Brian Poole & Pinkerton's Assorted Colours (1967)

WHAT’S SO FUNNY

‘BOUT PEACE, LOVE

& UNDERSTANDING…?

It was a ‘Pop Festival’ at Burton Constable Hall’, it was

June 1967, the year of Flower-Power, ‘Sergeant Pepper’,

Hippies, Peace & Love… and it was headlined by

BRIAN POOLE & THE SEYCHELES,

and PINKERTON’S ASSORTED COLOURS…?!?!

Shrapnels of broken glass. A pool of spilt beer on cobblestones. And what looks like blood. Why the hell am I here…? Later this year – 22nd August 1967, Burton Constable Hall hosts a more impressive line-up, the Pretty Things, Chicken Shack, and Third Ear Band. A year later, 21st June 1968 there’s even an anniversary ‘Midsummer Night Dream’ with Geno Washington’s Ram-Jam Band, the Move, Marmalade, Family and Spooky Tooth. And I have to be here, this night. Even now it’s hard to work out exactly how it happened, how it all went so wrong. A guy at Tech college. Can’t even recall his name. Might have been Patrick Dent, who first turned me on to Bob Dylan, but probably it wasn’t. He’d seen the event advertised in the ‘Hull Daily Mail’ and thought it’d be a great opportunity for checking out the talent… as in, nubile Free-Loving Hippie-Nookie. Me? living in Humberside is like living at world’s end, everything exciting happens somewhere else, way behind the horizon, and well, this seems like it might be a better way of spending the evening than sat watching life in b-&-w on TV. By then I’d got a car, bought for £250. A blue mini with a white roof. Burton Constable is an imposing Elizabethan pile with a lake and 1.2-square k’s of sheep-grazed grounds near an obscure hamlet called Skirlaugh. Out of Hull via the Saltend roundabout where the chemical plant flares blaze out over the dark Humber, through sleeping villages nine miles vaguely north-east. Once there, headliners perform in the white-washed interior of large Palladian outbuilding that had once been used for the estate’s livestock. One downbill group impresses with some strobe-theatricals, ripping up sheets of newspaper in jerky fast-frame bursts of sequential light. But I forget the name. Another does a pretty keen cover of the Who’s “I’m A Boy”.

Then some local guys, in a quite amiable way, assume we are Mods, and invite us to a ruck that’ll get us all in the papers. Well, I was wearing my ball-tight hipster pants with vertical stripes, pointed-toe Cuban-heel boots with three buckles on the outer side of each, and a mustard pvc jacket. With CND button. We spend the rest of the evening either trying to gawp the groups (they were still called groups, not yet bands), and ducking the thuggish inbred locals.

