RECORD MIRROR Singles Reviews, 25th November 1967

#3 in Canada but only #27 on Billboard (a peak position which they never matched again), The Lovin' Spoonful's "She Is Still a Mystery" starts beautifully, before lurching into the sort of stentorian boom-crash chorus which was endlessly deployed by early 1970s UK Britgum singles of the Tony Macaulay/Tony Burrows school. For all its merits, I just can't get past that.

"I fuckin' hate Northern Soul, it's like Motown's on the dole." (Sleaford Mods: "Shit Streets Runny") Yeah, but that's why I like it, Jason. It's the rawness, the urgency, the energy. Thought you'd get off on that tbh, mate. Two years as a monthly Northern Soul DJ has brought me to a more refined appreciation of a genre I'd mostly dismissed, and The Glories' "(I Love You Babe But) Give Me My Freedom" ticks all of my boxes - not least the "under-appreciated" box, as it's yet to have a repress, or to appear on a compilation. Instead, the group are now best known for the regularly anthologised "I Worship You Baby", an admittedly excellent stomper with a more restrained tempo that doubtless works better Out On The Floor.

As a 4CD box set which I once got for Christmas confirmed, I can only take Smokey Robinson & The Miracles in limited doses - but when they're good, there's no one better. I first knew "I Second That Emotion" in its Japan version, swiftly followed by its Diana Ross & The Supremes/Temptations version, only scrolling back to Smokey's original years later. They're all great, but Smokey wins, and if I'd not disbarred it from the poll, it would easily have had my vote. (And probably yours too. That's why it's disbarred.) This was their first UK chart entry, while in the US it gave them their biggest hit since "Shop Around" in 1960 (and only "The Tears Of A Clown" went on to do better).

Produced by Isaac Hayes, "Give Everybody Some" is basically a retread of "Soul Finger", The Bar-Kays' hit from earlier in the year, and the law of diminishing returns saw it flounder commercially. As four members of the six-piece band died in the same December plane crash which killed Otis Redding, the new line-up didn't regain its standing until well into the 1970s. This one's forgettable but fun, peppered with party-style vocal ad-libs that are kept low enough in the mix to prevent them from smothering the jam.

https://i.imgur.com/MsJUhqF.jpeg

"Second Hand Dealer" was the final Searchers single for Pye, who opted not to renew their contract. The band had suffered from the 1966 departure of drummer Chris Curtis, who wrote most of their originals, chose most of their covers and supplied their high harmony vocals, and each successive single during 1966 and 1967 fared less well than its predecessor. But even a band on the slide can still produce good work, and reverting to an original A-side after six consecutive covers was, if nothing else, a brave last stand. This isn't a typical Searchers song: it's observational in a Kinks-esque style, and poignant in a way that "Sweets For My Sweet" certainly wasn't, although the demise of the titular dealer could perhaps have been more sensitively portrayed ("he falls and breaks his neck - he's a goner!").

Freddie "Parrot Face" Davies was an Opportunity Knocks winner who became a light entertainment/kids' TV regular during my childhood. He played a character called Samuel Tweet, whose black hat was pulled far enough down to make his ears stick out, and his character spoke with a "hilarious" speech impediment that is deployed to "hilarious" effect on the ghastly "Sentimental Songs".

Sandy Posey was also on the slide, following three big hits in 1966-67. In the US, she's best remembered for "Born A Woman"; in the UK, for "Single Girl". She can also be heard on Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves A Woman". "Are You Never Coming Home", written for her by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham (who had also played on "When A Man Loves A Woman") is classier than either, a lovely piece of plaintive pop with lyrics that could easily have been sung by Patsy Cline. Penn and especially Oldham (organist with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) were as much soul as they were pop, and the soulfulness is what sells this, to me if not to the record-buying public. Posey ended up going full-on country in the 1970s, and she did OK in her field.

Like The Searchers, Truly Smith was about to be dropped by her label, after her six previous singles for Decca all flopped (a shame, as her Dusty-esque cover of Chris Clark's "I Wanna Go Back There Again" is a cracker). Nevertheless, nabbing Gerry Goffin & Carole King's "The Boy From Chelsea" was quite the coup, as it has never been recorded by anyone else. Perhaps Goffin and King had set the song in Manhattan, but it works perfectly in London, and Truly's journey from Warrington to Carnaby Street is just the sort of Rita-Tushingham-and-Lynn-Redgrave-in-Smashing-Time story for which I'm such a sucker. Maybe it's a bit too Cilla Black-like in its vocal stridency, but this presses all my buttons. Truly recorded one more single for MGM in 1968, and then that was that. She went back north, trained as a tescher, and ended up as a Northumberland headmistress.

"Turn Around" was Tony Christie's debut single, although the "highly-touted new star" would have to wait until 1971 for an actual hit.

Tim Andrews had been a member of Fleur De Lys, latterly hailed as one of the great freakbeat bands, and he'd also played in their offshoot, Rupert's People. "Sad Simon Lives Again" was his first of six psych-pop singles, many of which have appeared on recent compilations, particularly the long-running Piccadilly Sunshine series. Its B-side, the cornily winter-themed "You Won't Be Seeing Me Anymore", was written and arranged by Gordon Haskell, a fellow Rupert's Person who later joined King Crimson. The best thing about "Sad Simon" is Ian Green's string arrangement, and Green went on to arrange two UK Number Ones: Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" and Thunderclap Newman's "Something In The Air".

