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Today you can see that Penzance is different. Britain is sunny, Penzance is rainy. We finished the drum tracks on Sessioneer Ahad’s album and ventured straight outside into a lovely rainy day for a proper soaking. It was particularly windy, stormy, rainy, coldish, and most welcome fresh air after another early start and some concentrated time working on the last four songs. Our umbrellas were working, my LFC brolley, Olivia’s zebra brolley from Buenos Aires, Dare’s posh strong brolley and drummer Ed was using a brolley that Ahad had kindly given us in London after we met on another rainy day. We have recorded thirteen songs altogether and now I need to record all the bass and all the guitars. Some of the bass we will keep from the sessions we have done with Ed because playing live in a rhythm section is something very special and not the same as overdubbing parts. The rain slanted sideways and despite our handsome umbrellas we still got drenched. The working in the studio and walking in the rain seem somehow to be connected. It’s as if magic can be found in both these places.

We treated ourselves to our favourite Thai takeaway as a celebration of the drum tracks completion and spent some time discussing the world, those aliens and the price of saffron in Egypt. We talked a lot about world population and how India is heading to have more people than China. Then there was the astonishing fact that 164 million people live in Bangladesh. I wonder how the world will be in 100 years when countries see their population explode. What do we do? Answers to Solve The Earth’s Problems, c/- The Alien Help Agency, 1,000,000,001 Andromeda Lane, Southern Venus, 99911, Infinite Space.

The Saga Of The Belt. One wise man advised me to buy a belt online. So I gave in realizing that the belt fixing shop is not opening anytime soon. I went online, found the size, ordered it and it arrived today. My heart rose, I was filled with tears of joy, I danced around the archive singing merrily along to Nine Inch Nails records. The package was tatty and half open, but inside lay the shiny new perfect thing. At last, it was here. It was like I had been waiting half my life to finally wear this functional wonder. Inside the brown paper package was a plastic bag and I could see the belt coiled like a snake, brand new, smelling like roses and fireworks, champagne and surprises. The moment was here. I took the belt from inside the plastic bag, ripping the seal like a frenzied animal. It was gorgeous – black, three rows of studs and a sparkling buckle. I slipped the end through the loops in my shorts. The opposite ends of the belt met to close the circle, surrounding my body like the rings of Saturn. I threaded the end through the buckle and pulled it through to the belt’s last hole and then, horrified, I realized that there were not enough holes in the belt to pull it tight. It hung around my hips like a lazy boa constrictor, tired of squeezing. It was no good, it was back to square one and £10 worse off.

It’s good to have my computer back, smaller, lighter, easier to wield, doesn’t seem to get so hot. They don’t even make a 17 inch laptop anymore. It’s still good to use the old one to watch films and TV series. But I really wonder about this computer world that we live in. Having lived well into adulthood without the internet, without a mobile phone, I wonder have I adapted or betrayed the past? What happened to reading? What happened to the music world since computers? Is it better or worse? Or is it just different? Each era has to deal with the consequences of technological development for better or worse. You don’t miss what you never had and us older people are very happy about the conveniences that this computer world has offered us. The younger people don’t miss a world they never lived.

Our great black-backed gull was there again as it is every evening. It sits on one of two walls outside the studio/archive. I always stop to admire the splendour of this beautiful and huge bird with its giant wingspan and presence. It’s hard to know why it always returns to this spot every night. Is there a nest, food, or perhaps a memory of a lost loved seagull mate that once also frequented this spot?

A session with Brian tonight in Orlando. I was showing him the Reptile parts. The Reptile riff is one of the most popular things I ever came up with. Where do these things come from? It’s so random, I just played that out of nowhere at a rehearsal. It’s another example of the theory that if you do something long enough you’ll eventually come up with something good. Nobody can be so bad as to only create things that are bad, the random universe doesn’t allow it.

I’ll leave you with that profound thought. I am so tired tonight and really must catch up on sleep. The studio, the sessions, the writing, they are all wonderful things, but they need focus, they need a sprightly mind, not a weary one. So I’ll take myself to bed, sleep it off, awake fresh and out of thin air build a mountain.

Music today is staying with Germany and Amon Düül ll’s Vive La Trance (1973) is the first album by them that I knew well and I still love it to this day. It’s a mixture of things, male and female vocals, songs, jams, melodic, weird, beautiful. Life is better because of this record.

As I was dying on my feet tonight I asked Olivia to pick three more German records and the first she found was Birth Control’s Plastic People (1975). A classic mid seventies Progressive album full of intriguing parts and arrangements, a voyage of discovery (notice the mask). Nektar came next with Recycled (1976). An English band that lived and formed in Germany. Very much in the Progressive vein. Last but not least one of my favourite Electronic albums, ex Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann’s Romance ’76…I gotta go.

Song Of The Day is Amon Düül II – Vive La Trance, the whole album!

So Liverpool have won the Premier League for the first time. A monumental achievement in a world that is so incredibly competitive. Growing up on Merseyside, football is big and I was blessed to be able to appreciate it as well as music. It was a wonderful experience in the first three months of the season whilst working on the Wild Swans album in Liverpool to be sitting at Anfield watching this amazing team play in the flesh. So thank you to the amazing Liverpool team and my second favourite German, Jürgen Klopp, and thanks to Tim for the loan of the season ticket.

We were in the studio again today working on sessioneer Ahad’s album and we got five drum tracks down, that’s nine so far. We will be planning on another four tomorrow. I was mainly playing my Ricky bass, although on one song I played my Bill Nash Telecaster. It’s been a good way to work and different to the Space Summit album that we made with sessioneer Jed. On Space Summit, the vocals were done in Minneapolis, the drums in Bristol, guitars and bass in Penzance and backing vocals in, wait for it, Borneo. It was mixed and mastered here. On this album, Ed our drummer, has come to Penzance to record and Ahad will come here at some point in the future, so we will actually be recording, mixing and mastering the album in one place, novel.

Yesterday’s sun abandoned Penzance today as it often does. At one point we left the studio to go and pick up some lunch and it was simply Sci Fi out there. There was an ominous stillness as if some great event was about to unfold like an alien invasion (Oh, that’s right, they think we’re too mad to conquer). The sky was low, as if it was slowly sinking down, encasing us in some cosmic receptacle for reasons unknown, perhaps to be studied from a safe distance. The birds seemed to know something was going on, they looked down on us perched atop lamp posts and hanging in the air like a pre strike reconnaissance force.

Today, I finally got my computer back. After tripping over the lead and causing £300 worth of damage in one second, I was happy to see it repaired with a new screen. I’ve paid half the bill already so it seems less painful. I’m hoping that this is the kind of thing you only do once. Many years ago I knocked a bottle of Becks over my laptop, that was a hard lesson. Then there was the time I bought a brand new computer and one week later dropped it and cracked the motherboard. These amazing machines are actually quite fragile, they don’t take well to accidents. The reason I broke my computer in the first case was because I was unnecessarily rushing around like a mad man. I have to learn that the trip from the archive room to the kitchen does not have to be conducted at 100MPH.

I had a session later tonight with Jeff in Ohio and just managed to sneak in my Duolingo French before midnight, phew, I didn’t want to lose my 22 day streak! Last day in the studio with Ed and the drums tomorrow which means an early start, so I’ll be trying to get a decent night’s sleep. Bonne Nuit.

Music today has been all Liverpool and all The Beatles. I played Mono copies of their first four albums, Please Please Me (1963), With The Beatles (1963), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Beatles For Sale (1964). These were the days of recording an album in an afternoon and releasing two albums a year.

Song Of The Day is You’ll Never Walk Alone by Liverpool legends Gerry and the Pacemakers, for some reason.

 

You’ll Never Walk Alone

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of a storm
There’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never walk alone

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never walk alone

Bed at 3AM, up at 9AM, an early start to a busy day, I was showered, out in the town before the post and at the studio by 10.30AM doing a sesh with Rohan and his King Crimsonesque musical extravaganzas in Sydney. This was very early for me! We were getting the drums down on the first of the Ahad songs by 11.30AM. It was a fruitful day, we managed drum tracks on four songs, I played guide bass on three of the four. Dare was baking in the control room, Ed was baking in the live room, we were searching for air flow on a very hot day. I tried to see what the temperature was, but they only want to predict the weather, they don’t want to tell you what the weather was like yesterday. Why would anyone want to know that? Well, I want to know, I need numbers!

Later on after recording we all went down to admire the sea, Olivia came too and we breathed in the sea air and marvelled at the aquamarine water. Unfortunately it was a bit sludgy where we were standing, something yucky that sat on the surface, washed up on the tide, probably some crime against the oceans committed by man. There was a lot of seaweed but the smell was fresh and stimulating for the senses. There was a man in a kayak, swimmers attempting the two points of the bay. There were people in the water and people on the beach and despite this not being the most beautiful part of the shore, it is the town, so it’s convenient.

Whilst walking in the street earlier I saw the post lady doing her rounds and I thought to myself how warm and comforting it is to see the post person. (In the seventies it was always men?) Ok, so they also deliver bills, but if you write letters, you get letters. To think it is a dying art. Olivia has pen friends all over the world. They write to each other and tell each other about their lives, their aspirations, it’s beautiful. I saw the post lady in the same place where we usually see the Bengal cats. I wouldn’t want fur on a day like today, but maybe the cats like it, stretching out, luxuriating in the sun.

(Warning, sport paragraph.) Liverpool were playing tonight at Anfield, their home ground, with no crowd, really strange because it’s all about atmosphere. I was there watching a game in November (against Brighton) when I was working with The Wild Swans. Today they were playing against Crystal Palace, they won 4-0, all great goals. They are one win away from taking the title. They haven’t won the league for 30 years and never since it became the new expensive version – The Premiership. This is exciting news for Liverpool fans – and then there’s everybody else.

French today was short but sweet. I’m too busy to spend lots of time on it this week, but I am still doing it everyday. I’m in the Sapphire League, but there’s no way I’ll be winning it, like I did the Gold and the Silver. These learners are serious and this system of learning is soooo good. I wish I’d had Duolingo when I was 22 instead of 62, I’d be translating War And Peace from the original Russian by now, fluent in 19 languages.

Another day in the studio tomorrow and another super hot day. I just saw pictures from Bournemouth and Southend-on-Sea, who in their right mind would see that crowd and stay there? I’m not even talking pandemic, just generally who could suffer that? When I see pictures like this I realize just how different we are to each other whilst paradoxically being just the same. Humans? I’m quite convinced that the aliens have been, explored, done research, they’ve sent teams, gathered data and come to the conclusion that they are best leaving us to ourselves. If you were an alien and you discovered that the most powerful man in the world was Clump, what would you advise your leaders?

Music today is revolving around the arrival of I Spider by Web, released in 1970. The band features keyboardist/vocalist Dave Lawson who later joined Greenslade. The band is really The Web who made two albums in the sixties with Lawson taking over on vocals from John L. Watson as their style changed and they went in a more Progressive Jazz direction.

They then became Samurai releasing one album and in 1972 Lawson joined Greenslade where he stayed for four albums. He also played on the last seventies Stackridge album Mr. Mick, released in 1976. His story is long and most people have never heard of him.

I Spider is a typical 1970 album of both complex, proggy, experimental, jazzy and catchy tunes. I love records like this, because no one dares to make them anymore, they have no aggression, no gratuitous showboating, but are made by talented, technical musicians with feel, a sense of humour and who were inspired and stimulated throughout the whole process.

Mr. Mick was the catalyst for the end of Stackridge, it didn’t do as well as expected, the record that came out wasn’t the one that the band wanted. This version has a reggaeish version of The Beatles’ Hold Me Tight, but despite the problems and the issues the band may have had, it’s a lovely album. On Spotify or on CD you can hear how the band wanted it. Poetic, melodic, West Country fare and appropriate as our drummer Ed has played with later incarnations of the band. The instrumentals are gorgeous and the concept, the lyrics, the cover art, give it a listen, I’ll say no more about it, but this should introduce you to their classic earlier albums. Dare and I saw them at Liverpool Stadium in the seventies.

Greenslade’s first album was released in 1973, a keyboard-heavy Progressive trip that was the underground music of the day, but again it was catchy. Dave Greenslade (keys) and Tony Reeves (bass) had been in Colosseum and wanted to form a band with two keyboards and invited Dave Lawson (who was struggling in Samurai) and drummer Andrew McCulloch who had played on King Crimson’s Lizard. (If you read a previous post, he also played on one track on Manfred Mann’s Chapter Three, Volume Two.) If you like your Prog, this is the album for you, all four albums they released are progtastic, but I only have time for two of them tonight. Bedside Manners Are Extra, their second album released in 1973, is their most well-known. After these two albums, guitars were introduced for Spyglass Guest (1974) and Time And Tide (1975). (They reformed in 2000 for Large Afternoon.) The cover art was by Roger Dean, what could go wrong? Go Prog Crazy!!!

Song Of The Day is Staring At The Sun from Seeing Stars.

 

Staring At The Sun

In your blood
There’s a vein of gold
If I could
Undo heaven’s hold
On your maps
Air on the moon
Your midnight comes at noon

Eyes blind
Staring, staring at the sun
White light
Waiting, for the end to come

I am glass
You see through me
Gliding past
Beauty waves you on
If you choose
All those colours
Kill your lovers now

Eyes blind
Staring, staring at the sun
White light
Waiting, for the end to come

(Willson-Piper / Cousin / Price)
Seeing Stars – Seeing Stars (1997)

It was so bright outside today that when I went out for two minutes without my sunglasses, I came back blinded with stars in my eyes. It took me ages to adjust to the archive labyrinth and the studio control room. The real flashing lights on the mixing desk and the various pieces of Star Trek equipment in the control room were actually there in my head and it took me a while to find my sunglasses, because I simply couldn’t see well enough to look for them. It was 68 degrees here in Penzance, you could feel the sun wrapping itself around you like big cosy arms. The sky was so blue that it didn’t look real, it was as if someone had dreamed it up. People were out in the streets and I imagine that the beaches were full, especially as de Pfeffel has announced some easing of the lockdown from July 4th. So many things are opening up, except for the ones that we want, the venues and the swimming pool.

Ed arrived today with his car crammed with drums. Can you imagine the difference in experience for a drummer versus a singer? Especially in the early days of trying to get somewhere and the lug. That poor singer having to carry his poetry book around. Who’d be a double bass player? You sometimes see them on the subway, I guess they never travel in the rush hour. In the live room at the studio there’s a two inch square hole in the ceiling to accommodate double bass players, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hold the bass upright. Dare soundchecked the drums after Ed had set up, but the start day for recording is tomorrow. You never think about how long it is to the end of an album even though it’s a very long way. When you look back on the process, listen back to what you’ve done, it all seems a very long time ago just in terms of the amount of work. But when you think about The Beatles taking an afternoon to record Please Please Me and Guns ‘n’ Roses taking 14 years to record Chinese Democracy you wonder at the chasm between the two and the different experiences those projects were to each other even though they were essentially the same thing.

I had two sessions today, one with Chris in New Jersey and another with Paul in New Orleans. Progress! The exciting thing about the sessions is that as we work on songs and ideas, singing, getting a body of work together, at the same time we start on the second sessioneer album with Ahad after Jed and Space Summit. There was a time that these were also at this early stage, progress is the key. I’m coming to the conclusion that anybody can do anything they just gotta wanna. I’ve been hitting the French for 20 days in a row and really feel like I learned something and even though I’m busy and feel like I would learn more if I could concentrate more, submerge myself in it, just the act of doing it is so useful and there will be times when I can really take it in. There will always be crazy times when there aren’t enough hours in the day. No time isn’t really an excuse, it’s priorities, even ten minutes a day adds up.

Today, finally, after over a year, I received a vinyl copy of Hanging Out In Heaven. It’s nice, isn’t it? It wasn’t that the label hadn’t sent it, it’s just that I hadn’t got around to having them send it whilst we are here at the archive. I spoke to Jan today who took those amazing pictures all those years ago and told him it was on the way, he was happy. Jan has also taken the picture for the cover of the new MOAT record, Poison Stream. He lives in Stockholm and is one of my oldest friends there. He told me today that he’s had the virus as have many of my friends and musical collaborators in Stockholm. Sweden was the country that followed a different path and there’s some quite scary numbers in the death department. There’s some bad news with flare-ups at the moment as they ease the lockdowns, but the statistic that says Germany 83 million people – 9,000 deaths, UK 66 million people – 42,000 deaths, begs belief.

So I head off into a busy week with the Ahad album, with Dare in the studio recording Ed’s drums and with me playing guide guitars and bass where necessary, some sessions later on at night and fitting that French in somewhere, too. So if you want to ask me a question or are waiting for a reply about anything at all – next week!

Music today comes from the perfect Soul pipes of Aretha Franklin. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You (1967) featured the Otis Redding penned Respect as the opening track which became her signature song and helped catapult the album to the No.2 spot in the US charts. The album also has two Sam Cooke songs on the record, Good Times and Change Is Gonna Come – she was a great interpreter of Soul songs. Although it seemed to set the Soul audience on fire, back in the day the critics were less enthusiastic, Rolling Stone gave it a bad review, time put paid to that opinion. When you consider that this classic and first release on Atlantic Records, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You, was in fact her 10th album, it seems like she took a long time to get going having made 9 albums with Columbia that skirted around the 100s in the charts. Ultimately in her career Franklin had some impressive stats – from Wikipedia: 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries, and 20 number-one R&B singles.

Her follow up album Aretha Arrives released in the same year (1967) opened with The Stones’ Satisfaction, but it was the single Baby I Love You that made it to No.4 on the US chart and sold a million copies. Franklin would become known as the Queen Of Soul. You gotta have your Soul party hat on to dig these vibey sixties Atlantic records, but she could belt out a ballad too. She released three albums in 1967 alone and then two a year till 1972 with a regular output through the seventies and eighties, this lady was prolific.

It was on Lady Soul (1968) that she sang another song that would be associated exclusively with her, Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman from an idea suggested by Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler. It was specially written for her and reached No.8 on the US chart. The album also features Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready and The Rascals hit Groovin’, written by Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati.

Aretha Now was her second album released in 1968 and that too had songs that she made her own, Think (US No.7) and I Say A Little Prayer. Think was written by Franklin and her first husband, producer-manager Teddy White. I Say A Little Prayer was a Bacharach/David song which was originally a hit for Dionne Warwick, but it wasn’t long before Franklin released it, too, both reaching No.4 in the UK and Top Ten in the US. The album also features another Sam Cooke classic, You Send Me.

Whenever I listen to Soul music, the groove, the singers, the warm skillful easy expertise, I always feel the euphoria of talent and heart.

Song Of The Day is The Guessing Game from the Noctorum album Offer The Light, released in 2006. I wrote the lyrics to this song but Dare sang it as he has more of the Soul voice and that seemed appropriate for today.

 

The Guessing Game

Sometimes when I’m dreaming
All these worlds are spinning ’round
Can’t believe what I’m seeing
Through the clouds down to the ground

Into the distance
Into the darkness

And now that we’ve returned here
To see what we have hatched
Millions of people
A perfect little batch
So that’s what you call England
Sweden and Japan
The Himalayan mountains
Sri Lanka and Siam

Into the distance
Into the darkness
Should we just leave you
What are your chances
Have you the faith
Have you the hunger
All of the madness
All of the wonder
The guessing game

Slipping through my fingers
This tiny galaxy
All these shooting stars
The Men from Mars
And all eternity

Into the distance
Into the darkness
Should we just leave you
What are your chances
Have you the faith
Have you the hunger
All of the madness
All of the wonder
The guessing game
The guessing game

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – Offer The Light (2006)

Today is preparation day for being in the studio with our drummer Ed who is driving down from Bristol tomorrow afternoon. All the amps have been sitting in the live room as we were recording guitars and bass on the Space Summit album. They all had to be moved into another spot which was taken up with other things, the Vocoder, guitars, bits and bobs. So all this stuff had to be moved to the archive room which in turn has records all over the place that need filing away. When you are too busy to put records away, you are really mad busy and after all, messing around with the records is in fact high on the list of my favourite things to do. It’s going to be a busy week as we start with the backing tracks for the Ahad album. I’ll still be doing evening sessions, early sessions with Australia, learning French, writing and looking at the sea. And now as the world seems more confused than ever with everything opening up as the virus spikes are being reported everywhere, we try to plan. We even have a Berlin show pencilled in for February 7th 2021, I have Anekdoten shows in September and November, but will we be able to do these shows, who knows? We are trying to find release dates for the finished MOAT and Space Summit albums whilst trying to figure out when we could start campaigns for preorders so we make back the investment and try and raise the manufacturing costs, but when should we do that? The future is a mystery.

It seems that this week de Pfeffel will be making the two metre rule a one metre rule. Today at the greengrocers (where I bought the most attractive cauliflower you have ever seen) I was asking the scared man behind the perspex shield if they will be taking all the tape off the floor and making the distance one instead of two metres. He told me he couldn’t see that working and that’s the reaction I have got from everybody. The pandemic has struck fear into the populace. The bakers, the co-op, the charity stores, everywhere has barricades and two meter distancing has been strictly enforced. There’s special mass-produced posters and signs in the chains that must have cost a fortune that will be no longer relevant, but they are partly relevant, so do they scrap them all and manufacture them again with the new rules? Or do they scrub out the two and make it a one?

Has anybody noticed that these days shops have their own private radio stations. Co-op radio? Really? What is going on with that? Even Barnardo’s, the charity store, has its own radio station complete with prerecorded announcements about the imminent defunct two metre rule. It must be something to do with the costs of playing music in a public place, it must be cheaper to get a package deal with the PRS (Performing Rights Society) than it is paying your yearly license fee. Of course the chains have found a way to pay less whilst the independent have to pay full whack. Why doesn’t anybody realize that it should be the other way ‘round. It’s this system that wiped out the corner store, supermarkets buy in bulk, get their wares cheaper and can undercut the independent store. It’s the independent stores that should get discounts or at least the same deal as the big stores so that they can compete. Isn’t it obvious?

I have to say that the streets were rather busy today on this cold, windy, rain threatening summer’s day. I was running into people I knew, nodding at people I knew and chatting in the street. The great black-backed gull stood on the wall outside the Acorn Theatre across from the studio/archive like it was guarding the place. The size of a small dog, they only fly away from you as a last resort, choosing to run away down the street on their land-unfriendly webbed feet, they’re confident. This regular visitor had a dirty head today like it had been hanging around its chimney nest and got a good dose of soot. I’ve stopped seeing the chicks, but that’s probably because they grow so fast that they are no longer recognizable as chicks. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where the kid grows abnormally fast, then they twig, it’s an alien.

Music today sees me trying to catch up with some hard to find albums that were trying to get themselves into the shelves without being listened to. It seems in the case of Dreamin’ (1978) by Liverpool Express I now know why. It’s a hard to find album only released and available in Brazil. But first a little about the band. I’ve mentioned them before and played their first album Tracks from 1976 quite recently, it was this that inspired me to find the second hard to find album. They are a Liverpool band that sound very much like Paul McCartney. McCartney said of You Are My Love, a hit single from their first album, that it was his favourite song at the time.

They were formed by Billy Kinsley, Roger Scott Craig, Tony Coates, and Derek Cashin, who met at a football match. Billy Kinsley had been in The Merseybeats and later The Merseys (remember Sorrow?). Liverpool Express were initially having a lot of success, a hit in England, hits in Europe and then mega stardom in Brazil with number one singles. For some reason the second album Dreamin’ was only released there. It’s great, as good as their first album. Unfortunately the copy I bought from someone up north (someone who had bought it in Brazil and brought it back to England) has a problem with the roundness of the hole, so the tracks sound sour as the needle moves backwards, forwards and sideways on the spindle. Replacing it is expensive, so next trip to Brazil that is all I will be thinking about. Luckily I can listen to it on Spotify and hold the cover like it’s the real thing.

In 1979 they released L.E.X. which I recently bought from Germany. It has a track that is on the previous album, I guess they figured it needed another chance to grab the public’s attention. They cover a Dylan song (Is Your Love In Vain) and Joe South’s Games People Play. This record plays properly (phew) and follows that same effortless Liverpool talent path, but by 1979 New Wave was killing bands that sounded like this. There’s a dodgy picture of Jerry Hall on the cover and they sound a bit like later 10cc, out of step with the times but a success at their own game. It shows how much image matters. I remember when grunge wiped out the middle-sized eighties bands as another generation dismissed what the older kids liked as unhip, not turned on, and then it happened again to them, as it always does and always will ad infinitum.

When you listen back to the Liverpool sound of the early to mid sixties you can hear why it was the place to be, but isn’t it strange, it happened in Seattle, in San Francisco, Athens, Georgia, Minneapolis. A sound from a place can catch on. This Merseybeats album is a collection of songs from 1963-1965, three-minute Pop slices in the same style as The Beatles. You can hear the accents, something in that Liverpool vernacular that stands out. I Think Of You from 1963 could easily be The Beatles – it was a million seller.

Billy J. Kramer was managed by Brian Epstein and was given unreleased Beatles songs that propelled him into the charts as the Merseybeat sound became the sound of the day. He had many hits and this ‘Best Of’ album has five Lennon/McCartney songs, four of them unreleased by The Beatles. Do You Want To Know A Secret was released in 1963 on The Beatles’ Please Please Me album and sung by George Harrison. Kramer took it to No.2 in the charts as a single. Lennon and McCartney’s Bad To Me reached No.1 in the UK in the same year as did another Lennon and McCartney song, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, reaching No.4. In 1964 Little Children (Shuman/McFarland) also made it to No.1 and the last Lennon and McCartney penned hit, From A Window, reached No.10. Trains and Boats and Planes (Bacharach/David) reached No.12 and that was just about it as Merseybeat’s popularity waned.

Song Of The Day is She’s King. Although I wrote it in New Zealand, the seeds were planted in Liverpool.

 

She’s King

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

A thousand things to do
To follow them all through
Things to learn and see
And they will better me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

A throne of violent blue
And nothing to see through
Distant eyes to guide
And to enlighten me

An end to all our pain
An hour through her heart
Nothing there at least though
It encouraged me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king

Ohhh

(Willson-Piper)
Art Attack (1988)