Infuriatingly, there’s neither logic nor reason to hit singles. There’s no great cosmic arbitrator to determine that worthy records achieve the chart pre-eminence they deserve. It’s random, all down to consumer whim, exposure to a catchy chorus on the correct radio or TV-slot at the right moment. A pretty face in a fan-mag. Occasionally, when a neglected overlooked Soul classic is selected for a TV-ad campaign or for inclusion in a movie-sequence it achieves retroactive hit-status, as with Jackie Wilson, Erma Franklin or Nina Simone. But surely it baffles, affronts, bewilders and confounds all sense of the essential moral order of the universe when Ken Dodd and Englebert Humperdinck get no.1’s while the Who and the Yardbirds never do. And why did Creation or Idle Race never sniff the Top Twenty when Brian Poole & The Tremeloes and Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours do? There’s no justification. There’s no sense or reason to it. It just happens. It’s a contradiction of familiar mystery that where other, far superior records fail, Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours inexplicably notch up a hit single with the vapid “Mirror Mirror” (no.8, 19th February 1966). A song based around the pantomime ‘who is the fairest of them all’, he looks into the mirror and ‘I see your pretty face’. Heavy-rotation on pirate station ‘Radio City’ – which happened to be owned by their manager Reginald Calvert, doesn’t hurt. For ‘Top Of The Pops’ they contrive a forgettable visual front by adopting different coloured suits, with lead voice Tony Newman in dayglo pink. He plays an autoharp, the instrument of choice that John Sebastian wields to infinitely more creditable effect with Lovin’ Spoonful. Despite radio support, they barely scrape the fifty with a follow-up, “Don’t Stop Lovin’ Me Baby” (no.50, 21st April 1966). This night they also do one called “Magic Rockin’ Horse”. Yet more inexplicably, following its failure, they later reconfigure into Flying Machine with future Radio 1 DJ Stuart Colman on bass, and score a one-off American hit with Macauley-&-Stephens “Smile A Little Smile For Me” (US no.5, 18th October 1969). So, one-hit wonders, with different hits, on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Dagenham’s Brian Poole & The Tremeloes were famously the group Decca signed in preference to the Beatles. Already anachronistic, left-to-right gawky to homely, named after Fender’s tremelo-arm effect-lever guitar attachment used by Hank Marvin to give the Shadows their distinctive sound, they were first onto vinyl with a dance-fad single “Twist Little Sister” (in April 1962). Some time later, with “Twist And Shout” grabbing voracious attention on the Beatles first album, they rush out a convenient cover (no.4, 3rd August 1963). LP’s cost a bundle of pocket-money, no-one pretends they actually prefer Brian Poole’s blandly insipid version, but if you really need a low-budget “Twist And Shout” you’d maybe settle for it. It’s not really much of a song. Hardly a song at all. Like “Shout” – which gifts Lulu with her career, it derives from the Isley Brothers stage-routine, built up from spontaneous extemporisations with roots in gospel preacher ‘get up, get on your feet and praise the lord’, secularised into ‘get up, get on your feet and Dance’. For album-track fourteen, the Beatles bring to its nonsense lyric, not only Lennon’s power-vocals, but an intuitive grasp of structured dynamics, building tension to a shattering climax. The Tremeloes simply do it bright, fast and bouncy. With a toe-hold visibility, they follow it with a cover of the Contours “Do You Love Me” (no.1, 5th October 1963), which subsequently charts over a rival Dave Clark Five version. Probably the only time in their careers the DC Five are the credible option! Next, in their polite neat suits and sensible hair, Poole tours with Roy Orbison, who was astute enough to convince them to cover his ‘B’-side “Candy Man” (no.8, 22nd February 1964), published through his Orbisongs, he benefit from the royalties. There are other low-rent hits, including an execrable revival of the Browns’ Catholic prayer “Three Bells” (no.16, 30th January 1965), and a poor cover of the Strangeloves stomping US hit “I Want Candy” (no.25, 22nd July 1965 – which Malcolm McLaren would better-reinvigorate with Bow-Wow-Wow). When Brian split away from the Tremeloes, label-expectation was he’d go on to solo stardom while the group dispersed. It didn’t work out that way. The Tremeloes first wrong-step with a cover of Paul Simon’s “Blessed”, a vehemently satiric anti-religious tract from Simon & Garfunkel’s first electric LP. The Trems didn’t understand it, or know what to do with it, but Simon was a happening writer and CBS considered bandwagon-jumping a cool idea. But they did fall on their feet with a party-cover of another trendy songwriter’s “Here Comes My Baby” – from Cat Stevens (no.4, 4th March 1967). They go on to bigger, if not necessarily better things with a no.1 cover a Four Seasons ‘B’-side, “Silence Is Golden” (no.1, 20th May 1967), among a total of thirteen post-Brian hits… while Brian himself ineptly teams with the Seychelles. Smiling in a ‘please like me’ kind of way, with all the charisma of the high street butcher, a career he later adopts when the Pop bubble bursts. I’ve a feeling he did the vacuous Trems-period hit “Someone Someone” (no.2, 27th June 1964). In the meantime, he’d re-signed to CBS, but “Everything I Touch Turns To Tears” in September 1966, and “That Reminds Me Baby” (March 1967) both fail. Probably he sang those too, although I can’t be sure. More singles for the President label would follow (including “What Do Women Most Desire”). But the world was moving on.