Ronnie Jones was a US R&B/Blues singer who had relocated to London. He sang for Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, working with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, and at the time of this single he was a member of The Nightimers alongside John McLaughlin. It would be good to know who's playing on "In My Love Mind", an orchestrated and fuzz-guitared breast-beater of the Long John Baldry school that would have profited from a stronger song, given the abilities of its performers.

(NB I'm isolating ahead of a PCR result, so researching these is a nice little distraction. I'm asymptomatic, but Kevin is properly poorly and he might just have it. Probably not, though.)

https://i.imgur.com/V5PVQcB.jpeg

Peter Jones has accidentally reviewed the throwaway Everlys-covering B-side of Svensk's second and final single, "You" (winsome psych-pop whose orchestration quotes liberally from "The Last Post"). The duo (from Bournemouth, not Sweden) are better remembered for their first single "Dream Magazine" (featuring a solo church organ break, of all things), which cropped up on Jon Savage's 1967 compilation, amongst others; its B-side "Getting Old" is also well anthologised, and it's the best of the lot, being a good deal more psych than pop.

There are various versions of "Freight Train", with different lyrics. The original was written in the very early 20th century by Elizabeth Cotten, a North Carolina folk/blues singer who ended up working as a housekeeper for Peggy Seeger's family, many years later. This led to Cotten re-learning the guitar after 40 years of inactivity, finally recording it in 1958, and to Peggy Seeger bringing her song over to the UK, where it became popular in folk clubs. Two opportunistic British songwriters then nicked the song, altered the lyrics, claimed the copyright, and passed it to the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, who drafted in Nancy Whiskey for a featured lead vocal. Their version of "Freight Train" reached #5 in 1957, and its success basically kick-started the whole skiffle boom: Lennon and McCartney performed it regularly with The Quarrymen, for instance. Following an intervention from Peggy Seeger, copyright was eventually restored to Elizabeth Cotten, but this 1967 remake by Nancy Whiskey retains the stolen copyright.

The Chas McDevitt version turns Cotten's lament into something quite different, with Nancy Whiskey addressing it to a murderer who is either escaping the law by train, or else travelling towards his execution. On her 1967 remake, Whiskey herself is riding the train, with new verses that remove both McDevitt's murder references and Cotten's death wish, substituting them with non-specific sentiments of homesickness and regret. All theft issues aside, it's a lovely if lyrically sanitised new version, the skiffle replaced by yet another baroque string arrangement (the shadow of "Eleanor Rigby" was clearly looming large in 1967), with appropriate chuggity-chug flourishes along the way.

And while we're nicking stuff from black American artists, here come Northern Ireland's Margo & The Marvettes, with their cover of Dee Dee Warwick's "When Love Slips Away". Margo later retreated into Irish showband cosiness, but she sells the song well, with that requisite Dusty-style vocal tone, and the cover works very well as ersatz Northern. Dee Dee Warwick (whose sister Dionne was a regular victim of British Cover Syndrome) handles the song very differently, fronting a slower and more sedate arrangement, leaving room for The Marvettes to energise it for dancers.

Skip Bifferty, whose music was used in the aforementioned Smashing Time, contained two future members of Ian Dury's Blockheads, Mickey Gallagher and John Turnbull. "Happy Land" was the follow-up to their debut single "On Love", a much heavier (and much anthologised) affair which sounds like the work of a completely different band. If this was an attempt to do something more commercial, it's a rather awkward attempt, oscillating between dead slow and super-fast. An orchestra has been brought in - and yes, of course there are some baroque touches - but none of it properly gels.

One-hit wonders in their home country (with "She's Not There" in 1964), The Zombies were by now doing so badly that they split up a couple of weeks after this review was published. The second single, and the opening track, from the latterly canonised Odessey and Oracle, Rod Argent's "Care Of Cell 44" is a glorious piece of work that should by rights have been a huge hit, with beautiful tonal shifts, acappella harmony breaks, and a joyously uplifting chorus that, unlike The Lovin' Spoonful, doesn't feel bolted on. There's also the novel conceit of it being addressed to an imprisoned girlfriend nearing the end of her sentence - hence the title, which doesn't appear in the lyrics. The album was released posthumously in 1968, and did nothing until its third single, "Time Of The Season", became a massive US and Canadian hit in 1969 (and even then, it only peaked at #95 in the US).

Nothing is known of Johnny Dumar, who put out three singles in 1967-68. The B-side of the single reviewed here is the only one of his songs available on YouTube, and it's total MoR blah.

https://i.imgur.com/zgzzbG9.jpeg

There was nobody actually called Savoy Brown in the Savoy Brown Blues Band, as they were then called, and their line-up was in a constant state of flux (shortly after this single, Bill Bruford joined them as drummer, only to be dismissed after three shows for "fiddling about with the rhythm"). They eventually concentrated on the US market, sustaining mid-level success throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. "Taste And Try, Before You Buy" is a solid example of British blues rock, leaning towards the emergent heavier side, with guitar solos from Kim Simmonds: the only constant member of all the line-ups, who remains with the band to this day.

