Their Satanic Majesties & The Fab Four

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1st 1967, in the most elaborate sleeve of any rock album up to that point. Though cut-outs of the Rolling Stones weren't included, an oblique tribute was paid by the inclusion of a Shirley Temple doll wearing a jumper that has 'THE WMPS GOOD GUYS WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES' knitted on it. Six months and many tribulations later, the Stones finally released their own psychedelic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Not to be outdone, they had an amazingly expensive lenticular sleeve produced, with art direction by their chum Michael Cooper. Buried in the blurry image are the moustachioed heads of the four Beatles, but they're nigh-on impossible to spot, so I thought I'd spoil the fun:

RIC COLBECK: 'a player of exceptional power and complexity'

Frustratingly little is known of this enigmatic trumpeter. He was from Liverpool, where he joined future record producer Noel Walker's trad jazz band in the late 50s. "He played more in the style of Ken Colyer than anyone else, and had a good knowledge of the standard trad repertoire," Walker told me in March 2013. "In 1962 the band played a season at Butlins Filey, after which we broke up. Most of us returned to Liverpool, but Ric moved to London, and after a few months I joined him there. We roomed together at a flat in Kilburn, and then World's End. He knew all the musician's hangouts - the pubs and late night dives etc. - and we used to enjoy sitting in whenever we could. Quite often, coming home on the tube, we would get out our horns and play to an audience who were just as drunk / stoned as we were! It was clear that at this point he was becoming interested in freeform. The trouble was, neither of us was getting any work! Eventually I landed a job as a producer at Decca, but Ric spent his days and nights pottering around the West End, and his behaviour became so erratic that the landlord chucked him out."

Here are a couple of previously unseen snaps of Colbeck with the band, kindly supplied by Walker:

In the mid-60s Colbeck moved to New York, where he shared a Brooklyn loft with the saxophonist Marzette Watts, worked in the Record Center and Record Hunter stores, recorded a pair of albums with Noah Howard and hung out with John Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Jaki Byard and others at the cutting edge of jazz. In late 1969 he contributed trumpet, piano and harp to Dave Burrell's La Vie de Bohème album, a jazzy interpretation of Puccini's opera. At the end of the year he returned to the UK and formed a short-lived quartet with Mike Osborne (alto sax), Frenchman J.F. 'Jenny' Clark (bass) and South African Selwyn Lissack (drums). The great Richard Williams interviewed him for Melody Maker at this point; it may be the only interview he ever gave, and has never been republished. Here goes:

Melody Maker, January 17th 1970

On the day the interview appeared (Saturday 17th January), the quartet played a gig at the Crucible Club in Soho, which Williams rapturously covered a week later:

Melody Maker, January 24th 1970

At around this time Noel Walker encountered him again. "I'd spent the next few years immersed in the production of all kinds of music, and was really excited at the time because I was producing Duke Ellington, but Ric was totally unimpressed and accused me of selling out to commercialism! He told me he was doing some recording for Philips, we did a short round of our old haunts and parted, never to meet again." On January 19th-20th 1970 the quartet recorded an album in Chalk Farm Studios, produced by one of British jazz's greatest proponents, John Jack. The following Saturday they were back at the Crucible, this time supporting Bob Downes:

And a fortnight later they were playing with Michael Garrick and Norma Winstone at the Jazz Centre Society in Shaftesbury Avenue:

Their album, The Sun Is Coming Up, crept out on Fontana in August, in a striking sleeve by Marcus Keef. By then, however, Colbeck had long since returned to America, and no one bought it (a copy sold on eBay in March 2013 for $698).

'He's a harsh player with a spurting, asymmetrical quality to his phrasing, often building solos out of a string of seemingly disconnected notes, each quite separate,' wrote Melody Maker. 'On the ballads he can conjure up an almost childlike air of despair and loneliness. There are a lot of reasons why you should buy this one.' Gramophone was also impressed, stating that 'Clark and Osborne acquit themselves brilliantly throughout the LP, both as soloists and in creating a varied and exciting flurry in the background.'

Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any further recordings of Colbeck, who apparently drank himself to death in November 1981, but he has a loyal following. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth is one notable admirer, and described The Sun Is Coming Up as an 'exceptional and complex masterpiece' in issue #2 of Grand Royal magazine. As Noel Walker concludes: "Ric was a very charismatic guy, capable of great charm, but often moody and depressive. I was very sad, but not surprised, to learn that he had died so young." 