The yard outside was cobbled, with runnels to duct away dubious liquids. A night chill and uneasy with malevolent menace. In a confusion of intentions me and Patrick get separated, he falls foul of our amiable locals and gets his head kicked in a little. I follow shrapnels of broken glass. A pool of spilt beer. And what looks like blood. Full stop. Exclamation mark. We escape back to the mini more or less intact. And accelerate into the night, the Saltend chemical plant flares still blazing out over the dark Humber. Don’t let anyone tell you the sixties were all hedonistic fun fun fun, don’t believe the hype…

I Am-Sterdam

I AM-STERDAM / 'The Ins & Outs'

meteorite-slash over herengracht ‘gentlemens’ canal
where mad colours run psychedelic ripples
on the wrong side of my reflection
born beneath the sign of fire

bright lights bright cafés shimmer shimmer,
tram-lines quiver, the sound of sea in the trees
born beneath the sign of water

once hazardously wasted on a Thai stick
sat on a kerb for 45-mins straight, without moving
animation suspended, on pause, slow obliteration
struck dumb, then snap back, with no time elapsed
I must have come from someplace
just can’t remember where,
rap on the radio, lyrics connect in burning code
scattergun schmatterglum shatter-gloom encrypted
messed-up raddled, listen, saying the lines loud
soothes their quick-theft backwards into poems
born beneath the sign of the minotaur,
I Am-Sterdam

Rembrandt gazes down in ghostly stone in doublet, cap
& wistful regret, at needles, spent condoms &cold pizza,
he steps down as dark turns & the moon grows vast
freezing the city to stone, melting stone to flesh,
& we tiptoe together through Rembrandtplein
my mind made of gravel, where digital dogs howl &
sound resounds around in inpactful impactwise narrative
painting genes and bones, stonewashed jeans and stoned
through the square that puts the dam in Amsterdam
where even the bag-lady rides a bag-bicycle, &
fast-food burger-bar mothers feed kind to be cruel, where
cigarettes have health-warnings and brown energy cafés
don’t, ganja minds breathe god particles in magic potion 309
gauntlets of fat women are chewing iphones,
& there are chicks with dicks on the corner,
tres strange, born beneath the sign of aphrodite

light-years later, scanning every face on the Rokin, but
he’s returned to stone & I’m in the crummy Thorbecke
hotel skyping you home-thoughts & facebook phone-pics,
before we met my life was lived within these snippets
yet the light has dimmed, even as she shies away,
at one time you do stuff, smoke stuff, drink stuff
then do other stuff, rather than not doing stuff
a coming down, coming of age, or just coming?
there’s no time for ‘you should have known me when’,
time tells lies, there’s no time to be retrospective,
these memories you burn, & too late for new stories
so what other way to tell all these storms in golden cups,
trade away days, forget regrets, forsake mistakes
born beneath the sign of forgetting…

The Lodger CD Review

'FLASHBACKS'

by THE LODGER

(This Is Fake DIY records)

www.myspace.com/thelodgerleeds

Lodger. If you thought David Bowie, you’d be wrong. To anyone who’s ever frequented Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club or The Faversham, Lodger are endearingly ragged fey white-boys in sensible haircuts and thrift-store shirts. With Ben Siddall as the engagingly uncontrived focus, and the bands only continuity. He’s the wispy insubstantial lead voice of ‘Grown-Ups’ (2007) and ‘Life Is Sweet’ (2008), the kind of accessible voice you know you’ve heard somewhere before, but just can’t place. ‘Flashbacks’ is his first with a four-piece nucleus, expanded with various cohorts and co-conspirators, and the band’s first for This Is Fake DIY records. This time there are also strings, nice sax horn-lines, trumpet and violin solos. The structured big-production title track opens mildly, with outbreaks of mellowness, before blossoming into big choruses punctuated by Bruce Renshaw’s martial drums. There’s rippling jangle-guitar to ‘The End Of The Affair’ with smart lyrics about ‘squeeze my hand, till it cuts off the circulation in my arm’, enveloped in a balm of harmonies, accelerating into choppy rhythmic changes. These are songs of careless bedsit partings, ‘lust at the back of the bus’ that still touch all the usual bases, Stone Roses, Farm, Weddo’s, Housemartins, Postcard Records, but with some serious jiggery-pokery in the instro-mix, and Sarah’s attractive ba-ba-ba harmonies on ‘Time To Wait’ adding flurries of Yorkshire honey. The bright ‘Stand Up’ tail-ends into tasty jazzy break-ups. It’s widescreen wimp-Indie, impossible to dislike. Tunes that not so much lodge in your head, as shimmer there. Sometimes spindly, always informal, the artful Lodger is what they created Indie to be.