For his first three flop singles, Gilbert O'Sullivan was billed only as "Gilbert"; the moment he added his surname, he scored his first hit, with "Nothing Rhymed" in 1970. Opening with a solo bassoon, and closing with a piccolo-led baroque (TICK!) orchestral coda arranged by Keith Mansfield, "Disappear" is as strange and as odd as Peter Jones suggests, and O'Sullivan really does sing like an old man on this debut release, with an vocal affectation that he later shed.

If Blossom Dearie's "Once I Loved" reminds you of Astrud Gilberto's "The Girl From Ipanema", that's understandable: they were both written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, who brought Brazilian bossa nova to an international audience. Blossom Dearie, a New York singer and pianist of Scotch-Irish and Norwegian descent, was known for her unusually girlish voice, and even at the age of 43, the girlishness is still there. This is an exquisite recording, seasoning its tender pledge of everlasting love with a bittersweet awareness that the melancholy which preceded it could just as easily return.

Keith Mansfield returns as the arranger of former Eurovision contestant Ronnie Carroll's schlocky "Time", written by Dusty's brother Tom. It needn't detain us long, and we can also skip past the equally schlocky "You Knew About Her All The Time", crooned by Italian-American Tommy Leonetti.

A UK recording for Siggy Jackson's Blue Beat label, "Limbo Girl", the debut single from The Invaders, was written by the hugely prolific Laurel Aitken, aka "The Godfather of Ska". I want to like it more than I actually do, but it feels a bit perfunctory.

Andy Stewart's White Heather Club was a long-running early evening show in my childhood, and doubtless The Kerries' sickly Scottish folk whimsy "Coulter's Candy" would have slotted right in. It starts, promisingly, like the theme tune from Z-Cars, before the full horror sets in.

It's just a hunch, but I think that "top real estate agent" Lyn Roman may have written her own Discogs biog. Under her real name of Linda Griner, she recorded one single ("Envious") for Motown in 1963, written and produced by Smokey Robinson, when she was 14 or 15 years old. "The Penthouse" was the theme from a British film of the same name, a Hitchcockian tale of an estate agent and his mistress being tormented by intruders disguised as meter men. According to Roger Ebert, the intruders "tie the guy into a chair, give the girl enough whisky to float a regiment of Irish poets, get high on pot, make love to the girl, taunt the man, recite long tales of self-pity, dig into the psychological motives for their behavior, and then start over again". With that in mind, Lyn Roman's customary stridency serves the song well, conjuring up a suitable air of impending menace.

I'm not hearing much of the "violent punch" which Peter Jones promises, but "Do It To Me Baby" is a nice piece of Jamaican rocksteady, released on the highly regarded Caltone label, which also had UK distribution. There's no song to speak of, but that's hardly the point.

"Not sure this might not be a hit" is an interesting bit of hedging.

How did I skip The Marmalade upthread? Originally known as The Gaylords, the band had enjoyed a successful, if hit-free, 1967. Having opened for Pink Floyd at The Marquee, they secured a long-term headline residency there, in between touring with the likes of The Who, Joe Cocker and Traffic. Jimi Hendrix lavished praise on their earlier single, the psych-tinged "I See The Rain", rating it as the best song of the year. And they had two bass players! Wild!

So far, so credible, but the label wanted hits... and hits they would get, starting with the group's next single, the significantly more poppy "Lovin' Things". But before that, there was just time to put out a fourth and final flop, and a very good flop it is too. Keith Mansfield's back again for the third time this week, serving you Rigby-esque baroque orchestral realness with a side order of French horns, and there's just enough impressionistic weirdness in the song to straddle the psych-pop divide. Wonder what Hendrix thought of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"?

For Your Consideration, these are my halfway-through picks of the pack.

Country Joe And The Fish - Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGnvXo5RP6M

Lou Rawls - Little Drummer Boy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1KXkdAT8FE

The Glories - (I Love You Babe But) Give Me My Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfyHSsgvdI

Truly Smith - The Boy From Chelsea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UnWPFSWxXI

The Zombies - Care Of Cell 44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3x1or_KHl8

Blossom Dearie - Once I Loved

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8scXwetD4RA

https://i.imgur.com/h0zr91H.jpeg

Richard Boone was a long-time member of Count Basie's band, and "Boone's Blues" (billed as "introducing Richard Boone" on US pressings) is a fun piece of relaxed vocalese, as Boone switches between intelligible words and imitations of jazz solos, with some yodelling to boot.

Written by the great reggae saxophonist Tommy McCook, formerly of The Skatalites and later of The Revolutionaries, and once again released on Caltone, "Don't Want To Let You Go" was Max Romeo's first release, backed by a band (The Emotions) that included Robbie Shakespeare's brother Lloyd. It's a sweetly romantic rocksteady chug, crooned by Romeo in the old style, with occasional swerves into falsetto. We're still a long way from "Wet Dream" here.

It's back to the Blue Beat label for more old-school lovers' rocksteady from Dave Smith & The Astronauts, with "Lover Like You". Whereas "Don't Want To Let You Go" placed Max Romeo's vocals front and centre, "Lover Like You" places the band higher in the mix, with coolly chiming guitar and cooing female backing vocals. Dave Smith was never heard from again, but The Astronauts had a run of singles during 1966 and 1967, re-emerging in 1970 when Barry Biggs joined the band.

