In the second volume of The World’s Worst Records I wrote a
chapter on singing animals, mentioning the first of today’s brace of badness.
However I’ve only just become aware of the second disc, so here – especially
for ewe – is classical composer Adrian Munsey with his two wonderfully woolly
45s.
Issued by Virgin Records in 1979, The Lost Sheep is a mediocre slice of sub-classical dullness which
features a lamb bleating whilst a small orchestra – replete with bassist and
drummer - play the most maudlin music you’re ever likely to hear. Credited to Adrian
Munsey, his Sheep, Wind, and Orchestra,
the composer even performed this peculiar piece ‘live’ on television,
accompanied by a lamb, it’s mother and an eight-piece ensemble. As the lamb was
struck with stage fright, Munsey himself stood at the microphone, straight-faced
and cradled the poor animal while he performed the recalcitrant beasts’ part.
Virgin must have sensed a hit, for they allowed Munsey to
follow this up with C’est Sheep , a
dreadful marriage of classical, disco and early techno which failed to sell
despite also being issued as a disco-friendly 12”. C'est Sheep, a reader of this blog informs me, was produced by Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, and was later included on the Virgin compilation Methods of Dance. Three years later Virgin
main man Richard Branson – as Jeff Mutton - sat in the producer’s chair for the
one and only time to oversee the 1982 Christmas single from The Singing Sheep -
Baa Baa Black Sheep backed with Flock
Around the Clock.
Munsey has enjoyed a long career as a film and TV producer,
documentary film-maker, author and composer. A history scholar at King’s
College, Cambridge and a graduate of the Royal College of Art, Munsey’s also
promoted Elton John’s first paid gig. In 1982 he founded Odyssey Video and has
since released and distributed over 500 films on video or DVD. Music has been a
lifelong passion for Munsey, with Classic FM describing his compositions as “unashamedly
melodic and heart-warmingly nostalgic, capturing the emotions stirred by visual
imagery”. He has released several albums of
vocal and instrumental compositions, including Four Suites and Incognito (both 2005), A Wider Sky
(2006), Requiem (2008), Songs (2010) and Full Circle (2013). His latest album, Agnus Dei, was issued in March 2015. He has also enjoyed commercial and critical success
with his Music Infinity record label, releasing albums by the bestselling
Classical Brit-winning boyband Blake, soprano Lesley Garrett (her album A
North Country Lass reached No. 1 in the
classical charts) and showbiz legend Neil Sedaka.
So here are both sides of both of Adrian Munsey’s
sheep-related singles.
Enjoy!
Once again Divshare is up the creek. I'm using The Box for these tracks but you may have issues downloading as I have limited free bandwidth. I will replace these links with Divshare ones once they have sorted out their problems.
Although I have been editing this blog for almost eight
years now, I think that this maybe the first time I have featured an
instrumental as the plug track. Sure I’ve included instrumental B-sides in the
past, but unless my memory fails me (and, at my age, that is starting to become a regular occurrence) I don’t
believe that I have ever presented you with an entirely instrumental selection.
Well, today I aim to address that. And how.
This spectacularly inept disc – Your Voice Is Like A Song backed with Take A Cup Of Kindness - was issued in 1971 by song-poem supremos Tin Pan
Alley, but it’s not a song poem. Oh no: the writer of the two tunes, one Elmer
S Galloway, also performs them – or should I say attempts to - with all the
élan of a three year old picking up his or her first toy guitar.
This is a vanity pressing. A few song-poem outfits also
allowed erstwhile composers to perform their own material, and would knock out
a handful of discs to said tunesmith for a fee. Our Elmer clearly thought that
as he had composed these two tunes, who could be better than him to perform
them? Unfortunately the answer to
that is ‘anyone’; one of more of Tin Pan Alley’s regular roster of
catastrophically awful musicians would have done a better job that poor old
Elmer manages.
It’s clear, judging by the mistakes and the chronically poor
timing, that Elmer had but one chance to commit his precious - albeit
preposterous - tunes to vinyl: what a shame then that this was the best
performance he could muster. I can’t tell you much about the man, apart from
the fact that he was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in August 1921 and that he
died in December 2001 aged 80, just four days before Christmas. 5’ 6” high,
Elmer served as a private during WWII. He was a prolific songwriter, and in
March 1976 alone he copyrighted 18 tunes, including Space Age Holiday, You Were Great and Play For Me A Melody. 1976 was a good and productive year for Elmer: in
the previous year he had only copyrighted four songs, and three of those were
co-writes. He was still composing in the early 1980s (his song Can't
Love You Now, Love You Later was issued on
cassette in 1981).