It Was 2am, May 2010

IT WAS 2 am, May 2010

/ SOME WORDS STAY BETTER

LEFT UNWRITTEN, & OTHERS…

after William Wantling, 1973

it’s 2 am, &

the only station coming through

is this talk-radio phone-in

and this guy

from someplace rants

for half-an-hour about how

anti-GM, Animal Rights, &

Vegan anti-globalisation activists

wrecking fast-food outlets are

disrespecting authority, property-rights,

vested interests & free enterprise

about how

Gays & single-sex single-parent families

are destroying traditional social values

and how

asylum-seekers, illegal immigrants

and ethnic minority communities are

undermining our culture and

threatening our survival

as a great nation

I yawn & look away,

think about the beautiful bi-racial

children I see in the Mall & think

how grateful I am that he’s right

and about how,

because of all this,

there’s still so much

hope for the

future…

Published in:-
‘GARBAJ no.15’ (Nov 2003 – UK)
‘THE PENNILESS PRESS no.19’ (UK – June 2004)
‘EARTH LOVE: POETRY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT no.12’ (UK – August 2004)
‘THE SUN DOESN’T ALWAYS SHINE: Edit Pete Presford’ (UK – January 2005)
‘OUTLAW no.10: Spring’ (UK – March 2005)
‘MINOTAUR no.43 (Vol.10 no.1)’ (USA – March 2005)
‘EARTH LOVE: POETRY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT edit Tracy Patrick’
(UK – September 2006)

ACiD DROP: Leeds Punk

THE NEW LEEDS PUNK...!!!

ACiD DROP

The Drop Zone

(Acid Drop)

www.myspace.com/aciddroppunkrock

If the last Green Day CD didn’t quite make it for you, maybe ‘The Drop Zone’ will? ACiD Drop are Leeds-based sonic insurrectionists intent on putting ‘the fun back in Punk-Rock’, but they also put the Funk into Punk, and the pun into Punk, with an incendiary Molotov cocktail lobbed deep into culture-clash street. The vivid CD-booklet graphic tells the suicide-trip tale of Ciruc K Joy (Killjoy!) who adventures into psychotropic cactus-based compounds. Psilocybin, plus LSD – so much for sniffin’ glue! Ben’s glowering vocal inflicts verbal abuse then bats a defiant ‘Oi’ chorus into the mayhem while battling Ste’s spiky riffs. Stiv adds disruptive bass and devil horns. There’s some literate Orwell-pillaging, with ‘Winston Smith’ taking ‘1984’ into the jittery phone-tap CCTV ska-zone, as drummer Pete insinuates off-kilter sax in ways X-Ray Spex might once have done. ‘Society’s Rejects’ sounds more like the name of a first-wave Punk band than their more direct American New Wave Punk influences, but there’s studded tongues in several cheeks, and none of them ‘politically correct’. From the city of the Mekons, Gang Of Four, Three Johns... and Chumbawamba, they might claim to be barely afloat, but ‘don’t send the rescue boat’. ‘All The Same’ attacks the political system with a cunning Lydon cackle, until the acoustic play-out ‘The Last March’ emphasises the continuity of protest which simply moves to another town and goes on. So we know where they’re coming from, it’s where they’ve taken it, and where they’re taking it to that’s interesting. Maybe Malcolm McLaren didn’t die in vain?

Yardbirds Live In Leeds, 1966

HAPPENINGS FORTY YEARS TIME AGO!