Led by their trumpeter Chris Lamb, The Universals were an eight-piece former Irish showband from North London (although only Lamb and one other member were truly Irish). "Green Veined Orchid" (misspelt as "Orchard" in the review) was their fourth and final release, before most of the line-up (including their just-recruited new drummer Nigel Olsson, later of Elton John's band) morphed into Plastic Penny, quickly scoring their first and only hit in January 1968. "Hey You", the energetic freakbeat/mod/soul B-side of their previous single, is their most anthologised song, but "Green Veined Orchid" is very different: another reflective, observational, melancholy, Kinks-esque song which contrasts the realities and the daydreams of a bored office worker. The three-piece brass section adds an interesting soul influence to the psych-pop, and it's the brass which leads the break, but for the phased freakout coda, the psych elements fully take over. It's almost great, but held back by a certain hackiness before the coda which perhaps betrays their showband roots.

After Plastic Penny, members dispersed variously to Chicken Shack, The Troggs, The Flowerpot Men, Savoy Brown, Procol Harum, UFO and the Michael Schenker Group, singer Brian Keith having his greatest success as the singer on The Congregation's 1971 #4 hit (and big childhood favourite of mine) "Softly Whispering I Love You".

Bernard Braden and his wife Barbara Kelly were on TV a lot in the 1960s and 1970s, and doubtless that's how their daughters Kim and Kelly got to make two singles for Columbia, of which this is the first. It certainly couldn't have been for their vocal skills, but their untutored roughness is part of the immense appeal of "Didn't I", another Carnaby Street Beat Girl/ersatz Northern Soul confection which really should have been anthologised by now. Again, I'm put in mind of Smashing Time; it's just the sort of song that Lynn Redgrave's character might have squawked in the recording studio scenes. This is basically all Period Charm, from a period whose glamour transfixed me at the time (oh, how I longed to walk down Carnaby Street - and when I did, in 1968, it was like stepping round a corner into a multi-coloured dream), so I'm saying HIT.

The inventive string arrangement in "Laura's Garden", the second single from Orange Bicycle, is a cut above the "baroque" template of the time, and the band member who wrote the song, Will Malone, went on to have a spectacularly successful career as a string arranger, working with everyone from Take That and The Spice Girls to Opeth and Black Sabbath, via The Verve's Urban Hymns and Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy". The band had just topped the French singles chart with their debut "Hyacinth Threads", but they never came close to repeating its success, hence accruing the kind of obscurity that psych-pop compilers love to latch onto. Both singles are excellent, "Hyacinth Threads" being the freakier one (with a direct steal from a Beatles song that's driving me mad with its familiarity), and "Laura's Garden" the gentler, more stately one, albeit with a certain underlying sense of menace behind the pastoral idyll (those sawing strings are almost Psycho-like at times).

Curiously - and hearteningly - for a song about black African resistance to white imperialism, two of its performers were also holding down day jobs as immigration officers. Considering the times in which it was made, the good intentions of "Big White Chief" outweigh any potential problematic elements, and it's altogether a serviceable job from composer/producers Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, who season their lyrical boldness with easy tunefulness and bounce. Little further is known about The Inquisitive People, but the Left And To The Back blog has collated all the available details.

For all the psych-pop on display here, suffocating Light Programme MoR gloop was still a huge thing in 1967, and many of the grimmer records in this week's review section remind me of just how much it blighted my youth. Engelbert Humperdinck had topped the charts for five weeks in September/October with "The Last Waltz", so the inevitable instrumental cover from James Last followed swiftly in its wake. It's the absolute essence of Care Home, and I pity those on whom this sort of thing continues to be foisted.

Otello Smith's accent is so thick and so strange that I did briefly wonder whether this was a case of English comedy blackface, but on reflection that seems highly unlikely. A British production, as evidenced by Mike Berry's credit, and leaning towards Jamaican ska rather than the Tobagan proto-soca than one might have expected, "My Hometown" improves on Paul Anka's vaguely cod-calypso original, and it's a shame that the only version on YouTube cuts off about 20 seconds too early. Absolutely nothing further is known about the artists on this one-off release which, together with The Glories upthread and the next entry downthread, launched the Direction label.

lotta depth going on here! i feel like digging into this thread will be a project.

Amazing stuff itt from mike.

Thank you, I was beginning to wonder if anyone was reading this! But this is such a good week, and immersing myself in it is hugely fulfilling.

Am totally enjoying your commitment to this thread

Also I didn't notice the Zombies were in the poll but I've already voted.

Listening to the playlist, The Zombies sound so bright and sharp compared to most everything else.

Yeah, I'm almost certainly going to vote for The Zombies.

https://i.imgur.com/L2jDmJ3.jpeg

This is such a fucking AMAZING week for new singles, 1967 is my new favourite year, and here are two more prime examples.

Starting with a "You Can't Hurry Love"-style superfast backbeat, Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera's debut single "Flames" continues as high octane bluesy freakbeat, making it probably the most "rock" of anything here. There's a freakout bit in the middle that's tantalisingly way too short, and another freakout at the end, but the rest is basically straight-ahead stuff, later covered on stage by Led Zeppelin. Its follow-up, the lighter and swirlier "Mary Jane", was eventually banned by the BBC when they realised what "Mary Jane" meant, but the song makes it pretty blatant from the off.

