Peter Noone, including the excellent ‘Walnut Whirl’, which may be the ‘Savoy Truffle’ of the ’70s. Why should you shell out for this
HERMAN’S HERMITS & PETER NOONE Into Something Good: The Mickie Most Years 1964-1972 EMI CD
One might take a gander at this collection and ask, “why would I need this when I’ve already got a greatest hits collection?” The answer is that a
greatest hits collection will not suffice as a complete portrait of one of the most famous bands Manchester has ever produced. To be sure, there is a fair amount of fluff on this four-disc collection, but the deeper you look, the more you see (or hear). While there is a fair share of first-rate material on disc one and disc two, it’s on the latter two where you find most of the choice nuggets. Tunes like ‘It’s Nice To Be Out In The Morning’ will remind you of fellow Mancunians The Hollies, the psychedelic ‘Moonshine Man’ and the simply cool ‘Ace, King, Queen Jack’, among any others, are great. Disc four contains a bounty of previously unreleased material, with ‘The Colder It Gets’ being the best of that lot, as well as several solo tunes by
collection? Because if you want to call yourselves a Herman’s Hermits fan, you need it. Plain and simple. David Bash
PAUL KOSSOFF WITH BLACK CAT BONES Paul’s Blues Sunbeam 2-CD
www.sunbeamrecords.com
The guys at Sunbeam aren’t to blame for making the only reason for releasing this so instantly obvious. If it wasn’t for the teenaged future guitar prodigy, it’s
pretty unlikely that a bunch of covers of blues standards from rehearsal tapes, at best of transistor radio quality, would’ve been of much interest even to blues purists. Nevertheless, the whole package is an obvious labour of love, accompanied with a 12-page booklet, making this an interesting purchase for fans of Free and Paul Kossoff in general.
Two years and several more line
up changes down the road, Black Cat Bones broke up after their sole album Barbed Wire Sandwich was released on Decca Nova in 1970. Goran Obradovic
the whole fascinating story of this five-man Birmingham demolition squad who are now quite rightly placed alongside The Who and The Kinks as one of the great all-time British groups.
The Move might have swept in on
THE MOVE Move! Move! Move!: The Anthology 1966- 1972 Salvo 4-CD box set
www.salvo-music.co.uk After the recent deluxe reissues of The Move’s albums comes the titanic icing on the cake: four CDs chronicling the group from their earliest days, including a welter of rarities, alternative versions and live material. Not only that, the package includes an 11,000 word, memorabilia- stacked book by Mark Paytress which tells
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a wave of lysergic anthems and outrageous antics but they were actually a great pop band in the old-fashioned sense rather than sonic explorers charting new realms like, say, Pink Floyd. In true Tin Pan Alley style, they realised a gimmick was necessary to get them noticed, or rather ruthless manager Tony Secunda did. This meant that, when their first single ‘Night Of Fear’ emerged in December 1966 with its ‘just about to trip your mind’ refrain, they were immediately tagged as acid rockers who became even more notorious for their ultra-violent stage act involving singer Carl Wayne taking an axe to TV sets (supposedly protesting about consumer society) and blowing up cars or Hitler dummies. With flower power in full swing they produced the fabulous ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ (which actually took its title from naturist mag Health & Efficiency) but under the kaftans and beads beat a supernatural pure pop heart in genius songwriter Roy Wood. This and subsequent hits like ‘Fire Brigade’, ‘Blackberry Way’ and ‘Flowers In The Rain’, which created their biggest furore with the naked promotional postcards of then-PM Harold Wilson, were classic English songs up there with anything Davies or Townsend were producing in terms of provocative description and
THE ROKES Let’s Live For Today: The Rokes In English 1966-68 Rev-Ola CD
www.revola.co.uk
Whether it’s The Living Daylights, The Grass Roots (who had the biggest hit with it) or the sterling effort by Holland’s The Skope, ‘Let’s Live For Today’
will no doubt be familiar to many fans of ’60s beat. Some may know the original, sung first in Italian as ‘Piangi Con Me’, flip of a massive Italian hit version of Bob Lind’s ‘Cheryl’s Going Home’ (‘Che Colpa Abbiamo Noi’) and then recorded in English, by these here transplanted British beatmakers, The Rokes.
Although virtually unknown
anywhere else during the ’60s, The Rokes were Serie A rock stars in Italy, with legions of fans, successful long-players, some outtasite guitars made for them by Eko, and umpteen television and pop chart appearances. I can’t disguise my own
admiration for this group and hopefully a few listens to this collection of their English-language material will reveal to you a few of the reasons why. For grit and blast, there’s ‘No No No’, an unbridled rocker sure to please even the cavest of teens! And for sheer incandescent grooviness, there’s the shimmering
innovative music combined with instant hit appeal.
When I saw The Move at the
1968 NME Poll Winners Concert, despite recently scoring with ‘Fire Brigade’, their short set consisted of the not-yet-released Something Else By The Move EP, dominated by Wood’s wah-wah excursions on their version of Spooky Tooth’s ‘Sunshine Help Me’: much to the confusion of the screaming hordes. As the book reveals, the band
were plagued by direction problems, often switching styles according to trends, lost founder members ‘Ace’ Kefford and Trevor Burton over commercial sell-out issues [and maybe lysergic over-indulgence!], hopped from cabaret doom to Detroit’s underground mecca the Grande Ballroom within the space of a month and eventually mutated messily into ELO. This superlative set, fittingly
dedicated to Carl Wayne who sadly passed in 2004, is the best possible statement and souvenir this unpredictably great band could wish for, studded with classics (including personal fave ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic’, which would have put a song about a mental hospital in the charts had it been released as a single as originally planned). There’s their first ever recordings, painstakingly restored from crumbling acetates, the full Marquee set which yielded the live EP and untold live, demo and alternative curios. Something else indeed. Kris Needs
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