:THE YARDBIRDS LIVE IN LEEDS, 1966

I miss the last train home and spend the night stranded

in Leeds, but hey, Wednesday 23rd March 1966 was

a great night. THE YARDBIRDS at ‘The Majestic Ballroom’

‘Everybody knows that three feet make a yard,

but every Moddy knows that ten feet make the Yardbirds…’

(‘Record Mirror’ 30 May 1964)

And now, ‘the most blueswailing BIRDYARDS, sorry, the most yardwailing BLUEBIRDS, er, Live Five YIRDBARDS – no, FIVE LIVE YARDBIRDS!’ And they don’t even do the hits. As though it’s not quite valid pandering to chart stuff. Which is a shame. They’re great little singles. In memory, it was something like the “Stroll On” sequence in ‘Blow-Up’, with Jeff Beck petulantly smashing his guitar. Jimmy Page standing slightly back, watching him with a playful smile, an expression that might be amusement, admiration, or something of both. But it wasn’t really like that. The Yardbirds have been proclaimed the first psychedelic band. The first to experiment with strange tunings and odd sounds. But in Leeds they stick pretty close to their earlier ‘Most Blueswailing’ tag-line, as High Priests of the Home Counties Brit-bluesology Blues-revering sect. With an extended ten-minute “I’m A Man” building to its long rattling percussive lead-out, climaxing the hard-storming hour-long set. ‘The Majestic’ stands across City Square, just opposite the Rail Station. With its spacious auditorium and wide balcony, at various times it’s operated under the guise of a Bingo venue, and more recently a trendy Night Club frequented by Leeds United stars, and also the location of one of their more scurrilously violent episodes in the run-up to their collapse from the Premiership. But during the sixties it was the city’s premier ballroom, a place for crowds laughing, joking, drinking, smoking, till they’d spent their wage, a place to pull if your luck’s in, or else get off on just about every beat-combo name from the Beatles, the Mojos, the Hollies, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, on down at various weekends. And this night, the Yardbirds.

Over the years since, Yardbird history has been rewritten around the three-guitarists theory. The Eric Clapton-Jeff Beck-Jimmy Page triad that ran in series, and sometimes in parallel through the group’s story. That’s an understandable, if skewed perspective. You can no more understand a group dynamic by studying its constituent parts in isolation than you can appreciate what a laptop can do by examining a pile of disconnected printed-circuits and silicon chips. The Five Live Yardbirds operate as a single collective entity, a single pulsating organism, and should be viewed in that way. I’d been aware of them for some time before I’d even heard them. Long before Love or the Doors, they were the first group to exploit the graphic visual flair of configuring their name into an art-logo. The abrupt angular ‘Y’, the back-to-back echoing ‘db’, the long-tongued ‘r’s supporting and interlocking the ‘d’s into a stylish scrawl. Although I’d yet to make the connection with BeBop giant Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, I’d noted their distinctive font in the gig-guide lead-out pages of ‘Melody Maker’ or ‘Record Mirror’, standing bold from ‘The Marquee’ or ‘The Crawdaddy’ Club-box listing, focussing attention towards the sparse lines of advance reviews. They’d debuted at Eel Pie Island, then replaced the Stones as house-band at Giorgio Gomelsky’s ‘Crawdaddy’ when Jagger-&-co moved up and out into greater things. Although by day the venue went under the somewhat staid guise of ‘The Richmond Cricket Club’, the ‘Daily Mail’ claimed it ‘should be called the southern equivalent of Liverpool’s Cavern…’ and with the succession bestowing them a certain legendary status from the off ‘the Yardbirds will soon be whisked away on the elevator of fame. Or so they say’ (2 March 1964). Further hints and suggestions invested them with the vaguely esoteric air that their biographer Alan Clayson calls their ‘arty aura’. Blues bands were hardly a scarcity around the scene. But the Yardbirds crank it up a notch, elevate it a little onto another level, upset the pH of the scene by innovating Clapton’s extended instrumental ‘rave-ups’. A tendency that, with time, would in less dexterous hands become tediously self-indulgent, but as yet was still bitingly sharp and relatively restrained. Something of it is captured on ‘Five Live Yardbirds’ (Columbia SX1677, December 1964), their first album cut live at ‘The Marquee’ where they had a Sunday-night residency, with the compere’s stumbling mispronounced introduction, and the tapes speeded-up slightly so as to fit the ten tracks onto twelve inches of vinyl. Yet ‘without doubt one of the four or five most exciting Rock concerts ever recorded’ according to ‘Rolling Stone’ (9 July 1970). Looking as the liner-photos now, on the far left Relf looks unbelievably vulnerably boyish, while far-right there’s a short-back-&-sides Clapton in neat tie. But between them, the bedrock of the band, Paul Samwell-Smith’s bass and Chris Dreja’s rhythm guitar, bouyed on Jim McCarty’s neat economical drumming. McCarty scribed the witty liner notes for the second – and definitive album, variously known as ‘The Yardbirds’ or ‘Roger The Engineer’ (Columbia SCX 6063, July 1966), named for studio technician Roger Cameron caricatured in the warped cover-art inked by Dreja. For this second album, incoming ex-Trident Jeff Beck took Clapton’s clean Blues lines and gave them a dirtier edge, with reverb and bits of feedback. There are Blues-roots to “The Nazz Are Blue” lifted direct from Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom”, but Beck is less a Blues-Stalinist than Clapton, his solo takes it into elsewhere. More open to other influences, drawing chiming Jazz-quotes into “Jeff’s Boogie”.