In later years, Richard Hudson and John Ford joined The Strawbs, then continuing as Hudson-Ford ("Pick Up The Pieces"/"Burn Baby Burn") and latterly as The Monks ("Nice Legs Shame About The Face"/getting slagged off by Johnny Rotten on Juke Box Jury). As for Elmer Gantry, his plans to tour the US in 1974 with Mick Fleetwood collapsed when Fleetwood failed to show, Gantry's band became known as the fake Fleetwood Mac, and lawsuits duly flew. Thus piqued, Gantry formed Stretch, whose hit "Why Did You Do It?" was directly addressed to Mick Fleetwood, who had by then denied any such touring plans.

Only ever recorded in demo form by The Kinks, "I Go To Sleep" was first passed to Peggy Lee, who released it as a single in 1965, and then to the German singer Marion Maerz, who recorded it under the direction of Kinks/Troggs manager Larry Page. (There was also a 1965 version by The Applejacks.) It seems highly likely that Chrissie Hynde heard Marion's version, as the hit Pretenders recording from 1981 shows some distinct similarities (and let's not forget that Hynde had a child with Ray Davies in 1983). And of all these versions, I think Marion's is the best; it's a great find, and it's no surprise that copies now change hands for over 200 quid.

Rex Harrison's son Noel had his only hit in early 1969, with "Windmills Of Your Mind", but he'd been releasing music since 1958. I really like his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne". The understated flatness of his delivery is not without feeling, the arrangement is attractive, and the lugubriousness of Cohen's original is lightened, while preserving the essence of the song. Good job all round.

Earl Gill appears to be Irish, and presumably he's the trumpeter on the care home-appropriate instrumental "Sunset". Lacking the sickliness of the James Last record, it almost approaches bearability.

We're back in the Humperdinck slipstream with Danny Williams' "Love Me". A South African singer dubbed "Britain's Johnny Mathis" - and you can sort-of hear why, I suppose - Williams had reached Number One with "Moon River" in 1961, and he would re-emerge in 1977 with "Dancin' Easy", based on a TV commercial jingle for Martini.

The Fallen Angels were a Washington DC psych band, at loggerheads with a label who wanted to push them as pop. Tensions peaked when, during a TV performance of another 1967 single that the label had re-worked without their consent, they decided to retaliate by ripping off a doll's head. "I Don't Want To Fall", which was only released as a single in the UK, sounds a bit heavy-handed compared to the UK psych-pop offerings, as do the ooh-see-what-we-did-there lyrical references to "tripping". By the time they recorded their second album in 1968, the label had got off their backs, and their psychedelic urges were given full rein.

Earlier in 1967, The London Jazz Four released an album of Beatles covers, and for their second an final album in 1969, they presented An Elizabethan Songbook, jazzing up tunes such as Shakespeare's "It Was A Lover And His Lass". "It Strikes A Chord" was thus their only non-themed release. Its use of harpsichord suggests the direction in which they were travelling, and there's an appealing contrast with the vibes, making for a pleasingly groovy little curiosity.

The absurd over-valuation of Lovelace Watkins' "I Apologise Baby" (the median selling price on Discogs is £380, FFS) may be down to a renewed flurry of interest in him a few years ago, which I dimly recall but can't be arsed to trace. Hugely successful for a while in pre-apartheid South Africa (an unlikely achievement for an African American), Watkins later found his niche on the northern club circuit in the UK, which led to regular light entertainment TV appearances in the 1970s. The single is Humperdinckian shlock, but the voice is at least characterful, over-emoting for popular appeal in a way that stretches all the way back to music hall, and all the way forward to The X Factor.

Under his real name of Len Moseley, "Steven Lancaster" (an alias only used for this, his sole recording) wrote "The Night Before" for Lee Hazlewood in 1969, but little else. It's a better song than "San Francisco Street", a blatant flower power cash-in that was made with regular Kinks producer Shel Talmy (and, as Peter Jones remarks, released rather too late to ride Scott McKenzie's coat-tails). Still, the notion that "anywhere can be San Francisco", no matter how industrial and grim, if you just have "love in your heart and a flower in your hair" is cute, if silly.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'm working over this weekend, so there's no time to write any more of these up before the poll closes - but being an inveterate completer/finisher, I'll do the rest next week. There are only eight more singles left to cover in the actual poll, and you can pick them up on YT from here. My particular favourites: Dandy Livingstone, The African Messengers, The Bunch.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Perfect result.

Originating in 1862 as "La golondrina" ("The Swallow") (here's The Red Army Choir performing it in 1962), given new lyrics by Boudleaux & Felice Bryant ("All I Have To Do Is Dream"/"Bye Bye Love"/"Wake Up Little Susie"), andfirst released in 1960 by Jimmy Bell, "She Wears My Ring" had also been covered by Roy Orbison before Kentucky's Solomon King (backed by The Jordanaires, in Nashville) got his hands on it, slowing the schlocky song down even further and making it into a worldwide hit (although not in the USA). Of the 99 singles that Peter Jones reviews this week, it has the second highest UK chart peak of any of them, beaten only by The Beatles. That's Humperdinckians for you.