Happily, my copy of the disc comes with a lead sheet for Your
Voice Is Like A Song; my guess is that if
Elmer had been willing to spend more money someone like Billy Grey or Madelyn
Buzzard would have recorded the vocal version of the song. Perhaps they did:
maybe there’s a second version of this, still waiting to be discovered that
included a tortuous vocal performance to match Elmer’s rotten words. I hope it
exists, and that it was Madelyn Buzzard who had to suffer the ignominy of
singing the line ‘singing like a songbird in the sullen air’.
Wouldn’t that have been delicious?
Today’s brace of badness comes from veteran British rock ‘n’
roller Jackie Lynton – who same of you may know through his association with
Status Quo – still rocking and rolling today after more than 55 years in the
business.
Born John Bertram Lynton in Shepperton, Middlesex in 1940
Jackie first began singing in his church choir. However he was bitten by the
rock ‘n’ roll bug early on – Elvis was a huge influence – and, after performing Blue
Suede Shoes at a talent show he and his
band (originally known the Plect-Tones, before changing their name to the
Teenbeats) started to attract attention. In no time at all he was playing at
the famous of rival agents: consequently, by the time he got around to
establishing a residency at 2 I’s Coffee Bar in Soho: proprietor Tom Littlewood
subsequently became Jackie’s first professional manager.
Under Littlewood’s guidance Jackie graduated to the Larry
Parnes package tour circuit where he worked alongside Billy Fury, Vince Taylor
& the Playboys, Wee Willie Harris, Terry Dene, Lance Fortune, Screaming
Lord Sutch & His Savages (Jackie tells a story of how he and Sutch almost jumped into the Serpentine for a publicity stunt...until they both realised that neither of them could swim), John Leyton, Freddie Starr & the Midnighters
and others. Soon after Littlewood managed to score a recording deal with Pye’s
new Piccadilly label.
His first disc – a version of the Judy Garland showstopper Over
The Rainbow - was an odd choice and it
failed to chart, although it did pick up some decent reviews. Oddly, Lonnie
Donegan also covered the song around the same time. Hailed by New Musical
Express as ‘Most Promising Newcomer’, Jackie was widely tipped to make it big – but never quite did. The
follow up, Wishful Thinking was a silly song with a ridiculous
cha-cha-cha arrangement that – quite rightly – also failed to hit the charts.
Then came a rocking version of the classic All Of Me, which marked the recording debut of blues guitarist
Albert Lee. The single was well
reviewed, but despite selling steadily it again missed the charts. Similarly I
Believe also failed to find an audience.
It was at this point that Jackie’s career took a bizarre twist:
his next single – and the first of today’s tracks - was an insane version of
the children’s song The Teddy Bears' Picnic. An utterly ridiculous record, it however went on to become Jackie’s
best selling single and was the closest he came to scoring a bone fide chart
hit. But, like all of the singles that preceded it, The Teddy Bears' Picnic also proved unsuccessful.
One of the many Brit rockers to find an audience in Hamburg,
he recorded 16 tracks in the city in just one day in 1964, although these were
released credited to Boots Wellington & His Rubber Band, as he was still
under contract to Pye/Piccadilly. After a couple more releases, including
decent covers of Chuck Berry and Beatles compositions, Jackie left Piccadilly
records. The sessions he had performed on had been graced by some of the
biggest names of the early 60s rock scene - Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page (who
played on Jackie’s version of the Lennon-McCartney song Little Child), Herbie Flowers, Clem Cattini and Albert Lee among
them. There was even talk of him forming a band with the young Ritchie
Blackmore as early as 1962: apparently the pair were to be mentored by
legendary producer Kim Fowley.
He issued one last single on Piccadilly, Laura, before he left the music scene for a while. However
the stage still beckoned and, in 1965, he cut a number of
independently-produced sides with Ray Horricks (who had produced Teddy
Bears' Picnic) – two of which turned up on
a Decca single (and one of which provides our next audio disaster) Three
Blind Mice/Corrina Corrina – easily one of the most peculiar singles released by
one of the vanguards of the first wave of British rock ‘n’ roll, a freakbeat
nursery rhyme which never stood a chance of charting in the UK. An utterly
loopy record, I can’t but wonder if David Byrne was channelling Jackie when he
recorded his vocal for Talking Heads’ brilliant Blind.