The first few hit singles, when they duly arrive, were written for them by Graham Gouldman, but uniquely individualised. “For Your Love” with its structured changes, odd percussion and ascending Baroque harpsichord (courtesy Brian Auger), plus the keening “Heartful Of Soul” are both sharply inventive. “Still I’m Sad” – a group original (Samwell-Smith & McCarty) based around a Gregorian chant, is frankly weird. “Shapes Of Things”, another group-original (Relf, McCarty, Samwell-Smith) via a vague Sci-Fi HG Wells/ Alexander Korda futuristic vision, makes a blisteringly concise forty-five-rpm with not a note to spare. Yes, Jeff Beck’s solo is a masterpiece of inspired compression, but Keith’s lyrics delivered in his slightly nasal vocal-lines touch base with anti-militarist protest, and a yearning sense-of-wonder long-perspective gaze into endless tomorrows ‘when time and tide have been’, building to a jerking juddering climax. And although it’s studio-refined, they can do it live. Flip it over, and “You’re A Better Man Than I” came from the Manfred’s Mike Hugg, asserting the need not to judge a man by the colour of his skin, a fairly obvious sentiment now, but back then it was still something that needed restating. Each single evolving away from Blues, certainly. Carrying advance tremors of psychedelia, undoubtedly. A whole slew of American garage-bands would retune their dissonance through this Yardbirds lens.