There's a further Everly Brothers connection with the next single: they wrote the Beach Boys-ish "I Don't Want To Love You", and had released it as an album track earlier in the year. The Barry Lee Show's markedly inferior cover starts promisingly enough, but again it's marred by a sudden swerve into a widescreen, orchestrated boom-crash chorus.

As such, it highlights one of the underlying changes in pop music at around this time, that arguably began when BBC Radio One replaced the pirates just under a month earlier. Although ostensibly a youth station, Radio One was courting older listeners too, and "housewives" in particular, their launch line-up including Jimmy Young, Terry Wogan and Pete Murray. Where the pirates had embraced innovation, the BBC played it safer, steering listeners towards unthreatening commercial pop and hastening the emerging divide between the album-based "serious" rock market and the singles-based "disposable" pop market. Record labels were quick to respond, as we've seen here: either dropping their more adventurous acts, or else pressuring them into making artistic compromises. The gates of John Peel's Perfumed Garden had been shuttered (although a niche awaited Peel at Top Gear, which he would take over entirely from February 1968), and the doors of new-build supermarkets had been opened to the new breed of DJs, who seized every ribbon-snipping opportunity. The Love Affair and Amen Corner were waiting in the wings, and [meaningful look to camera] Nothing Would Ever Be Quite The Same Again.

https://i.imgur.com/pUTMunE.jpeg

Retaining the jauntiness of Donovan's single from earlier in the year, Dandy Livingstone's self-produced rocksteady cover of "There Is A Mountain" is a breezy, graceful, easy-skanking thing of beauty, and my favourite of this week's ska-related releases. A Jamaican who moved to London in 1958, Livingstone had cover version form, most recently with "Puppet On A String", and he'd also released the original of "Rudy, A Message to You" during 1967. "Mountain" is no "Rudy" - and how could it ever be? - but I'll take it.

I was born into the sort of upper middle-class world that Joyce Grenfell gently satirised, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. She was the sort of woman who might have played bridge with my paternal grandmother, or gone to church with my maternal grandfather, and so my connection to her work verges on the ethnic. "Nursery School" was one of her best-known monologues, and "George, don't do that" was its best-known line. So I'm glad that somebody dobbed her a vote, cheers for that.

Wayne Carson's biggest songwriting success of 1967 was with The Box Tops ("The Letter"), and in 1972 he would co-write "Always On My Mind" (originally as a B-side for Gwen McCrae). "Mr. Bus Driver" was the first of several songs that Carson wrote for Bruce "Hey! Baby" Channel, and it could easily be read as a sequel to "The Letter", the recipient of said letter now being on the way back to his true love, and impatient for his long journey to end. (That said, he's significantly downgraded his original choice of transport, but even impatient lovers must live within their means). Perhaps it was nearing-the-end-of-the-list ennui that caused me to disbar it from the ballot, as actually it's rather good.

Like Ronnie Carroll upthread, Kathy Kirby had also sung for the UK at Eurovision, in 1965. It had been almost three years since her final hit, but she was still getting steady work, the misfortunes which befell her in the 1970s (bankruptcy, mental illness, a female lover imprisoned for fraud) being some way ahead. "Turn Around", one of several Barry Mason/Les Reed songs this week, is a melodramatic belter of the Dorothy Squires/Shirley Bassey school (like them, Kirby had a sizeable gay fanbase), which casts its singer as the other woman in a love triangle, addressing her anguished lover with an anguish to match his own (although, to be honest, I'm a bit confused: precisely in whose direction is she imploring him to turn?).

https://i.imgur.com/nmrrFVd.jpeg

Interesting to see the schism between underground hip album culture and square pop starting to appear. Looking at the BBC genome website it's amazing how fusty some of the programmes are; Joe Loss and his Orchestra, crosswords, Ted Heath, even episodes of The Navy Lark! Seems a long way from swinging Carnaby Street and dropping acid at the Speakeasy Club.

Here's the listings for 25th November 1967 https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/service_bbc_radio_one/1967-11-25

and you can listen to some of 'Where It's At' here featuring John Lennon http://retronewser.com/2017/11/25/lennon-mccartney-appear-on-bbc-radio-1s-where-its-at-50-years-ago-onthisday-otd-nov-25-1967/

I didn't know about that genome site, thanks. I see that Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera were on the following afternoon's John Peel/Tommy Vance show. And there's Keith Skues, doing Saturday mornings; I met him about 10 years later, at a very posh party, by which time he was at Radio Hallam. My dad introduced me, thinking I'd know who he was. I didn't.

Yeah, I met KSkues, he was on Pop Quest 1975 Celeb vs Winners final.

Usually a purveyor of more bluesy, R&B-type material, Hamilton King rebranded himself as Mood Of Hamilton for an atypically psychy one-off release, "Why Can't There Be More Love", complete with Procol Harum-style organ, lyrical namechecks for San Francisco and a concluding freakout fuzz guitar solo. It all feels suspiciously opportunistic, and the overall feel is too dirgey for my tastes.

The opening seconds of Jackie Rae's "Believe In Love" put me in mind of George Harrison's still unreleased "It's All Too Much" (from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack), but the resemblance doesn't last long, as Rae's dippy love song (with faintly post-flower-power imagery in its opening verse) takes over. I'm too young to remember his TV appearances (including the first series of The Golden Shot, before Bob Monkhouse took over), and this was his final single.