Jackie went on to cut three singles for Columbia, all
produced by Mark Wirtz – famous for his compositions A Touch of Velvet, A
Sting of Brass and Excerpt From
a Teenage Opera – but again he failed to
score that elusive hit which would have finally taken him into the big time.
With little in the way of steady income from his recordings Jackie maintained a
day job, working as a painter and decorator (he worked on John Lennon’s
Weybridge mansion) whilst gigging at weekends and cutting the occasional disc.
During the 70s he became a member of Savoy Brown (and finally charted – in the
US at least – with the album Jack the Toad) and, in 1974, finally
issued his first full-length solo album The Jackie Lynton Album, which included his live favourite The Hedgehog Song.
He spent a few years dabbling in the pop ballad field: he
recorded a few sides for European release (his band The People issued a 45 on the Spanish label Explosion), recorded the vocals for an Ennio Morricone song The
Ballad of Hank McCain – which featured in
the movie The Untouchables - for the Italian market and even made
demos for smug repeat offender Mike ‘Ukip Calypso’ Read. Then, in 1978, Status Quo scored a massive hit with Again
And Again, co-written by Jackie and Quo’s
Rick Parfitt (Lynton had appeared as MC on the previous year’s Quo Live).
The following year he assembled a host of old friends - including Parfitt, Clem
Clemson, Chas and Dave and several members of Manfred Mann's Earth Band - to
record his second solo album, No Axe To Grind. Since then he’s continued to gig and record (although he has now
retired from painting and decorating), enjoying several successful appearances
at the Reading Rock Festival and as a guest of The Quo. Jackie issued his most
recent album - All's Fair in Love and Rock 'n Roll - in 2011.
Today’s track, the A-side of a 1968 single released by the Birmingham-based
band The Exception, is a blot on an otherwise exemplary and, in the history of
the British folk-rock scene, important musical career. The Exception, probably
best known amongst collectors for their debut single The Eagle Flies On
Friday (an aggressive, blues-influenced
cut about threatening bosses with baseball bats and which featured Robert Plant
on tambourine) included Dave Pegg and Roger Hill, two men who went on to work
with a number of noted British folk-rock musicians and who also became members
of Fairport Convention and (in Pegg’s case) Jethro Tull.
The third member of the band, Alan 'Bugsy' Eastwood, wrote
Rub It Down.
Reggae was still perceived as a novelty in the UK in 1968,
the year that Marmalade made the Number One spot with their cover of the
Beatles’ cod-reggae Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (making them the first Scots band to
score a chart topper, fact fans). Millie Small had the first reggae/ska hit
back in 1963 with My Boy Lollipop but
apart from that it wasn’t until 1969 that Jamaican artists began to make any
headway in the singles charts. That year Trojan Records – only established two
years’ previously – scored with Jimmy Cliff's Wonderful World,
Beautiful People, and Desmond Dekker &
The Aces’ Israelites became the
first bone fide reggae Number One.
The Exception were as capable as many of the better known
bands coming out Birmingham in the mid-60s however, unlike contemporaries such
as The Spencer Davis Group, The Moody Blues and The Move, they never to make
the shift into the big time…quite possibly because they couldn’t make up their
mind which musical direction to follow. Lead guitarist Roger Hill and bassist
Dave Pegg had been members of The Uglies and, after recording a couple of
singles with that band, the pair teamed up with former Brumbeats singer/drummer
Alan Eastwood (Hill had also been a member of the Brumbeats) first as The
Hooties before changing their mane to the Exception. In 1966 the trio - hoping
to emulate the success of Cream - signed with CBS.
The company issued two singles: The Eagle Flies On
Friday, which was credited to The
Exceptions, and the tongue-twisting Gabardine Saturday Night Street
Walker, which was backed by Pegg and
Hill’s jazzy instrumental Sunday Night at the Prince Rupert. CBS dropped the band after the singles failed to
chart and Pegg left, replaced by John Rowland who, fairly soon afterwards, was
replaced himself by Malcolm Garner.
The band moved to Ed Kassner’s President Records and issued Tailor
Made Babe, a decent blues chugger with a
great vocal from Eastwood and some nice guitar fills from Hill. Next came this
nasty, fake-reggae travesty complete with its terrible Sylvester the cat
impersonation; that was followed by the poppy Helicopter, which in turn was followed by the folky Pendulum. The Exception didn’t know what they wanted to be –
or if they did their record company wouldn’t let them be what they wanted to
be, trying everything – and every style – to try and give them a hit.
Again the singles did nothing, but President Records had
enough conviction in the band to finance an album - The Exceptional
Exception. The cover of the album reveals a
fourth member of the line-up, Steve Yetson, who is credited with vocals, sax
and keyboards. Mostly a compilation of the singles the band had cut for
President (and conspicuously missing both sides of this particular release),
the album sank like a stone. Alan "Bugsy" Eastwood left The Exception
shortly after the album's release: Hill carried on, fronting a new line-up but
by May 1969 it was all over. Roger Hill rejoined Pegg and became a member of
Fairport Convention (he sadly passed away last year) and Eastwood (on the left
in the group shot here) recorded a couple of solo efforts (including the album Seeds), though alcohol addiction sidetracked his career.
He died of heart failure in October 2007.
Here are both sides of the fourth Exception single: Rub
It Down and It’s Snowing in the
Desert.
A real treat for you today: a brace of cuts from one of the
most peculiar albums issued in that decade of peculiar albums, the 1960s.
Feted by serious collectors of psychedelia and the avant
garde, Bedlam by The Crazy People originally appeared on the small independent
Canadian label Condor in 1968. What is known for certain about the band behind the record is very little but the
theory upheld by many collectors and rare record bloggers is that the album was the brainchild of one Johnny Kitchen, an expatriate American who was believed to be in British
Columbia around the time the album was recorded, and a group of studio
musicians from the Burnaby, BC area.
All of the performers were uncredited on the original album
but a few song writing credits were given to Kitchen, a prolific writer who also
wrote for other bands on the Condor label. Much of the Crazy People legend is a
mystery, although it is believed that the album was an exploitation studio
project rather being recorded by a ‘proper’ group – a theory backed up by the
widespread sampling of other material (including the New Vaudevill Band’s Winchester
Cathedral) . Kitchen had a hand in dozens
of experimental underground records in America and Canada during the latter
years of the 60s and in the same year that Bedlam was issued it is said that he relocated to LA where he was involved in the recording of An Evening with
Wild Man Fischer, released on Frank Zappa's
Bizarre label: sections of two Bedlam songs (Life at the Funny Farm and Let’s Split) feature in Larry’s song Life Brand New. This has led some people to speculate that Johnny
Kitchen was simply a pseudonym for Larry Fischer. The whole Crazy People project - and the rumours that surround and confound its' release - becomes even more confusing when you discover that three of the songs on the
album are credited Jack Millman – and that Millman has recently been outed as the ‘real’
Johnny Kitchen.
Jack Maurice Millman began composing music in 1948. A
professional jazz trumpeter, who studied trumpet with Shorty Rogers and, at the
age of 17, played with the legendary Lionel Hampton. After spending many years
at the coal face of music, and taking a couple of years out in the early 60s as
he was burned out – he became known as Johnny Kitchen, thanks to fellow
musician Billy Elder.
“It was a joke, we were wise cracking and that’s the name
he gave me. It didn’t mean anything, but the name stuck and I went city hall
and registered it as a fictitious business name, and I used it to register with
ASCAP, too.” Millman told Andrew Jervis,
for the Ubiquity Records blog.
Through Abe Sommer (Millman’s attorney who was also attorney
to The Doors amongst others), he met Randy Wood – the former owner of the Vee
Jay label - who asked Millman to produce a budget line of records. Millman
pieced together 36 albums over the next decade for Wood’s labels.
Millman placed ads for his services in music magazines in
the USA and abroad, landing a ton of advertising work and recording many albums
for many different companies – including Condor. “They wanted to inflate the
value of their business because they were going public,” Millman told Andrew Jervis. “I think they
were in the lumber business. Gene Daniels (my contact) said he was told I had a
library, and could sell him product.”
So now you know. It seems that Johnny Kitchen didn't live and work in British Columbia after all and that the entire Bedlam project was pieced together by Millman from his extensive library before being offered to Condor for release.
Anyway, here, for your edification, are a couple of tracks
from Bedlam: Head Games And Other
Assorted Crap and the opener Parade at the Funny Farm – both of which intersperse the insanity with some
instantly recognisable hits. Crazy, man!