Not that any of these elements come high on the set-list in Leeds as the place comes alive. The stage framed by a white-plaster frieze that’s seen better days, with cornices and wall-motifs, as the play-in vagueness becomes a ‘sound’, urgent, precise, real. ‘Come back baby, I wish you would’, ‘Howling’ Relf appears pale and frail, lost, partially eclipsed behind hands cupping his Hohner Echo mouth-harp around the mike in sprays of blonde fringe. He’s softly-spoken between numbers, speaking hesitantly, or not at all, and sways a little unsteadily when he steps back, not supported by the mike-stand. But his harmonica-abusing keens like a knife to the head. He raises his arm, keys in Beck’s crashing chords with a chopping hand-gesture. Beck sulking, concentrating on his Les Paul guitar to the exclusion of all else, while stix-man McCarty pins it down with clean uncluttered drums, no flash, his eyes closed. Dreja adds build, crouched in around his guitar, knees bent, jerking rhythmically and sometimes doing a stiff-legged hop forward, while Samwell-Smith looks slightly gawky, his striding up-front bass up-sloped at forty-five degrees, his hair unstylishly tousled, stooping in at the mike self-consciously to add harmonies, looking every bit the relief fill-in Geography Teacher. According to the three-guitarists theory, Beck is the star. At the time it doesn’t look that way. Instead, they work indivisibly. “Louise” from John Lee Hooker, ‘Loo-weeze, why don’t you hurry home?’ sung with off-pitch rawness, or “I’m A Man, M-A-N”. Charles Shaar Murray points out Bo Diddley’s defiant unspoken punchline ‘I’m a Man, don’t EVER call me boy’ gets reduced by thin white-boys to ‘I’m a man, you’re a woman – get ‘em off’. But hey, this night, it’s transcendental. Slow Blues, fast Blues, plus kinds of Blues you never ever dreamed possible, one moment setting up chiming unison riffs, the next trading solos, duelling, exchanging licks, then abruptly switching what seems to be straight Blues into thundering raucous-loud crescendo, despite primitive amplification. Rumour had it they use a Tibetan prayer-mat on stage to add ambience, although I can’t see it. Not from any of the various angles I manage to contrive through the storming set in buckets-of-sweat humidity. In memory, it all confuses into something like the faux-‘Ricky Tick’ sequence in ‘Blow-Up’. A sparking crackle from the Vox stack. Beck irritably clubbing the faulty amp with his guitar-neck, then again as the roadie’s tweaks have no effect, harder, petulantly smashing his guitar. He stomps on the fractured fragments, then hurls the amputated fret into the audience as the Yardies determinedly play on. Except, it’s not like that. David Hemmings retrieves the splintered fret, and escapes with it into the night. What do I retrieve from this, strangely different night? A heartful of blurred recall? And within months Beck would be gone (in October). ‘Farewell to future days…’ Paul Samwell-Smith too (June 1966). Things were moving fast. The Yardbirds faster than most. After the gig closes, with the final echoes of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” (re-written into “Stroll On” for copyright reasons for the movie) receding across the emptying hall, I hang around too long. City Square is cold with bleak tides of wind, a wind that’s blowing time into my heart, but I’m still so high on riffs I scarcely notice. And by the time I get there, the station is already gridded off in high black gates, not unlike the rusted alley-railings the group are imprisoned behind on the front of ‘Five Live Yardbirds’. The last train for Hull long since gone. What began as a strange night was about to become longer and stranger than I’d anticipated. But that’s another tale for a different occasion...

‘Is There A Rhythm & Blues Boom?’

Giorgio Gomelsky writes in ‘Jazzbeat’ (1964)

'The Yardbirds' by Alan Clayson

‘YARDBIRDS:

SHAPES OF THINGS…’

Book Review of:

‘THE YARDBIRDS’ by ALAN CLAYSON

(Backbeat Books - $22.95 - ISBN 0-87930-724-2)

Your ‘Guinness Book of Hit Singles’ lists just five shiny Top Ten hits for the Yardbirds, from Graham Gouldman’s tempo-shuffling bongo-powered “For Your Love” in March 1965 through to the sharp pastiche-Bill Haley rhythms of “Over Under Sideways Down” little over fifteen months later. Two more of their vinyl 45rpm’s barely scratched the Top Fifty. They only ever recorded one proper studio album – ‘The Yardbirds’ aka ‘Roger The Engineer’. It sold modestly well, only peaking at no.20, although it continues to sell. Over the long decades since the group’s demise, innumerable forgotten and mostly ignored names have equalled such a score, and achieved far greater commercial success. Yet there are now more CD anthologies and compilations on ‘Amazon’ than there ever were during the Yardbirds’ brief lifetime. And people still write about, and people still buy stuff about them. Prior to Alan Clayson’s well-researched history-trip there was a 1983 ‘Yardbirds’ (from Sidgwick & Jackson), a clippings-rich archive-plundering volume with a wealth-of-memorabilia spattering its pages, produced by the band’s Chris Dreja (rhythm guitar) and Jim McCarty (drums), with ‘Comstock Lode’s John Platt on board for editorial assistance. Reasons for all this continued high-profile interest is not immediately obvious. Slavering critics used to point out the group’s Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck (Malcolm McLaren’s ‘the Paganini of the guitar’), and Jimmy Page lineage. But guitar heroes are now a devalued commodity. The New Yardbirds’ transition into Led Zeppelin still has slight currency value, despite the tenuous sound continuity – Robert Plant’s raunchy swagger is light-years from Keith Relf’s high nervous adenoidal whine, or – to Clayson, ‘barely the ‘Mannish Boy’ that Muddy Waters bragged about being’. So a large part of it must be their temporal positioning. An exact space / time nexus – trapped onto legendary celluloid by that incandescent “Stroll On” ‘Blow-Up’ clip, of Rock’s most mutationally exciting moment. After all, the Yardbirds hits were acting directly against The Who, Kinks and Smallfaces at their most innovative. And that’s before you even get to the Beatles and Stones. They were there on ‘Ready Steady Go’. There at psychedelia’s first Dayglo quivers. Peter Green told me of his awed fixation with Paul Samwell-Smith’s bass, watching the Five Live Yardbirds at their most Blues-Wailingest at Giorgio Gomelsky’s ‘Crawdaddy Club’. Cool R&B cult. Effortless Art-School class. A contact-high of blissful nostalgia for Mod Anoraks.