None of the various versions I've heard of John D. Loudermilk's "Indian Reservation" - Marvin Rainwater's original, Don Fardon's UK hit, Paul Revere & The Raiders' US Number One, Orlando Riva Sound's Germany-charting 1979 "disco" (not really) version, 999's 1981 almost-hit "punk" (not really) version - convince me of the song's worth. Apart from Marvin Rainwater, who claimed to be one quarter Cherokee, none of the other performers could claim Native American kinship, and there are some lyrical misfires, spread over the differing versions (Cherokees didn't live in reservations; nor did they live in teepees; nor did they use papooses), that suggest that a fairly superficial connection to Cherokee culture from all concerned. I dare say they all meant well, but given the late 1960s boom in Native American-derived clothing and accessories, the song's success was perhaps less about civil rights, and more about fashion.

Dublin's Danny Doyle topped the Irish charts with "Whiskey On A Sunday", and he continued having Irish hits until the late Seventies (including two more Number Ones). While Irish folk will never be my thing, the song itself is not without interest, having been written to mourn the passing (in 1902) of a Jamaican/Liverpudlian street entertainer called Seth Davy, who performed with dancing dolls attached to the end of a plank.

For their third and final single, "Nothing On", The League Of Gentlemen (nothing to do with Robert Fripp) shortened their name to The League, recording a song that was originally intended to advertise a perfume (also saucily called Nothing On). The perfume never appeared (too saucy, perhaps?), and the song eventually found its way - like so many others this week - onto the Piccadilly Sunshine series of psych-pop compilations. The howling guitar adds spice to the silly song ("I tell you all the world is in a swinging trend, bringing flowers and kisses to their best girlfriend"), and Period Charm basically saves it.

https://i.imgur.com/mTCsm4c.jpeg

A Rodgers & Hart composition for The Boys From Syracuse, a 1938 musical (and 1940 film) based on Shakespeare's Comedy Of Errors, "Falling In Love With Love" is a waltz whose gaiety belies the disillusioned cynicism of its lyrics. It was covered by all and sundry, from Frank Sinatra and Julie Andrews to Cliff Richard and The Supremes. This week, the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland gives it a bash, in a rare non-operatic excursion. Opera queens and musical theatre queens may well swoon, but I'm neither.

Dave & Don were a couple of seasoned cabaret circuit troupers (Dave Reid and Don Fox), teaming up for this Fox-penned one-off. "What A Feeling" is bog standard midtempo orchestrated MoR, the duo's showy showbiz vocals failing to satisfyingly meld. Don Fox went on to record a bunch of promotional songs for bingo halls ("Bingo Memories", "This Bingo Game", "Bingo (I'm In Love)"), which is nice work if you can get it.

Helga, daughter of the Müller family from my German language primer, was a big fan of Freddy Quinn, an Austrian schlager singer whose fame peaked in the Sixties and Seventies. She can't have heard the rumours, then: Quinn was long rumoured to be gay, but he had in fact been secretly married for nearly 50 years, expressing amusement in later life at the assumption. Anyhow, "Only A Fool Like Me" is gloopy Jim Reeves-style lonesome-cowboy pish and not worth your time.

Look, I do try to give all genres a fair hearing, but Big Johnny & The Maurice Lynch Showband's "Biddy Reilly" is a stretch too far. The titular and late lamented Ms. Reilly owned a shebeen, a term now used as much in South Africa and Zimbabwe as it traditionally has been in Ireland - but there, I would imagine, the similarities end.

If you thought the barrel was being scraped at this late stage, think again. Led by percussionist and singer Ginger Johnson - a Nigerian who had settled in the UK, helping to arrange the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1966 and performing with all manner of rock/jazz/blues luminaries - The African Messengers played Afro-Cuban music long before it was popularised. "Highlife Piccadilly", first released in 1964 and now reissued in 1967, was exhumed for an Honest Jon's compilation (London Is The Place For Me 4: African Dreams And The Piccadilly High Life in 2006, and the band's sole album (African Party), also from 1967, was reissued in 2015. This single has a lighter sound than the album, but all their stuff is great and should be heard. One of my best finds in the whole list, this one.

British trio The King Brothers had a run of hits between 1957 and 1961, but by this stage they were men out of time, nearing the end of their recording careers. Hokey song apart, "My Mother's Eyes" is a decent attempt at updating their sound, with its acappella harmony intro, a "Peter Gunn" riff, a beefy backing and Four Seasons-style vocals. After the trio split in 1970, Denis King had a successful career composing TV themes, scores and jingles, most notably writing the ever-Proustian (if you're my age) "Galloping Home" for The Adventures Of Black Beauty.

"Lapland", the Baltimore & Ohio Marching Band's kazoo-led novelty trifle, has since been eclipsed by its considerably more bearable B-side, the organ-led "Condition Red", which has ended up on a surprising number of latter-day Northern Soul compilations (it's fast and sort-of stompy, but no more than that; then again, they ended up playing any old shite at Wigan after a while, which the speedfreaks dug as the purists winced).

I've still got James Hamilton's old review copy of Anthony Quinn's "Spanish Eyes"-derived "I Love You And You Love Me" (in its 1970 reissue), holding onto it for OMGWTFLOL purposes (everyone should hear it once in their lives), and there are some lesser OMGWTFLOLs on its flip, "Sometimes (I Just Can't Stand You)". It wouldn't be surprising if William Shatner took inspiration from them both.

