a.k.a. Luther Kent, a.k.a. Duke Royal) and Butch Swann – and changed their name to The Greek Fountain River Front Band in 1967, releasing the album The Greek Fountain River Front Band Takes Requests. Unfortunately this would be the band’s last hurrah. Drummer Cyril Vetter, who wrote the hit Double Shot of My Baby's Love, went off to serve in Vietnam. Since his return he has enjoyed a varied career as an attorney, a TV executive, a record producer and an author. Miceli went on to become a well-known ER doctor in Baton Rouge, and for some time Chesson was involved in aviation.
Danny Cohen (who, along with Vetter, wrote most of the band’s original material) moved to New York City, changed his name to Casey Kelly and kept working, often alongside Duke Bardwell. Bardwell is probably the band’s best-remembered musician, having toured with Elvis Presley’s band, written for Jose Feliciano, opened for Loggins & Messina (with Cohen/Kelly), toured with the Byrds’ Gene Clark and recorded with Emmylou Harris. Named, like every other member of his family, after a university (seriously, he had a brother name Harvard!) he still plays and records today. Cohen/Kelly moved to Nashville where he has written for Kenny Rogers (he was Grammy nominated for the country number one Anyone Who Isn’t Me Tonight), Helen Reddy, George Strait and Tanya Tucker amongst others.
The Greek Fountains were a respectable garage/r’n’b act, but the perverse b-side An Experimented Terror- the flip of their Hollies-inspired single I Can’t Get Away and named after the 1962 movie Experiment in Terror - has to rank alongside Lieutenant Pigeon’s Opus 300, the Turtles’ Umbassa and the Dragon and the Beatles’ Revolution Nine as one of the most wilfully ridiculous pieces of music ever to be placed on a pop record. Sampled by Quasimoto for the song Shroom Music, here are both sides of this highly collectable, and rather expensive, 45.
I wonder why Bardwell is the only member of the group not to receive a writer credit?
I originally discovered these tracks a few years ago at the – now, sadly, no longer updated – Cartilage Consortium blog, and much of what you’re about to read has been cribbed from there. Apologies, but information on this incredibly odd and obscure album is otherwise impossible to come by.
Taken from the self-released CD Kyô Kawanishi Volume One, as the cover states what you are about to hear is ‘the first work song in the language of the universe’. Kyô Kawanishi is, according to Cartilage Consortium, a Japanese gentleman ‘whose lyrics are for some reasons often historically obsessed by the situation of Korean people’ and who credited himself with having composed ‘more than 1000 songs written between 1988 and 2007’. Kyô Kawanishi was the name of the character played by Kyû Sakamoto in the 1962 film Ue o Muite Arukô, so it’s highly likely that the man hiding behind the hockey mask is using a pseudonym - possibly to protect his family from his horrible music.
This is nuts: his voice is all over the place, the primitive keyboard backing at times sounds like the soundtrack to the Clangers, and the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a karaoke bar. It’s all very amateur – and, in a way, quite charming. Apparently our Kyô Kawanishi is known to have played several gigs. But then again, so did Eilert Pilarm…
Back to Cartilage Consortium: ‘It would be hard to render the unique syntax by translating song titles such as "Spaceship of the Maruberu Break". Directly connected to the universe, he's also a bashful perfectionist, who couldn't help apologising in his booklet for the recording quality.’
If this is only Volume One you have to wonder how many others are out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Anyway, here are a couple of songs from the album, Andromeda Maruberu Seijin (roughly Maraberu Alien from Andromeda) and Maruberu Pause no Uchuusen (the aforementioned Spaceship of the Maruberu Break). Make of them what you will.
This thoroughly ludicrous recording is a product of the same school that taught you that Robert ‘Jesus’ Powell’s Once Upon a Time was acceptable. Well that isn’t, and nether is this.
But it is apposite: this year marks the 400thanniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and it’s entirely right that we should do our own little bit to celebrate that fact. Let’s kill him off all over again, to a ‘5am in Ibiza’ beat. There’s the rub, the rub, the rub, the rhuuuuubbbb!
Richard E Grant, star of the ultimate slacker movie Withnail and I, recorded To Be Or Not To Be in 1997 – around the same time that he was filming Spice Girls: the Movie. The single finds Richard reciting the well-known soliloquy from Hamlet over a house track from Orpheus, as well as singing during the choruses. To Be Or Not To Be was intended to launch a whole album of Shakespeare readings, featuring a number of actors including Kenneth Branagh, Ralph Fiennes and Alan Rickman – although that project seems not to have seen the light of day. Presumably because this turned out to be such a dead duck.
‘I told them I couldn’t sing!’, Grant told the Melody Maker. ‘It just shows that anything goes, anything can happen if somebody thinks it’s daft enough to buy. I don’t expect anybody to take it any more seriously than I did.’
The ‘them’ in this case is anonymous musical collective Orpheus. Ken Gibson (who co-wrote and produced the song) is better known for his work with John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, although he has also worked as an arranger with Alison Moyet, Craig David and Neil Hannon. He is also the producer for the singer Nancy Nova, backing vocalist on To Be Or Not To Be.
‘They said, “Do it straight and then we can do stuff, muck about with it.” Then they asked me to sing this chorus and I did it full-pelt, but they didn’t want that. They wanted it to be as melancholic as possible. And they made a dance track out of it.
‘This all happened by accident. It was not my intention at all to set myself up as a serious pop star. I’m not trying to give Oasis sleepless nights about this. My eight-year-old daughter thought it was danceable…. I just laughed. I thought, “Oh my God, I’ll never get a job as a serious Shakespearean actor at the RSC having done this!”’
He was even more revealing in the NME, admitting that ‘I suppose I should bullshit you that I’m a great singer, but I approached this with a large, leviathan tongue in my left cheek. I can’t be serious about it. But if this could constitute me as some aging Spice Boy, then great.’ A video, featuring Virgin Radio DJ’s Russ & Jono dressed as Shakespearian fools, was filmed but has yet to finds its’ way to YouTube.
The CD single contained four versions of this nonsense. Here are two of them.
According to the sleeve notes, this album is ‘one of the greatest original interpretations of the new dimension of Psychedelic sound’ – it’s not though: it’s a load of old nonsense.
Underground by Satan and Deciples (sic) is about as satanic as my dog’s farts: released (by Goldband Records) in the same year that Charles Manson and his Family were enacting something the world would forever see as satanic, this silly symphony was hardly likely to turn anyone into a Satanist. It is a load of fun to listen to, though.
Satan was (and quite possibly still is) one Roy O. Bates. Bates started out with a New Orleans bar band and recorded at least one, Screaming Lord Sutch-like single as Satan & Satan’s Roses (a cover of Elliott Small's I'm a Devil backed with We Recommend, Sable 404), before mutating into Satan and Deciples (sic). There are no credits on the album sleeve, although Bates, Childs and Denson were credited as writers on the labels, and the opening Track – Satan’s First Theme– is merely a re-recording of the plug side of the lone Satan & Satan’s Roses 45. Roy Bates/Satan’s show included some fire breathing pyrotechnics, highly unusual for the time – although soon Arthur Brown would be seen on our TVs setting fire to his head!
Two tracks that didn’t make it to the album were issued on the 45 Mummie’s Curse (sic)/Cat’s Meow. Co-author credit on both cuts is given to ‘F Fender’, and although there’s no mention in his official biography of country star Freddy Fender being our Satan it does appear that he was at one point part of the group. According to Jeff Strichart (commenting on the Bad Cat Records blog in December 2015) Freddy ‘told me that all but one of the Satan and Deciples were dead. They were all Mexican and were hired as a backup band by the mysterious and presumably non-Mexican Roy O. Bates and even Freddy did not know much about him, who he really was, what his agenda was, if he was alive or dead’. With Fender’s passing in 2006 much of the story will remain untold.
As the Bad Cats blog makes plain ‘to be honest, a bunch of 5th graders could have probably come up with something at least as good’. The album seems to catch a band on the cusp of changing from a Sam the Sham or Seeds-style garage band into a more progressive rock band, but the material and the performances just ain’t good enough: despite the band’s best efforts to come across as sinister ‘the predominant satanic theme is about as ominous and threatening as a Tellytubby’. On Ensane (sic) Bates does a passable Lou Reed impersonation, while on Devil Time he goes for a James Brown vibe (even referencing Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag in the lyrics. It’s all a bit of a mish-mash.
Anyway, have a listen to a couple of tracks from the (according to the sleeve notes) Underground and decide for yourself. It’s been reissued on CD and is all over the YouTubes if you want more. Here, for your listening pleasure, is Why the Seas Are Salty and the dreadful Satan on Universe.
