weren’t as forthcoming as they would have liked and work appeared to be plentiful down Weimar-way. The idea was to get the band tight and blend together all those influences they’d picked up along the road. Their sound was a departure from the usual Jefferson Airplane aping female-fronted acts of the time; instead coming over like a groove-orientated heavier group somewhere between Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly and Big Brother. Josephine’s cut-glass vocals slash across the wasted funky vibe to create a sound that’s as unique as it is appealing.
Peter Hauke came through on his end of the bargain and the band upped sticks in 1970 to Frankfurt. A spit and sawdust backstreet venue called Club 65 became a regular haunt for the band. They played there as often as they could – and when they weren’t they’d be hanging out in the back bar, enjoying the odd cheeky spliff when management weren’t looking too closely. Availing themselves of all the benefits of the city the band inveigled themselves into the company of the local erotic entertainers. Kenny and the lads would take great pleasure in strolling into the strip club after a gig and walking straight back out again with the hottest girls hanging off their arms. Josephine for her part was almost one of the lads and struck up unlikely friendships with the dancers herself – perhaps spotting that their lives and careers weren’t really all that far removed from each other.
It wasn’t long before Peter Hauke secured the band a deal with Admiral Records (a subsidiary of Bellaphon) to put out a couple of singles and perhaps an album. The recordings the band came up with were utterly sensational. Over two singles, the only recorded output of the band shines like a radioactive carrot. ‘Do What You Like’ boasts an insistent nagging refrain – perhaps a cop from the Aleister Crowley-isms that many echoed in the late ’60s as libertarian philosophy met with spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. ‘That Woman’s Mind’ shows the band at their funkiest – acid guitar burning across catty male/female vocal duelling. Built around an R&B riff overlaid by distorted bluesy wailing, it’s a hit missed if ever there was one. ‘Mr Deal’ features druggie lyrics with Josephine delivering an awesome strung-out vocal as the memorable bass-line pulses through another stompy club monster. Weird organ/keyboards are overlaid over the top leaving the listener with a sense of dislocation despite the clear underlying poppy appeal of the track. ‘Is This Really Me’ is probably the pick of the bunch – a
dirty garage-stoner riff shoots through this tale of lysergic freakery as Josephine delivers an Alice In Wonderland style lyrical tale backed by some of the best hard acid guitar work ever set to tape.
The band went up and down the autobahns attempting to promote those singles despite minimal distribution. At least gigs came easily in Germany and performances at open-air festivals were soon negotiated. Transport came by way of that old English ambulance that was
as unreliable as it was uncomfortable. Kenny recalls one occasion when the suspension broke down and they stopped by a nearby park bench with a large saw and obtained a piece of wood that they jammed in to keep the thing going. Any German cop stopping this eccentric vehicle would have found the patients in the back, thoroughly medicated, though not suffering with any known illnesses.
ANY GERMAN
COP STOPPING THIS ECCENTRIC VEHICLE WOULD HAVE FOUND THE PATIENTS IN THE BACK, THOROUGHLY MEDICATED
Playing at those festivals with the likes of Deep Purple, The Nice, Chicken Shack, Yes, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry provided the highlights of the bands career. Acid and grass were more popular than bread and water and the collective vibe was overpowering in a land renowned for its embrace of communal life at this time. J.C. Heavy made a point never to hit the stage too stoned, but after the gig was over anything was fair game. It could scarcely have been a hardship for the band to experience the cream of the British and European rock scene whilst free drugs were pressed into their grateful hands.
That full-length album never materialised for various reasons – mainly that the singles didn’t fare that well despite releases in both Holland and Germany. Somewhere out there in a dusty vault lies the prospective recordings the band made for an album, though no investigation has uncovered anything as of yet. There was an appearance on the Bellaphon Pop In sampler, though no further releases. The band’s planned three months in Frankfurt had turned into a year, though, aside from a healthy gigging history and some great memories, they hadn’t achieved a whole lot. On their return to the UK in ’71 they found themselves even more out of step with the current music scene than they’d left. A couple of months in and with few gigs on the horizon they decided to call it a day.
Neil Levine joined 10cc as sound engineer, John Needham opened a recording studio in Oldham and Kenny Anders joined a later version of Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders. However, like many acts they derived their power from the inscrutable chemical formulation of those exact members coming together at that exact time. On their own they were far less than the sum of the parts. Like ball lightning, they burned brightly, unpredictably, unexplainably and all too quickly.
Kenny Anders owns the ’60s themed bar Legends, in a resort called Caleta de Fuste in Fuerteventura in The Canary Islands (
www.legends60sbar.com)
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