Mark Barkan's side hustle as a solo singer was brief, and the overcooked "A Great Day For The Clown" suggests this was no great loss, but as a songwriter and producer he was much more successful. Having written Manfred Mann's 1966 hit "Pretty Flamingo", he became the musical director on both seasons of The Banana Splits, also co-writing its theme tune, "The Tra La La Song". So, y'know, credit where it's due.

Hokey song apart, "My Mother's Eyes" is a decent attempt at updating their sound, with its acappella harmony intro, a "Peter Gunn" riff, a beefy backing and Four Seasons-style vocals.

Kevin Coyne's take on it was pretty unique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOsnWKKfha8

Err... wow. The 1964 Big Maybelle version is pretty good, actually; it turns the greetings-card lyrics into more than they deserve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USPACVUxhKc

Bournemouth's The Bunch, whose history has been documented in exhaustive detail, are responsible for the most expensive single in this list, by some distance. Having released a couple of serviceable mod/R&B singles earlier in the year, they briefly jumped on the psych-pop bandwagon for this one, before "doing a Marmalade" and going pop for their final release. A compilation LP was eventually put out by Record Collector magazine in 2019. On the A-side, a Tony Blackburn record of the week, "Spare A Shilling", the seven-piece band do a creditable job, not far removed from what The Zombies were up to at the time, while on the equally sought after and psych-ier flip, the Lewis Carroll-referencing "Looking Glass Alice", they "do a Jefferson Airplane", coy drug references and all. It's all a bit opportunistic, but they get away with it.

Brass-playing Belgians Albert and Theo Mertens ploughed a Herb Alpert-style furrow, covering tunes such as "Puppet On A String" and "Congratulations", and even recording a track called "Marijuana Brass". We can only guess at what they did to Vince Hill's "Some May Live", the theme song from a British war movie set in Saigon, but filmed in Twickenham.

Peter Jones is way too kind to Jimmy Wilson's Humperdinckian blah, which just leaves Tuesday's Children, former psych-poppers (and good ones, at that) who were also "doing a Marmalade", ditching their own songwriter Phil Cordell for hired hacks Mitch Murray and Peter Callander ("How Do You Do It", "Goodbye Sam Hello Samantha", "Billy Don't Be A Hero"). Breezy, brassy and banal, "Baby's Gone", the first of their two Mitch-n-Pete singles, already sounds more like 1968 than 1967, and what few fans they had must have been aghast. (To hear them as they were, and if you can get past the cultural appropriation, try "A Strange Light From The East", their most anthologised track.) By 1969, the game was up, and the band relaunched themselves as Czar, whose sole and self-titled 1970 album, now seen as a progressive rock underground classic, sells for between £600 and £1200.

And that's your lot. As overall snapshots of an era go, you couldn't ask for a more comprehensive selection than this one. Was every week in 1967 as good? If so, then I should never again roll my eyes at nostalgic boomers. The lucky bastards.

Just listening to the YT playlist by itself is so much fun, thanks for this thread mike!

Yeah I couldn’t keep up with this in real time this time around but these threads are so great.

Before I finally step away from this thread (and God knows it's a wrench!), I've put together the tracklisting for a notional Bob Stanley-style compilation album based on this week's new releases, which would fit neatly onto four sides of vinyl, or a single CD. I've paid close attention to sequencing and diversity, and the finished result flows very agreeably indeed.

YouTube playlist: http://is.gd/25nov67

SIDE ONE
1. The Zombies - Care Of Cell 44
2. Country Joe & The Fish - Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine
3. The Bar-Kays - Give Everybody Some
4. Margo & The Marvettes - When Love Slips Away
5. The Orange Bicycle - Laura's Garden
6. Dandy (Livingstone) - There Is A Mountain

SIDE TWO
1. Marion - I Go To Sleep
2. Tim Hardin - Lady Came From Baltimore
3. Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera - Flames
4. The Glories - (I Love You Babe But) Give Me My Freedom
5. The Bunch - Spare A Shilling
6. Blossom Dearie - Once I Loved

SIDE THREE
1. Diana Ross & The Supremes - In And Out Of Love
2. Richard Boone - Boone's Blues
3. Gilbert (O'Sullivan) - Disappear
4. London Jazz Four - It Strikes A Chord
5. Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - The Equestrian Statue
6. Sandy Posey - Are You Never Coming Home

SIDE FOUR
1. Truly Smith - The Boy From Chelsea
2. The Searchers - Secondhand Dealer
3. Tim Andrews - Sad Simon Lives Again
4. Lyn Roman - The Penthouse
5. Kim And Kelly Braden - Didn't I
6. The African Messengers - High Life Piccadilly

well played mike, congrats on a loving document

Thanks!

That was an enjoyable listen, Mike. For me the real find here is Marion's "I Go to Sleep" which - to agree with you - is the best version of that tune I've heard (I say this as massive Peggy Lee fan). Absolutely the model for the Pretenders version.

Jayzus, I had a lot of time on my hands in December 2021. This was such fun to do, though. What a week in 1967 that was.

Dour, messy, pretentious, and Grace Slick's counterpoints particularly grate.

These are all the things I like about "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil".