By early ’69, The Majority had wrapped up their engagement as Barry Ryan’s backing band, and without a record deal of their own, found themselves back playing clubs in England and pondering their next move. One job they did pick up during this period was backing Radio One DJ Tony Blackburn on his single, ‘It’s Only Love’, which reached #42 on the English charts in March ’69.
Pete Mizen remembers, “We just signed to Jim Carter-Fae who was paying us a wage. We were playing at The Revolution and Blaises at South Kensington. Then Barry had a car accident and knocked all his teeth out. He was laid up and couldn’t do anything so we carried on as best we could, playing Chuck Berry sets with me doing most of the singing just to get through the night. I remember we were playing one Sunday night at Blaises and this French girl came up during the break and said she was the secretary of the manager of the group Aphrodite’s Child and were we interested in working in France?”
“The move to France was a last attempt at making it big,” explains John Turner. “The band had done quite a lot of work in Paris, Lyon etc and had gone down really well there. The agent who booked them over there wanted to take them on and it was decided they had nothing to lose.”
The Majority’s decision to move to France meant that they would obviously need to alter their arrangement with Jim Carter-
Fae, who had been managing and essentially underwriting the group for close to three years. “There was a deal done between Jim Carter-Fae and Jean Pierre Rawson (the manager of Aphrodite’s Child), the details of which I know nothing about,” recalls Pete Mizen. “Once we moved to France, we never played in the UK again. We went over to France lock stock and barrel with wives, girlfriends and everything. We all got flats and settled into Paris and Jean Pierre got us a record deal with Pink Elephant, which was a subsidiary of Decca. We used to go to Decca to get our posters from a big warehouse where they had posters for all their acts.”
The first Majority single to be issued by Pink Elephant in mid-69 was ‘Charlotte Rose’/ ‘Time Ain’t On Your Side’. Both songs had been recorded in England in early ’69. ‘Charlotte Rose’, a song written by George Alexander of Grapefruit, was particularly impressive, yet the song was never issued in the UK, only appearing in Holland and Belgium.
Among the first new tracks that The Majority recorded in France after moving to Paris was ‘Glass Image’, which would be issued as a single with ‘Friday Man’ on the B-side. “We recorded that single on 26th February ’70 in one night in a studio on the outskirts of Paris,” remembers Pete Mizen. The single was issued under a slightly revised name, Majority One, and it showcased a more sophisticated sound than their previous singles, though still boasting a strong pop sensibility. Pete
Mizen remembers that it was Jean Pierre Rawson who came up with “Majority One”, explaining how “I think he had an idea for Barry’s wife Joanne to become a group member, thus adding even more glamour and MOR appeal to the band! This was greeted with – let’s say – a negative reaction [by the rest of the band]. But we did actually record some stuff with Joanne.”
In the summer of ’70, Jean Pierre Rawson put Majority One on a tour of the South of France, where at the same time he was also promoting shows for Mungo Jerry. “We were writing the songs for our album that summer,” remembers Mizen. “We had Mungo Jerry’s double bass stuck on the front of our van for about a month because we were all in the South of France together, and for some reason, we ended up carting their double bass around strapped to our transit van.” One of the high points of the tour was their performance at a major pop festival. “We played at a big festival at Aix en Provence, in front of about 50,000 people,” remembers Bob Long. “That was awesome, a sea of faces as far as we could see.”
When the tour wound up, the group returned to the studio to work on a new single, recording ‘Because I Love’ and ‘Get Back Home’ during a single session on 9th September ’70. ‘Because I Love’ was a simple, back-to-basics rock ballad, but the B-side, ‘Get Back Home’, was a totally different proposition. The hard-edged fuzz guitar lines that Pete Mizen overdubbed on this upbeat rocker made the song a much sought after recording for collectors who would discover the song decades later.
Throughout late ’70 and early ’71, Majority One worked on developing the songs they had written over the summer, with the intention of completing enough for a debut album. Curiously, the ones they recorded bore little resemblance to the sounds that were popular on the rock scene of ’70/71. Most had a distinct sound that was more in line with The Beatles, Kinks, Bee Gees and other UK-based acts circa ’68. Pete Mizen is
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