John Lennon: LP winner!

One of the joys of old music papers is chancing upon revealing interviews that have barely been seen since their first appearance. It's especially interesting to find a Beatles one, of course, and here's a corker. Written by the late Ray Coleman, it appeared in Melody Maker of April 10th 1965, and catches the great man during the filming of Help! (then labouring under the working title of Eight Arms To Hold You), as he began to shed his moptop image and project a more complex public persona. Indeed, it was in April 1965 that he first took LSD (in coffee spiked by his dentist). There are numerous intriguing insights in the piece, but I won't pontificate about them here. One point, though: there's a reference to Lennon carting 'huge box full after huge box full of LPs into the lounge'; I recently spoke to Barry Miles, who told me that Capitol sent all four Beatles every new single and album in the US top 200 every single week throughout the 1960s, without fail...

COB: the contemporary press (part 2)

Clive Palmer, Mick Bennett, John Bidwell and Genevieve Val Baker

Following the release of Spirit Of Love in November 1971, COB played a few gigs, but largely focused on getting a new set of songs together back in Cornwall. They added Genevieve Val Baker (whose sister Demelza had played with Palmer and Bidwell in the Temple Creatures) on drums and percussion, and by July 1971 they had a single ready for release. Produced by Ralph McTell, Blue Morning / Bones appeared on Polydor, following the dissolution of their manager Jo Lustig's arrangement with CBS. Lustig had apparently instructed them to come up with something deliberately commercial, and the result is a good-natured pop record that sounds little like the rest of their work. The A-side verges on reggae, and the flip is almost a novelty song. It's an anomaly in their catalogue, and seems to have baffled Rosalind Russell when she interviewed them for Disc on July 29th 1972:

The same issue carried a review of the 45, which repeated Russell's remarks:

Sales were minuscule, but it was also issued in Germany, with a picture sleeve:

In late July, they went back into the studio in London to record their second and final album, with some striking assistance by Danny Thompson on double bass. Thankfully, they'd got the lightweight pop out of their system, and created one of the great masterpieces of modern English music, Moyshe McStiff & The Tartan Lancers Of The Sacred Heart. Produced by McTell - whose skill in managing their sound deserves the highest praise - it was completed by August 6th, which is the date scribbled on the mastertape. Soon afterwards they performed at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Here's their entry in the programme:

With the release of Moyshe approaching, they gave a fascinating interview to Melody Maker on September 14th:

On Saturday 20th they played a gig with Gillian McPherson and Bridget St. John at the Basildon Arts Centre. Here's their page from the programme:

The album appeared as part of Polydor's short-lived 'Folk Mill' imprint in early October, and was trailed in a couple of papers:

Here's a promo photo Polydor issued at the time. Though Genny Val Baker is prominent in it, she only appears in an intermittent supporting role on the record, which was evidently made as a trio, and not the quartet Palmer had spoken of earlier in the year:

The striking artwork was by Paul Whitehead (who also designed covers for High Tide, Andrew Leigh, Genesis and others), and it came with another gatefold sleeve containing all the lyrics:

Incidentally, I spoke to Whitehead about the album, and this is what he said: "Boy! That's a blast from the past. If I remember correctly, that was an airbrushed piece involving a dragon and the band slaying it - right? I did a lot of covers in the 70s and they all seem to blur into each other in terms of the creative process involved. I usually insisted on hearing the music as it was written, or at least reading the lyrics. I remember meeting with one of the band. We talked about the concept and I showed him some pictures from a Victorian illustrated book about King Arthur as a possible way to go. Once everyone (band and record company) agreed that was a good direction, I just got to work. I don't have a copy of the cover and I imagine the original piece is in the possession of the record company - if they still exist."

The two reviews I have found were broadly complimentary, though Jerry Gilbert in Sounds mystifyingly criticised the trio's brilliant vocals, which apparently 'should have been stronger':

Sounds, October 14th 1972

Melody Maker, October 14th 1972

On October 14th another interesting article appeared in Melody Maker, written by Eric Winter:

As the article explains, to promote the album they went on a prestigious tour with Pentangle and Wizz Jones, which had been advertised in Melody Maker on September 23rd:

Here's the 'souvenir brochure' cover (billing them as 'Clive Palmer's COB') and their section:

The tour was well-received, if a little shambolic, reflecting the turbulence in Pentangle at the time (they split as soon as the tour ended). COB's performance in Croydon on November 5th got a lukewarm notice in the local paper on the 10th:

By then, however, long-term hardship had exacerbated their personal differences and the initial magic had gone. They persevered with a weekly residency in one of London's leading folk venues, the Half Moon in Putney, but split for good in March 1973, without making any further recordings. Their full story can be read in the notes to the Sunbeam reissue of Moyshe McStiff, and I recommend Grahame Hood's biography of Clive Palmer, Empty Pocket Blues, but I'll end here with a statement Ralph McTell made to me when I was working on the reissue: "COB was about three guys living in the middle of nowhere who somehow came up with this magical music. I feel we got the absolute best out of each other, and couldn't have improved the records in any way. In my opinion they stand head and shoulders above most of what passed for music at the time, and I'm very, very proud of what we achieved together."

COB: the contemporary press (part 1)

Mick Bennett, John Bidwell and Clive Palmer

Nothing sounds quite like COB, whose dense, eerie and touching music seems to belong to another sphere entirely. As Steve Bonnett (who guested on their first album) has commented: "They seemed impossibly old, and not just in years. It felt like they were from some distant rustic past, operating to rules older than time..." I'm going to post everything I have about them here, in two parts. The first is below, leading up to the release of their masterful debut in late 1971, Spirit Of Love. But first, a little history...

Having left the Incredible String Band in late 1966, travelled the East, returned to London to work solo and in a duo with Wizz Jones, recorded a then-unreleased album (Banjoland), moved to Cornwall and made an album with the Famous Jug Band, in the summer of 1969 Clive Palmer was getting restless again. As a regular at Cornwall's leading folk venue, the Folk Cottage, he had befriended local multi-instrumentalist 'Little' John Bidwell, who was barely out of his teens. Bidwell shared his musical curiosity, and had already invented an instrument that he named the dulcitar (a cross between a dulcimer and a sitar). They began to play together, and by that autumn had formed an Eastern-themed trio named the Temple Creatures, with another local, Demelza Val Baker. They headlined at the Guildhall in St. Ives on September 10th 1969.

They made enough of an impression to have been covered in the local paper, but it proved a short-lived venture and no recordings survive.

At the time Palmer was sharing a caravan with another refugee from London, 'Whispering' Mick Bennett, a poet whose slight frame belied his extraordinarily rich and powerful voice. Over the next few months Bennett, Bidwell and Palmer formed another trio, and soon came to the attention of Jo Lustig, a brash New Yorker who was managing Ralph McTell and Pentangle. Lustig was swift to sign up the new act, naming them Clive's Original Band and sending them into the studio in May 1971, with McTell as their producer. Shambolic though their approach to the recording process reportedly was, the resulting album was magical. As soon as the sessions were over, they returned to Cornwall to play the Guildhall again, on June 4th.

Lustig, meanwhile, found the band and their album a berth at CBS (Record & Tape Retailer, July 17th 1971):

Eager to publicise the band, Lustig prevailed upon another of his clients, Bert Jansch (an old friend and collaborator of Palmer's from Edinburgh days) to promote his new Rosemary Lane album with a gig at London's Royal Festival Hall, with COB and Anne Briggs (another Lustig signing) supporting.

The show had been announced in Disc on May 15th,

and was a major opportunity for an unknown act. The critics were duly impressed:

Disc, July 10th 1971

Sounds, July 10th 1971

Melody Maker, July 10th 1971

A fortnight later, Sounds ran a lengthy feature on the band, which gives a lot of detail about their music and approach (and mentions a song named 'Golden Apples', which was renamed 'Evening Air'):

Sounds, July 24th 1971

The album was originally due for release in August, but was delayed for three months. In August they walked offstage at the Cambridge Folk Festival in protest at only being allowed to play two songs, and in September two further interviews appeared, sharing the same sub-standard pun in their headlines:

Melody Maker, 4th September 1971

In October CBS sent a special EP out to DJs, promoting all three Lustig acts that it was handling:

The album finally appeared at the start of November, as erroneously announced in Disc on the 6th:

It came in an appealing unipak sleeve, with all lyrics handwritten inside:

It was greeted warmly by the music press:

Melody Maker, November 6th 1971

Disc & Music Echo, November 6th 1971

Record Mirror, November 20th 1971

Sounds, December 11th 1971 

Despite the praise, sales were meagre - but they were already working on their masterful second album, about which I will post soon...