Of course, as a teenager, I loved the Yardbirds for their ability to compress a ‘progressive Shape-Of-Things to come’ vision – not into tediously pretentious concept albums, but with precise and enticingly strange two-and-a-half minute singles structured into immaculately segmented moments of tantalisingly evocative weirdness, until ‘only restrictions such as the common chord and Rock instrumentation put much of their music in the realm of ‘Pop’ at all’. Until, by the time they were recording the album – in less than a week on a primitive four-track machine, they were still to Pop in the way that Russ Conway and Thelonius Monk were both still pianists. To Alan Clayson too, I guess. His appreciation ‘mutated into a craving, an obsession, almost a religion’ with an ‘attic floor groaning beneath the weight of vinyl, tapes and memorabilia’. And he remains loyal to what’s left of the group (Relf dies aged just 33 in May 1976), through their fall-out Renaissance and Box of Frogs bands, and their continuing reformations with other 1960’s remnants. Hence his book is a ‘rather personal telling’ of their story, more ‘an extended meditation than a strict chronological biography’. But one rich with images of a young Jeff Beck struggling with chord-shapes from Bert Weedon’s ‘Play In A Day’ manual. To them backing a bowler-hatted Sonny Boy Williamson – who could play harmonica with his nose. Then chewing the Benzedrine from Vick inhalers to get high. Listening to Howlin’ Wolf. Improvising extended instrumental ‘rave-ups’ in ‘scruffy jive-hives’. To teasing “Shape Of Things” ‘from nothing more than a riff’ at the Chicago 2120 South Michigan Avenue’s ‘Chess’ Studios, and the backing tracks for its B-side “You’re A Better Man Than I” with Sam Philips at ‘Sun’ in Memphis’. To their inevitably messy end. While his appendix provides a taste-sensitive day-by-day ‘Yardbirds Diary’ covering the period 1st June 1963 to 31st October 1968, an all-too-brief window in time which took the Yardies from ‘Eel Pie Island’ supporting the Cyril Davies Blues All-Stars – through itemised time-fixed dates at legendary venues such as the ‘Twisted Wheel’ and ‘The Marquee’. From the ‘Ricky Tic’ to the Leeds ‘Majestic’. Through the Hull ABC – sharing a tour-package bill with the Kinks and the Ronettes, to manager Peter Grant negotiating the final contract with Atlantic records in New York for what would be ‘Led Zeppelin 1’. You can check out exactly where they were and what they were doing on your birthday, when you lost your cherry, or perhaps confirm the date, time and venue when your lives briefly intersected, and you actually saw them live? Or perhaps you weren’t even born? In which case, all the more reason for buying this fine book, to learn just exactly what you’ve missed out on!

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Published in:-
‘SONGBOOK no.1’ (October 2003 – UK)