The Pretty Things - Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky (box set booklet)

Y L N E D R O F | E L P M A S

Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky

Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky

N O M

O N O I T A R T S

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

E D R O F | E L P M A S

N O M

1

Y L N

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly over time.”

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

So said the great French poet, novelist, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and he was right. He might easily have been talking about the Pretty Things, a band whose music and image was once regarded as the epitome of ugliness and bad taste, but whose work, over time, has come to be recognised as some of the best of its era.

When the Pretty Things burst onto the British music scene in the middle of 1964 in a violent explosion of rattlesnake maracas, raunchy, rackety guitars, and leering vocals, nobody expected them to last. With their surly street-punk scowls and shockingly long hair they were the living, twitching embodiment of every parent’s worst nightmare. Surely they were an aberration, and would disappear as quickly as they’d arrived?

O N O I T A R ST

But the Pretty Things refused to go away. Instead of burning out, they evolved. From roughneck garage-punk R&B, they went on to embrace hard-riffing mod-fuelled rock, melodic pop, psychedelia, and artful progressive rock, always challenging themselves and their audience, always remaining on the creative forefront. Other acts may have sold more records, filled larger venues and pocketed more loot, but few mastered or helped initiate so many genres so convincingly, nor with as much passion, conviction and bold creativity. For that reason the Pretty Things and their music have endured, exerting an influence on rock ’n’ roll that far exceeds their record sales. Artists as diverse as the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Oasis, the White Stripes and Kasabian have acknowledged them as a source of inspiration, but it’s only today that the greatness of the Pretty Things’ rich—and still ongoing—legacy is starting to be fully appreciated.

While many of the more commercial, fashionable, safely palatable bands have since faded into a grey netherworld of nostalgia, the Pretty Things and their work continue to stand proudly on the forefront. More than fifty years after two art school students, Phil May and Dick Taylor, formed the band, they’re still together; still vital, still relevant, hardened by a half century of bad choices, bad luck and a hundred thousand miles of bad road, but as uncompromising as ever - the eternal ugly things whose legacy has only become more beautiful over time.

2

3

T

PART ONE: Art School Blues (1944-64)

he Pretty Things’ story begins in the rain-streaked grey world of post-war England—on a council estate in Erith, Kent. “It was a brand-new estate,” remembers Phil May. “We had been in an old 1930s terraced council house in Crayford, which was about three miles away and they built this new estate and moved a lot of families into it; they got new houses for the first time. So we were moved there.” Within a few days of moving in, Phil had befriended a kid who lived directly across the street, Alan ‘Wally’ Waller, another Pretty Thing to be. “I was out in my garden with Charlie,” recalls Phil, referring to the man he then believed to be his father, “and over the road was this ginger haired kid with his ginger haired father doing their garden, and that was Wally! We were four or five, and we kind of struck it off. We became inseparable.”

O N O I T A R ST

Within a small radius of May and Waller’s street, Chipstead Road, lived a number of other Pretty Things in waiting. John Fullager (later John Stax) lived a few miles away and attended the same primary school as Wally—the two future bass players were born in the same maternity ward, three days apart—and, though they were yet to meet, keyboard player Jon Povey lived just a few hundred yards away on Birling Road, while Dick Taylor resided in nearby Bexleyheath.

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S The Pretty Things, ca. May 1964. L to R: Phil May, John Stax, Dick Taylor, Brian Pendleton, Viv Prince. (Photo: Redferns) 4

Y L N

It would be easy at this juncture to fashion a maladroit metaphor about the stars of a future constellation shifting slowly but surely into heavenly alignment, but that would run counter to the essentially random and chaotic nature of the universe—especially the Pretty Things’ universe.

In 1954, or thereabouts, the fabric of nine year old Phil May’s family life was ripped apart when he was wrenched from his home, and the only parents he had ever known, Flo and Charlie May, and deposited—by court order—in a house in Sidcup with a group of apparent strangers who, he was informed, were his birth mother, stepfather, and older sister. Phil’s father, Dennis, and mother, Daphne, had separated when he was still a baby, and Daphne’s half-sister, Flo, had been given custody of the infant and brought him up as her own. Phil had no real inkling that Flo and Charlie weren’t his real parents, or that his older ‘sisters’ Bet and Kath were in fact his cousins.

The trauma of being transplanted to a new home was compounded by the fact that his new family severed all contact with Flo and Charlie. He didn’t even keep his own name: Philip May was now Philip Kattner, after his new stepfather.

Phil May in his mid-teens

Phil (back) and Wally at Chipstead Road, ca. early 1950s

Phil at Chipstead Road, Erith, ca. 1965

Dick and his father, ca. 1962

“The shock was not so much that Flo and Charlie weren’t my parents—although obviously I wanted to believe they were,” he says, “it was, I think, the fact I was taken away from the people I’d Phil and Flo May. Chipstead Road, Erith, ca. 1965 5

been with for nine or ten years. And also I was told when I left—or I assumed—that I would come back at weekends or something. Nobody disabused me of that during the move out when they picked me up in the car. When I saw Flo and Charlie out of the car window I still believed that maybe next weekend I’d be taken over to Erith to see them, but for five years I was completely cut off. They burnt all the presents that Kath, my sister, and Flo and Charlie sent, birthday and Christmas, and all the letters. Flo sent a letter every week, apparently, and they just burnt them.”

From the age of nine until fifteen—when he finally returned to Flo and Charlie—Phil lived in a state of near complete lockdown. To ward off his feelings of loneliness and separation, he retreated into a world of his own. “I went into a shell,” he says.

“It fired my imagination, because I thought life was pretty bleak, so a lot of stuff went on in my head. I had a kind of secret life, I guess. It wasn’t real; it was a virtual world to keep myself going.”

His secret world manifested itself in a fascination with history, geography, literature, and especially art. Phil had been a keen artist since the age of three or four, but now he threw himself more and more into his drawings: “I was creating my own world,” he affirms. “I used to lie on the floor for like hours. It was like I’d gone somewhere: I just drew and drew and drew—it was almost like I was in a trance state.” This ability to live in his own head, retreating into a world of art and creativity would serve him well later when the Pretty Things music became more evolved and experimental.

of music—blues and Chuck Berry and stuff.”

Taylor and Jagger, along with Dick’s friend Robert Beckwith, were soon getting together regularly at Dick’s house to make music. Mick sang, while Robert and Dick played guitars, with Dick occasionally taking a turn on the drums.

“We must’ve been 13 or 14 when we started,” remembers Dick. “We did it for ages.” Although they had no need for a name in the beginning, this informal aggregation would eventually be dubbed Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys.

Like Phil May, Dick Taylor had an aptitude for art, so in 1959, at the age of 16, he began attending Sidcup Art School. There he met Keith Richards, who had recently been expelled from Dartford Technical College, and the two

The events immediately thereafter are also well known by now—exceedingly so. In June 1962 Brian, Mick and Keith joined forces, along with pianist Ian Stewart, and—briefly—a third guitarist, Geoff Bradford, to form the Rolling Stones.

Because there was—again—a surplus of guitar players, Brian invited Dick to play bass, which he did for about five months, alongside drummer Tony Chapman and various other fill-ins. “One of the things I think people don’t really understand,” Dick emphasises, “is that the line-ups were a lot more fluid in those days. People just wanted to play music, I think, and because we were all playing rhythm & blues type stuff, things were a lot less rigid, particularly with who played drums.

So, as I’ve said before—many times—I got bored with playing the bass slightly, and I was trying to get into the Royal College of Art, but I was still at Sidcup, and at that point, after leaving the Stones, Phil started nagging me about forming a band.”

Phil May had started at Sidcup Art School a year after Dick and Keith, and had hovered around the edges of the cloakroom blues scene.

“I was very shy so it took me quite a while to get involved,” he says. “I used to listen to Dick and Keith. I listened to Dick teach Keith almost everything he knew. Then Ian Stirling came along, who was in my year I think—Dick was a year older and Keith was a year older—and I eventually got encouraged to sing a bit. And Wally started to teach me the guitar on his old Spanish guitar. Anyway, that really blossomed to where [Dick and I] formed our own band.”

Y L N

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Meanwhile, on Alexandria Road in Bexleyheath, Dick Taylor had been learning to play a variety of musical instruments, starting with a plastic ukulele and eventually graduating to acoustic guitar. “I got a guitar for my 12th or 13th birthday,” recalls Dick.

“It was really nice. I don’t know what make it was, but it was a flat, round-hole acoustic with metal strings. I wanted to be Big Bill Broonzy so I listened avidly to all the Big Bill Broonzy records and tried to play that, and then I got into trying to play Chuck Berry and what have you. I was also really heavily into first of all trad jazz and then all sorts of jazz.

Skiffle was around; skiffle was great because everybody and their dog played in the skiffle band, you know? Some of my sister’s friends had a little skiffle band and that’s kind of how it developed.

When I got to the grammar school, by that time I had my granddad’s really tiny kit of drums and I played very badly at youth clubs and things like that along with this guy called Bernie Bungay— though God knows what happened to him.”

It was at Dartford Grammar School that Dick first met Mick Jagger. “We were 11 or 12,” says Dick, “and it didn’t take long before we both realised that we were into the same sort

An early photograph of Phil, Dick and John, 1963

soon began jamming together on blues and Chuck Berry songs in the school’s cloakroom.

Along with a love of Chuck Berry, the two guitar players also discovered that they had a friend in common—Mick Jagger—although Keith hadn’t seen much of Mick since primary school. “Keith was too shy to say, ‘Can I come along to your rehearsals?’” says Dick. “But then he bumped into Mick at Dartford station—the famous meeting when one of them had a Chuck Berry record or whatever, and that’s when Keith started coming around to the rehearsals, and that’s when I said I would play the drums because we had a bit of a surplus of guitarists. It’s pretty well documented what we did next: we went to the Ealing Club, saw Alexis Korner, made our little tape of Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys which we gave him, and met Brian Jones.”

Keith Richards had been thrown out of the art school earlier in the year for not submitting any work, but the Stones (with either Ricky Fenstone or Colin Golding on bass) played the school’s Christmas dance at the end of 1962. “We actually hired the Stones for our school dance,” remembers Dick, “and they were very good. We were all like ‘woah!’” “I think they got 30 quid for our art school dance,” remembers Phil, “but once they turned professional we couldn’t afford them.

So that’s ostensibly why the Pretty Things were formed, to play the music we wanted to hear.”

O N O I T A R ST

While the Stones’ performance at the Christmas dance may have been a spur for May and Taylor to form an R&B band of their own, it would be many more months before they actually managed to do so. Dick was now in his fourth and final year at Sidcup and most of his energy was focused on getting into the Royal College of Art. Nevertheless, during the summer of 1963, the band began to take shape.

The first recruit was Phil’s old mate John Fullager, who would eventually adopt the stage name John Stax. Although John’s right

Around May 1964. L to R: Phil, Brian, Dick, Viv, John. Dick and Brian are wearing waistcoats bought from John Stephen’s in Carnaby Street. (Photo: Jeremy Fletcher/Redferns) 6

7

Y L N

OR

F | E L P M A S

O N O I T A R ST

M E D

ON May 1964

hand was in a cast after an accident at his building site job, he was still able to hold a guitar pick, so he was handed Dick’s huge semi-acoustic Emperor bass guitar and began to learn as many Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry songs as he could. “John didn’t have to work, so we smuggled him into the art school,” recalls Phil. “We had this drunk who ran the Life Drawing class. He was really strange and every 20 minutes he’d have to go off and have another drink in the Black Horse, which is a five minute walk, and then he’d come back. When he used to go for a drink we used to draw a leg for John or an arm, and then when he came back John would have this body drawn that was in four different styles!”

This arrangement helped facilitate additional practice sessions for the fledgling band. “At break time we’d nick off to the locker room and there’d be a couple of guitars there and we’d just start playing,” remembers John.

Another Sidcup art student, Pete Kitley, became the band’s first drummer. “Pete Kitley was the one who bought the drum kit,” chuckles Phil, “poor sod. He could only play it with one hand or the other! Because he had enough money to buy a kit he became the first Pretty Things drummer, but he couldn’t play drums.”

“He lived in a tree,” remembers Stax.

Phil May, 1964. (Photo: Pictorial Press)

Phil became lead singer more or less by default.

“I wanted to be the second guitarist,” he insists, “but Dick said, ‘You sing until we find a proper singer. Do it till then and then you can play guitar.’ Later he said that was just a ruse, and he never intended to look for another singer. It was just to con me into accepting the fact!”

In need of a second guitarist, they located Brian Pendleton via an ad in the Melody Maker.

Pendleton, it transpired, had also attended Dartford Grammar School, but a year behind Taylor and Jagger. More importantly, though, he was the owner of a very impressive amplifier with more than one input. “The minute we saw he had this large amp with two inputs, he was in the band!” laughs Phil.

Practice sessions were soon underway in the back room of the Taylor house, where Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys had once played.

After cobbling together a repertoire of about a dozen songs—mostly by the holy triumvirate of Chuck, Bo and Jimmy—and some makeshift amplification, the newly minted quintet secured their first booking at a tiny club in Dartford called the Inferno. Playing a gig required the band have a name so after some discussion they opted for Jerome & the Pretty Things, in homage to their hero Bo Diddley and his maraca-shaking

Miming to “Can’t Stand the Pain” on Swedish TV, 1966. From top: Phil, Skip, John, Dick, Brian.

8

9

sidekick Jerome Green. The ‘Jerome’ part was dropped quite soon afterwards, as was John Fullager’s first stage name, Elmo Lee, which although very bluesy was not entirely plausible for a young white bloke from the Home Counties.

Despite some equipment troubles, the Inferno gig was a big success. The room was packed, mostly with art students, and the group was forced to repeat their same dozen songs several times. Another gig followed soon afterwards at the Station Hotel in Dartford—with Flo and Charlie May in attendance—and the Pretty Things were officially up and rolling.

Having failed to secure a slot at the Royal College of Art, Dick began attending the Central School of Art in the autumn of 1963. There he met Bryan Morrison, who was studying furniture design as well as serving as the school’s social secretary.

“Also at the Central was Viv Stanshall and Legs Larry [Smith],” relates Dick. “Viv Stanshall used to go around the Central School playing his euphonium. You could always tell where this was because [he imitates the sound of a euphonium].

Bryan was actually managing the Bonzos, and I talked to him about my little band. He must have cottoned on that I had been in the Stones— by that time the Stones were becoming quite well-known—and he said, ‘Why don’t the Pretty

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Inside 13 Chester Street, August 1964. L to R: Viv Prince, Dick Taylor, Phil May, John Stax. (Brian Pendleton was absent that day) (Photo: Hudson/Daily Mail. Rex Features)

Things start playing the art school dances here?’

So we started doing the Central School dances and started doing all the art schools over London, the Royal Academy, Royal College, St. Martin’s and stuff like that.” The band hit it off well with Morrison—or Morrie, as he was affectionately called—and before long he had dropped the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to manage the Pretty Things—a fortuitous decision, as it turned out.

Quite early on, it became clear that Pete Kitley wasn’t cutting it on drums, so Dick was given the task of firing him. No one remembers the name of his replacement, but he lasted long enough to accompany the band on their first out of town expedition, to the Bodega Club in Manchester—

Phil remembers Flo packing sandwiches for them. The drum stool was next occupied by Viv Broughton, who remembers auditioning for them in the front room of Brian Pendleton’s house. “I set up my Premier kit between the sofa and the armchair,” he recalls. “I seem to recall they were particularly impressed that I knew the standard Bo Diddley drum pattern, so it all gelled straight off and I was in. John had already taken on the name John Stax, and for some obscure reason lost in the mist of time, I became Viv Andrews.”

Things escalated rapidly after an especially riotous, sweat-drenched set at the Royal College of Art. “I finished up coughing up blood because we played for so long,” remembers

Circa May 1964

Dick. “By that time Phil had this little thing about purple hearts.” “That’s where Jimmy Duncan stumbled drunkenly up the stairs and said he wanted to sign us,” remembers Phil.

“He was completely out of his head. Jimmy Duncan said he was a talent scout for a record company and he wanted Dick, who was up in town, to meet the Philips/Fontana people. We were all, you know, ‘Fuck off, mate, go and get another drink.’ We didn’t think anything would happen, and then of course Dick went to this meeting and they were there, the suits.”

Duncan was a fixer—a songwriter, song-plugger, and Denmark Street deal-maker. He was shady, but he was connected. “When Jimmy

Pictorial Press. 1964 10

11

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Appearing on the television show Thank Your Lucky Stars.

came on board he brought Philips along,” explains Phil. “Morrie then bucked his ideas up and got involved. I think he already felt he was our manager, but there was nothing on paper, nothing, and then when Jimmy came on the scene they decided to team up.” Together they formed the MorrisonDuncan Agency, the organisation that would oversee the early years of the Pretty Things’ career from an upstairs office at 143 Charing Cross Road, and later in Golden Square.

The Pretty Things next started to make inroads into the London club scene. From early 1964 they began playing the 100 Club twice a week— Tuesdays and Thursdays—opening for other up and coming R&B bands like the Graham Bond R&B Quartet, the Animals, John Lee’s Groundhogs, the Art Wood Combo and Jimmy Powell & the Five Dimensions. By the middle of March, they had parlayed this into a headlining

Tuesday night residency. “I think that’s when we really learned how to play,” says Dick of those 100 Club shows. “Also when your support is the Tridents with Jeff Beck on guitar, it kind of sharpens you up a bit. That was when we discovered what we were really up against.”

Around this same time, Jimmy Duncan took the band into Regent Sound studio on Denmark Street where, with Viv Andrews still on drums, they cut a demo of “Route 66”—now, sadly, lost—plus one or two other numbers. This demo appears to have clinched the deal with Fontana/Philips. Around Easter of 1964 Dick dropped out of the Central School, Phil left Sidcup Art School, and the art school outlaws turned professional. Like Dick, Phil had also failed to secure a place at the Royal College.

Had he done so, he admits, he quite likely would have left the band to pursue his art studies.

Outside 13 Chester Street in Belgravia after their eviction. August 26th, 1964. (Photo: Hudson/Daily Mail/Rex Features) 12

13

There was one last detail to be taken care of before the Fontana contract could be signed.

According to Jimmy Duncan, the record company insisted the band acquire a more experienced, professional drummer. Enter Vivian St. John Prince, a veteran of various trad jazz bands, and more recently Carter Lewis & the Southerners, in which he’d played alongside Jimmy Page. Prince had the skill and finesse of a jazz musician, but played in a hard driving, animated style that immediately shifted the band’s sound into a higher gear.

If the record company thought Prince would be a stabilizing influence on the young band though, they were sorely mistaken. Along with his unique musical skill set, he also came equipped with a voracious appetite for amphetamines, bourbon and dope.

In other words, he fitted right in.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S Blokker Festival, Holland. April 19th, 1965 14

15

PART TWO: Don’t Bring Me Down, Motherfuckers!

(1964-66)

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Early 1964. L to R: John Stax, Viv Andrews, Brian Pendleton, Phil May, Dick Taylor on a roof in Soho

W

ith Viv Prince now installed in the drum seat, the band set about recording their first single. Jimmy Duncan had a song picked out for them—one he’d written himself, along with the head engineer at Regent Sound, Bill Farley (who likely was given the credit in exchange for studio time): “Rosalyn”. “I think Jimmy Duncan recorded his version of it in Regent Sound in a back room on a piano,” remembers Dick Taylor.

“It was very Denmark Street and very Scottish sounding. It would be more suitable for some Scottish comedian to do. We literally went, ‘What the fucking hell are we going to do with this?’”

As Taylor remembers, it was at Regent Sound that they came up with the arrangement that transformed the song, discarded all but the barest outline of Duncan’s plonky piano demo, fastening it to an accelerated Bo Diddley beat, and bringing in a keening slide guitar part, played by Brian Pendleton.”I’d love to say it was me who came up with the Bo Diddley idea,” says Dick, “and I think it was. The slide guitar idea was a slight nod in a

Phil in 1966. Pictorial Press

way to—although I shouldn’t say this—‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, the Beatles-Stones thing.” “Clever us for doing it,” adds Phil, “but Diddley was so much in our veins that it was a natural move for us to put it into a Bo Diddley framework.”

After demoing the new arrangement at Regent Sound, the band then went into Philips Studio in Stanhope Place to record the final version. At the session, the band channeled all of the fire and aggression of their live performances into the recording. On the final take Phil was shaking his maracas so vigorously that one of them fell to pieces. “If you listen closely you can probably hear it on the record,” Viv later told Beat Instrumental.

“Rosalyn,” paired with a swaggering version of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man,” was released in May. To launch the record, the band made what Record Mirror described as “a shattering debut” on Ready, Steady, Go!, a television appearance that sparked a flurry of media coverage, most of it focused on the band’s unconventional image.

Blokker, April 65 16

17

It’s difficult now—post-Stooges, post-Sex Pistols, post-GG Allin—to comprehend just how strange and outrageous the Pretty Things appeared to the vast majority of the British public at the time. A half a year earlier, the Rolling Stones had been likened to hooligans and Neanderthals, a perception that was carefully nurtured by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, and used to their advantage. But the Pretty Things upped the ante with much longer hair, a surlier demeanour, stranger clothes, wilder gyrations, and music that seemed positively savage compared to anything else on radio or TV at the time. “It seems funny now,” admits Phil May, “because today you’d have to walk bollock-naked down Oxford Street to cause any kind of stir. But we were raising eyebrows; we were getting thrown out of places, or not allowed in places. We seemed very different. We seemed like aliens.”

“Rosalyn” reportedly sold more than 7,000 copies in its first week of release, and by June had elbowed its way into the lower reaches of the

“Kill them! Kill the lot!” Rather than scattering at this point, though, the group’s attackers froze only momentarily before the leader of the mob grabbed the barrel of the gun and began to wrestle the Greek for it. “They danced, and I was thinkin’, I’m going to be covered in bits of yokel,” remembers Dick. “I was a bit worried about my shirt, I think.” Fortunately a passing policeman arrived on the scene before anyone was shot, and Andronicus was arrested, while the band themselves took shelter in the police station as a crowd of angry locals glowered outside.

Later in court, Andronicus told magistrates the group’s members were “ugly enough as it is.”

“I can’t have them going on stage with black eyes and broken noses,” he added. He was fined £25, and his shotgun was confiscated.

charts. Although it would only peak at Number 41, the band’s new-found notoriety led to them playing to larger and larger audiences. “We were playing gigs in small places built for sixty people and there’d be like 300 people outside because of the word-of-mouth,” remembers Phil.

“And, after we’d done television and were in the newspapers, it all got really stupid because the bookings weren’t for that kind of level of venue.”

On one occasion the venue was so tightly packed that the band and their gear had to be passed over the heads of the crowd and onto the stage to play. “When they’d booked us we weren’t famous,” he explains, “but six months later we’d been in on telly and went viral; went potty.”

Y L N

In the summer of ’64 the band moved into a rather opulent house at 13 Chester Street in Belgravia.

The Pretty Things occupied three of the house’s four upper floors, while Brian Jones lived in the basement, as did Andrew Jackson, a friend whose father owned the lease. Not surprisingly the address—later immortalized by a song on their first album—was the scene of many notorious parties that summer. However, despite the lipstick smeared van outside and the comings and goings at all hours of the night, the band had no real problems with their neighbours—despite attempts by the media to stir up trouble. “We know some of the national newspapers are gunning for us,” said Phil at the time, “what with those headlines about the flat and everything. But our duty is to the fans—they’re the ones that matter in our lives.” Eventually they were evicted because of the behaviour of some rowdy neighbours. “The Duke of Westminster owned the place across the road, which was trashed by a bunch of Americans who lived there,” remembers Dick. “It was them who actually got us chucked out, really.”

R O F | E L P M A S

Much of their time anyway was spent on the road, playing one-nighters around the country and dossing down in whatever hotels would accept their business. “We’d roll a 12-paper joint and that’d last the whole length of the motorway,” remembers John Stax. “When Viv was asleep he used to foam at the edges of his mouth—it was horrible. When he was right out of it we used to get some of the papers and lick them and stick them on his eyelids. Then we’d wake him up and he’d start fluttering! Other times we’d say, ‘Viv, Viv, we’re home!’ and he’d open the door and we’d be doing a hundred miles per hour!”

O N O I T A R ST

Meanwhile, the band was regularly refused service in pubs, restaurants and hotels, and taxi drivers would ignore them and drive past. Even the staff of the venues they played sometimes treated them with disdain or even outright hostility.

While they waited to go onstage in Scotland, bouncers kicked Viv’s chair from under him and threw them out of the venue’s lounge. “Our hair, our clothes lead to trouble,” Phil explained to Peter Jones of Record Mirror. “In pubs, we get shepherded to the public bar—or right outside if we’re unlucky. People do hate us. Those who are aware of us in the adult classes hate us more than the Stones. In fact, there are signs that the Stones are being accepted by the older folk.”

N O M

DE

By late 1964 Phil’s shoulder-length hair was said to be the longest of any male in the country, and when he leered, “I’m in love with your little girl, and your little boy’s in love with me” into the camera on BBC2’s Beat Room, he was only throwing petrol onto the fire. “We were always trying to get a bit of reaction from people, because they were so oppressive and so straight,” he says. “Also, they looked upon us with so much disdain that it made us just want to fucking rile them a bit. Especially Viv. It was like a red rag to a bull with him. If somebody said, ‘Do this,’ Viv would immediately do just the opposite.”

This “us vs. them” stance helped them attract a rabidly loyal following among disaffected teenagers, but within the industry—and especially among TV producers—the band acquired a reputation for being ‘difficult’. “There was a lot of drink and drugs and things going on,” explains Phil. “There were all sorts of things like Morrie being called up from Top of the Pops, saying, ‘Your band’s uncontrollable. If you can’t get them together, we’re going to throw them off the set. They’re not cooperating…’”

In the music press, the band would often be found complaining about their lack of television

Out in the provinces, not surprisingly the band got into a few scrapes with hostile natives. In Trowbridge, a mob of local toughs had the group and their car surrounded and outnumbered so road manager Phil ‘The Greek’ Andronicus pulled a shotgun out of the trunk. According to testimony in court later, members of the band then shouted,

Late 1964 18

19

exposure. “This lack of TV is hard,” Viv told Record Mirror. “But producers don’t seem to trust us or something.” “When we did get on TV, we weren’t very cooperative,” admits Phil. “Viv would fuck off to the pub. We were meant to have run-throughs and there would be nobody there. We cut our own throats with a lot of that stuff. But, also because they didn’t really want us on anyway, you know what I mean? It was any excuse would’ve done, really, because we were not acceptable. You know all those headlines like, ‘Did you see them on TV last night? Pretty Things? Dirty things…’ and all that kind of stuff.”

Y L N

O N O I T A R T S

By the autumn of 1964, a follow-up single to “Rosalyn” was long overdue, as members of the music press were quick to point out.

“Lots of work, not enough good material,” Viv told Beat Instrumental by way of explanation.

“And we just didn’t want to come out with a load of rubbish just for the sake of a release.”

“We need a really big hit record,” explained Phil. “Must have one out for the first week of October,” he added with a note of urgency.

R O F | E L P M A S

DE

N O M

Sure enough, in October Fontana released the band’s second single “Don’t Bring Me Down”, written by Johnny Dee, an acquaintance of the group, who was also a singer and performer in his own right. On the B-side was the band’s first original composition, “We’ll Be Together”, a slow blues in the Jimmy Reed style with lyrics about prostitution—a theme May would revisit in later compositions.

Urgent and compulsive, “Don’t Bring Me Down” was an inspired choice for the A-side. Viv Prince’s drum patterns drive the band through the intense stop ’n’ go verses, while each successive rave-up edges closer towards pure frenzy, egged on by Phil’s extraordinary vocal— one moment a lascivious purr the next a feral howl as he delivers lines like “And then I laid her on the ground / My head is spinnin’ round / Don’t bring me down.” The single catapulted the band straight into the Top Ten—exactly as planned. It was followed into the charts in December by an eponymous EP compiling all the previously released A- and B-sides.

The band’s first album was recorded shortly thereafter, over the course of just a few days.

Fontana’s A&R manager Jack Baverstock had served as producer on earlier sessions, but when an inebriated Viv reputedly vomited over his drums, he’d stormed out of the studio vowing he’d “never work with those animals again.” In his place he sent down one of his A&R underlings, Bobby Graham, a renowned session drummer, who’d once been a member of the Joe Meek-produced instrumental rockers

Early ‘66 20

21

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Blokker, April 65

the Outlaws. “I think Jack Baverstock found us a little bit too much,” says Dick Taylor with characteristic understatement. “But I think he was quite smart because he realized we could probably relate to Bobby Graham. Bobby was older than us, but we got on extremely well.”

The arrangement worked out especially well because Graham could also take over the drum seat if Viv was absent or incapacitated—as was the case on a couple of occasions. The album’s twelve songs—four of them written by the band’s idol, Bo Diddley—were mostly culled from their live repertoire, including proven crowd pleasers like “Roadrunner”, “Judgement Day” and “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut”, along with a handful of original songs penned especially for the record. The Slim Harpo-inspired “13

Chester Street” was a paean to their one-time residence with Prince conjuring up some kinky S&M flavour by whipping a chair with his belt.

Viv also beats on a chair on “Unknown Blues” while Dick plays guitar and John blows harp; the song was improvised on the spot, including Phil’s lead vocal. Jimmy Duncan also submitted another tune, “Big City”, which the group turned into a storming Chuck Berry-style rocker.

Meanwhile “Honey, I Need” was written by Taylor and a few friends: Ian Stirling, from the old Sidcup Art School circle, Pete Smith, and John Warburton. Dick had recently acquired a Gibson 12-string acoustic, which gave the song a decidedly folkie flavour, enhanced by a ton of Stanhope Place reverb and a cascade

22

of handclaps and percussion. “Honey, I Need” became the band’s third single in February 1965, and peaked at number 13. The non-LP B-side, “I Can Never Say”, while never performed live, has gone on to become a fan favourite.

The album was released in March and sold well, climbing into the UK Top Ten, and spending several months in the charts. Fontana also issued the album in the States, with an amended track-listing that also included “Rosalyn” and “Don’t Bring Me Down”. It sold moderately well there, and provided inspiration for numerous up and coming garage bands, including the Shadows of Knight and the Seeds. Fontana also issued a number of the group’s early singles in the States, but with no promotion—or payola—behind them

Balcony of Chester Street, Summer 1964

they failed to attract any significant airplay. In the case of “Don’t Bring Me Down”, the line “I laid her on the ground” was deemed too racy for radio play anyway. A Miami, Florida-based group called the Montells, who were big Pretty Things fans, seized the opportunity to record their own version of the song. The single, issued in June ’65 under the name H.M. Subjects, featured both “censored” and “uncensored” versions; the “censored” version bleeped out the offending verb, “laid”, with the no doubt intended effect of making the lyric sound even more risqué.

While the H.M. Subjects single was only a minor hit in the Miami area, it was symptomatic of a larger failure on the part of the Pretty Things’ management and record company to strike while the iron was hot and organize a US tour. Offers

from American booking agents had been coming in ever since the group’s first UK TV appearance, but the young and inexperienced Morrison and Duncan were unable to make anything happen.

The hugely successful promoter Sid Bernstein, who’d first brought the Beatles to America, offered Morrie the opportunity to bring the Pretty Things over, telling him they’d be the perfect antidote to the Beatles. Morrison turned him down when he received a slightly better offer—reportedly $300 more—to take the band to New Zealand.

Prior to the New Zealand trip though, their efforts were now focused on Europe, beginning in April when they travelled to Holland to headline a televised concert in the northern town of Blokker. The group was totally unprepared for the

23

rapturous reception that greeted their arrival on stage. After just a few songs, the crowd surged forward, pulling down barricades and scuffling with police. As TV cameras continued to roll, the band stoked the frenzy, Viv leaving his drum stool to roam the stage, beating out a Bo Diddley beat with his sticks on Phil’s back while Stax leapt atop a grand piano to blow his harp towards the melee below. Much of this mayhem spilled out live into living rooms across the country, until word came down to shut if off—immediately. The sound was cut, then the picture. Then, for several minutes, Dutch television viewers apparently stared in bewilderment at blank screens. “That’s all we ask from an audience—frenzy,” Phil had told a Sunday Times reporter the previous year.

“That’s the only sign of real acceptance.” In

Y L N

R O F | E L P M A S

O N O I T A R ST

M E D

ON

Blokker the Pretty Things had found that and more; their Dutch fans would continue to be some of their most loyal and demonstrative.

The band was also well-received in Germany, France and Scandinavia. “They identified with the spirit of anarchy in the band,” says Phil, of the rowdier, more male-dominated audiences in Europe. That spirit of anarchy had been evident in the band’s performances as far back at the 100 Club days, but had been ramped up ever since. Certain numbers like “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut” or “You Don’t Love Me” would turn into extended freeform improvisations during which Viv left his drums to loon drunkenly around the stage, banging out the beat on whatever came to hand, aided and abetted by Phil. While the Yardbirds, for example, were also stretching out certain numbers live, their arrangements were tightly choreographed, serving as platforms for Eric Clapton’s guitar solos and Keith Relf’s harmonica playing. The Pretty Things’ extended instrumental sequences, on the other hand, were platforms for whatever kind of musical anarchy they happened to be caught up in at that moment in time, a practice that would carry over into their psychedelic period and beyond. “I don’t think the freeform thing was particularly a result of Viv joining,” explains Dick. “It might’ve been something we were smoking, I don’t know! I think it was just generally we wanted to do stuff like that. I was still into my free jazz—Coltrane, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and everything—and the idea of long improvisation and going off in a complete tangent seemed pretty natural to me.”

Top of the Pops, circa late 1964 24

25

Y L N

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

On the Isle of Wight ferry, 1965. L to R: David Bowie, Brian Pendleton, Phil May, Denis Taylor (guitarist of Bowie’s group the Lower Third)

What was natural for the Pretty Things, though, set them apart from the beat group minions of ’64 and ’65 who mostly stood onstage in matching suits and played their songs. “Things would get out of hand quite often,” adds Dick. “We did a gig on the Isle of Wight with Matt Monro, believe it or not, and when we did that we were certainly into doing long extended things. So in the first show we did ‘Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut’ and it just went on and on and on, and [afterwards] the management said, ‘If you do any of those long numbers in your second half, we’re going to close the curtains on you!’ So the second set, again ‘Hey Mama,’ I kept trying to finish it, Phil resolutely wouldn’t—whether it was on purpose or because he was inebriated I’m not sure—but it went on and on and on, and guess what? The curtains closed on us.”

There had been some talk in the press about the group recording a Donovan song for their next single, and apparently Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was also up for consideration, as Morrie was briefly administering Dylan’s UK publishing at the time. The Pretties were all big Dylan fans (and in fact spent some time with him during his ’65 UK tour; Brian Pendleton can be clearly sighted in a hotel room scene in Don’t Look Back), but didn’t think the song was right for them so they declined

the opportunity. The Byrds’ version appeared soon afterwards and was, of course, a huge hit.

The Pretty Things opted instead for a Solomon Burke number, “Cry to Me”, which was released in the UK on June 25 1965 (a few months ahead of the Stones’ recording, which was based on the Betty Harris version not Burke’s original). The track reflected the growing popularity of soul music in the British R&B scene, and although Phil now claims he hated doing it, he met the soul challenge well with a smooth, heartfelt vocal, supported by the collective back-ups of Stax, Pendleton, Dick’s flatmate Ian Stirling, and Leslie Duncan, the singing sister of Jimmy. The single peaked at Number 28 in the UK, and sold well in other countries, including New Zealand where it was a sizable hit later that year.

“Even though our new record is much quieter than our image would suggest, we merely thought we’d prove that it was something we could do,” Phil told the music paper Disc in an article headlined “Pretty Things – Last of the Long Hair Groups.” “We shall never change,” he asserted.

“It’s a personal thing with us. I’d rather give up the business than conform. I won’t cut my hair and I have no intention of dressing like a mod!”

26

In August Fontana released another Pretty Things EP, Rainin’ In My Heart. Along with a fine arrangement of the Slim Harpo song—a favourite from their live set—and the loose studio jam “Get A Buzz” (from the B-side of the last single), the EP included a couple of deeply atmospheric numbers (perfect for “late-night listening” as the band’s original liner notes used to say): “London Town” (adapted from the arrangement by English folk singer Mick Taylor) and “Sittin’ All Alone”, a dark, reflective original composition by Phil, Dick and Ian Stirling.

O N O I T A R ST

Meanwhile, as many of their peers set their sights on America, laying the groundwork for long-term careers, the Pretty Things headed instead for the remote colonial outpost of New Zealand for a two-week tour with Sandie Shaw and Eden Kane beginning on August 19. There they ignited a veritable inferno of headlines in the ultra-conservative tabloid press, who baited the band mercilessly, provoking Viv in particular to new extremes of behaviour— openly drunk onstage, swigging whiskey from his shoe, brandishing a torch of lighted newspaper, breaking furniture, trashing hotel rooms and carrying around a stinking crayfish.

At the end of the tour he was ejected from

27

the plane home after an altercation with the pilot. The band’s visit was so controversial that there were heated questions in New Zealand’s Parliament, where the Minister of Immigration was forced to assure the country that “any return visit by the group would be scrutinized.” In effect, they were forbidden from ever returning, a curfew that was never formally lifted.

The bad press followed the group back home to England with Record Mirror and Melody Maker both devoting considerable space to the controversy. In September Viv spent a night in the cells for being drunk and disorderly, missing a recording session the next day (Twink deputized for him on “You Don’t Believe Me”). It was not the first time Viv had been AWOL for a session or a gig or simply been too incapacitated to perform, and these occurrences were now becoming more and more common. A few weeks later in Copenhagen, he was hospitalized for injuries sustained in a drunken altercation with a professional boxer, the brother of former world heavyweight champion Ingemar Johannson.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

Viv Prince after his altercation with the brother of heavyweight boxer Ingemar Johannson. Autumn 1965

Beat Club, Germany, 1966

N O M

The situation was becoming untenable. The last straw came at the Manor Club in Stockport when Viv refused to go onstage because the pub across the street from the venue wouldn’t serve him. “He said that all the people who were coming to see him were being served and if he couldn’t be served then he wouldn’t play for them,” explains Phil. “Of course, we didn’t see that at all. We thought that was just fucking selfish, because the night before he’d been there with some other musicians [members of the Kinks] and wrecked the place!”

E D R O F | E L P M SA

Viv was given his walking papers there and then.

In the middle of November it was announced in the music press that Viv had left the group because of “a disagreement over group policy.”

“Among other things they seemed to think that the personal publicity that I was getting was bad for the group,” Viv told Disc in what was for him a rare moment of Dick Taylor-like understatement.

The band had already completed work on their second album when they parted company with their drummer, who duly appeared on the cover (fast asleep, or more likely passed out, in the bottom right corner). Released in December 1965, Get the Picture? remains one of the most well-rounded and ultimately satisfying albums in the band’s entire catalogue. In the nine months since The Pretty Things, the group had advanced at a tremendous rate creatively, branching out from crude, amped-up rhythm & blues to incorporate a more diverse palette of sounds and influences. Of special note was the flowering of the May/Taylor songwriting team,

which was responsible for such standouts as “Buzz the Jerk”, “Get the Picture” and (with an assist from producer Bobby Graham) the remarkable “Can’t Stand the Pain.” The latter song was worked up in the recording studio, Phil adding words to Dick’s haunting guitar hook, while Graham tinkered around on the piano. “We were just messing around with that,” recalls Dick, “and then it was a question of ‘What chords aren’t normal?’ to get the chord structure for the verse.” The entire band eventually painted a remarkable mood piece, the eerie melody peaking on a series of thrilling slow-fuse crescendos, in many ways foreshadowing the more psychedelic direction that lay ahead. “We were just trying to do something different,” Dick states simply, “and I think we succeeded.”

Graham also had a hand in writing the album’s melodic lead-off track, “You Don’t Believe Me,” as did session guitarist Jimmy Page—although it’s almost certainly Dick on guitar with Page

showing his prowess at banging a tambourine on the floor. Other highlights include “You’ll Never Do It Baby” (a cover of a song by R&B kindred spirits the Cops ‘n Robbers), Johnny Dee’s “I Want Your Love”, and a killer reading of Ike & Tina Turner’s “I’m Gonna Find A Substitute” featuring some room shaking bass runs by Staxie.

Not surprisingly perhaps, given their uptight, conformist mind set, rock historians have largely ignored Get the Picture?, but it ranks alongside the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, the Kinks’ Face to Face, the Yardbirds’ Roger the Engineer, and, yes, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, as one of the very best LPs to come out of Britain in the mid-Sixties.

Meanwhile, the Pretty Things were joined in late 1965 by new drummer Skip Alan (real name Alan Skipper), who’d previously played with Donovan as well as his own trio called, appropriately enough, the Skip Alan’s. Skip was just 17 years old at the time—so young that when the band

Late 1965 at Chiswick House Gardens 28

29

travelled abroad they had to get a signed letter of permission from his parents. Upbeat and boisterous, John Stax likens Skip to an overgrown puppy, and that natural exuberance spilled over into his playing, which was every bit as wild and energetic as Viv’s had been. Skipper’s recording debut with the Pretties would be for one of their greatest and more enduring songs, “Midnight to Six Man”. Appropriately enough the session was a grueling all-nighter, the band rushing back to IBC Studios in London after a gig in Gravesend.

Glyn Johns produced, and the group was joined

by Nicky Hopkins on piano and Margo Croccito of Goldie & the Gingerbreads on Hammond organ.

“We played all night on that song,” remembers John, “and finally got it down. Dick did a beautiful solo. We did take after take–we would’ve done 30 takes.” Once it was completed, it was obvious they had a monster track on their hands. Even the music papers seemed to agree: “It could well be the record to put the Pretty Things back in the charts,” said a Melody Maker review. To

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA 30

31

everyone’s surprise though, it slunk to the lower reaches of the Top 50 for one week, then dropped like a stone. “We were quite shocked when it wasn’t actually a hit,” says Dick. “Everybody was, from the record company on down.”

Y L N

Not for the last time, the band were caught wrong-footed—delivering some of their best work, only to see it widely ignored or dismissed. It would become a common theme in the years ahead.

At the beginning of 1966, the Pretty Things were the subject of a self-financed 14-minute promotional film, an art house curio directed

by Caterina Arvat and Anthony West. It showed the band at work in the studio, onstage at the 100 Club, and in some fast-motion comedic sequences with Bryan Morrison inspired by Richard Lester’s Running Jumping Standing Still and A Hard Day’s Night. The film (eventually titled The Pretty Things but often referred to as The Pretty Things On Film) was essentially a forerunner of the music promo videos that would later become commonplace in the industry. The four songs from the film (“Midnight to Six Man”, “Can’t Stand the Pain”, and two new numbers, “Me Needing You” and “£.S.D.”) were issued as an EP, The Pretty Things On Film, now one of the band’s more sought-after artifacts.

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

For their next single, the band turned again to outside writers. “Come See Me” was co-written

by American soul singer J.J. Jackson and Englishman Pierre Tubbs, and arrived with the Pretty Things via a demo disc recorded by Tubbs’ band the Jeeps. With characteristic flair, the Pretties took the mid-tempo funky soul number and gave it a heavy slam of mod fuzz and fury, including one of the most cataclysmic bass guitar intros ever etched into vinyl. The NME gave it a generally positive review, but Disc slammed the record as “too ugly,” complaining that “they’ve become identified with this rather anti-sound; it’s rather a shame.” Today the recording is widely regarded as one of the band’s best, but it fared poorly commercially, peaking out at Number 43 in the charts.

Although the A-side failed to incite much interest, the B-side at least managed to stir up some publicity for the group. “£.S.D” (which had previously appeared on the On Film EP) was ostensibly a play on words referring to pre-decimal British currency (£ s d) and a certain hallucinogenic drug that had recently appeared on the scene. It earned the group a public scolding from the British Pharmaceutical Society, who claimed the song was endorsing or encouraging drug use.

Controversy aside, it’s another first-rate track,

Backstage at the Star Club, 1966. L to R: unknown, Phil May, John Stax, Brian Pendleton, Skip Alan 32

Star Club in Hamburg, 1966 33

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

dashed off in a demo studio on the fly, and highlighted by Taylor’s spiky guitar work and some animated drumming by Skip Alan.

Although they continued to state in the press that they would never conform, after consecutive flops with two of their strongest singles, the decision to record Ray Davies’ “A House in the Country” was the first sign that the group’s resolve was starting to crumble. “We just can’t keep on fighting the rest of the world,” admitted Phil in a Record Mirror interview in July 1966 when the single was released. “Things had reached a terrible state. TV producers just didn’t want to know, and they’re only just beginning to change their minds now they’ve heard our new record.” While the band turned in a solid enough performance on the

record, they were clearly not 100% committed to the song. “That song was presented to us,” says Dick. “They said: ‘It would be a good idea for you to do a Kinks song, because you need a hit and this is bound to be a hit.’” It was not a hit.

Pretties devotees though could be well-pleased with the B-side, “Me Needing You,” a stoned-out spooky soul number constructed around the bass line of Alvin Cash’s “Twine Time.” That song though, had already appeared several months earlier on The Pretty Things On Film EP. After the failure of “A House in the Country,” they followed up quickly with “Progress,” a number originally recorded by American soul singer Carl Spencer. With its blaring horns and raucous sing-a-long chorus, “Progress” was the

34

Pretties most overtly commercial outing to date, but the scent of desperation was impossible to ignore and fans stayed away from it in droves.

The band had urgently needed to make some kind of progress, but like the song says, “It’s not progress when you’re making my name mud.”

The Pretty Things were starting to look like a spent force. The number of gigs they played dwindled, as did their asking price. Inevitably, things started to fall apart. Brian Pendleton left suddenly towards the end of the year. According to Dick’s recollection, he just stopped showing up for rehearsals or gigs. When Dick and road manager Pete Watts went to Brian’s flat to check up on him, they found it empty except for the strewn pieces of a smashed acoustic guitar.

Skip Alan, circa early 1967

Evidently he’d had some kind of breakdown.

Always something of an outsider, Brian kept his private life secret from the rest of the band. It wasn’t until much later that they learned he’d been married for well over a year and had a young son. Many years later, Pendleton explained in an interview that he was completely burnt out after three years on the road, and simply wasn’t bringing in enough money anymore to support his family.

As 1967 dawned, the Pretty Things were down to four members, and still owed Fontana one more album. It was apparent to all parties concerned that a change of direction was needed if they were to survive. Fontana assigned the group a new producer, Steve Rowland, an American with a proven track record that included commercial

pop hits for label-mates Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. The album was to mark a completely new approach for the Pretty Things: it would be their first to feature exclusively original material, and it would also find them augmented with strings and brass under the direction of Reg Tilsley.

This change of direction didn’t sit well with Stax, who was a bluesman at heart and didn’t much care for the more melodic pop direction of Phil and Dick’s new songs, or the presence of session players. The last straw for John came when he arrived at the studio to find someone else (possibly Gary Taylor of the Herd) playing bass in his place.

“I was furious,” he says. “After all, the three of us—me, Phil and Dick—had started the band, and now I was out. But in a way,” he adds, “it was

35

a relief, because I didn’t like the songs they were writing, and I’m not a good enough bass player to play that kind of music.” Like Brian, John also had a wife, Wendy, and a young child to support.

Because of the lack of gigs he’d been forced to take part-time work driving a taxi. Times would get even tougher for Stax and his family in the years ahead, living in a freezing council flat and working a factory job. But in 1970 they relocated to Australia, where they made a new life for themselves.

Meanwhile, back in ’67, Phil, Dick and Skip had an album to finish, and were in urgent need of reinforcements. As it turned out, Phil and Dick already had someone in mind, even before Stax’s sudden departure. Remember that ginger haired kid who lived across the street from Phil in Erith?

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA Pretty Things, 1968. L to R: Jon Povey, Dick Taylor, Phil May, Twink, Wally Waller. (Photo: Peter Sanders) 36

37

I

PART THREE: Balloon Burning (1967-71)

n the autumn of 1962, while Phil May and Dick Taylor were still in art school, Phil’s neighbour, Alan ‘Wally’ Waller was about to make a life-changing decision: whether to become an electrician or a full-time musician.

At the time, he was playing rhythm guitar in Bern Elliott & the Fenmen, a popular local group which also included Jon Povey on drums. By day though, he was working as an apprentice electrical engineer with the London Electricity Board. Then the Fenmen were offered an extended residency at a club in Hamburg. “It was for more than a month,” explains Wally.

“Plainly, if I went, it would mean leaving my apprenticeship. By chance, at about the same time I met the head of the Southeast region of the LEB. His name was Mr. Abbot. He was as dull as ditch water; he was balding and stout, and had probably finally reached his lofty status after a lifetime of service. It occurred to me that if I worked my arse off for the rest of my life, and if luck was on my side, this is who I’d be.

was the first meal that I’d eaten in a London restaurant. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

They were exciting times for them. It was all about to kick off and I suppose I vicariously shared in some of that. Little did I know.”

Six months later—just as the Pretty Things came crashing onto the scene with “Rosalyn”—the Fenmen parted ways with their singer, and became a quartet with an emphasis on threeand four-part harmonies modeled on the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys. Wally also began to write original songs, including the superb, Beach Boys-inspired “Rejected,” which was released as a Fenmen A-side in the summer of 1966. By then, the Fenmen’s popularity had

“There I stood, at the fork in the road: the sign on the first road said ‘Security, Safety, Thinking Not Required.’ The sign on the second road said ‘Danger, Uncertainty, Mystery of The Unknown.’

Having seen with my own eyes the result of taking the first road, I opted for the exotic enigma. My mother was worried about signing my release papers, but she did, and I never glanced back, or had any second thoughts.”

The first two Pretty Things songs to be enhanced by the harmonized voices of Wally and Jon were “Children” and “My Time,” which were issued together as a single in April 1967, in advance of the Emotions album.

Although initially credited to May/Taylor, both also included songwriting input from Waller, as did several other songs on the album including “There Will Never Be Another Day” and “One Long Glance” (with Phil and Dick), and “The Sun” and “Bright Lights of the City” (with Phil). Meanwhile, their old Sidcup Art School chum Ian Stirling contributed ideas to three other new songs: “Death of a Socialite,” “Out in the Night” and “Photographer.”

The Fenmen’s Hamburg experience was typical of that of many other up and coming rock ‘n’ roll groups at the time: playing six to eight hours a night for very little pay, living in near squalor, danger and uncertainty at every turn. “We grew up very quickly, I think” reflects Povey. “Gunshots in the night, blood on the sidewalk...” “At the start of the trip I was still an immature teenager,” notes Wally.

“By the end of it, all traces of innocence had been irrevocably swept away, and in a sense the band found its beating heart.”

The following year, Bern and the Fenmen signed to Decca, and their first single, “Money,” caught a fast ride into the charts on the cresting wave of the British Beat Boom. Phil May remembers benefiting from the group’s first flush of success: “When their first hit, ‘Money’, was riding up the charts, they celebrated by going up to London to be measured up for new tonic suits—I think the color was ‘old bronze’—for their upcoming TV spots. At the time I was a very hard-up art student, spending three days a week sketching and gathering information for my finals thesis at the British Museum. Wally suggested we meet up in my lunch break in Charing Cross Road and treated me to an Angus steak. It

Wally Waller, 1967

been ebbing for some time, a fact that had not escaped Phil May’s attention as the Pretty Things experienced their own downturn in popularity.

Phil and Wally had seen very little of each other in the preceding years, having both been busy working, but one day in February or March of ’67 both happened to be in Chipstead Road, so Phil invited Wally over, and suggested he bring his guitar along. The afternoon turned into an impromptu writing session. “There seemed to be a certain empathy straight out of the box,” recalls Wally. “In that afternoon we wrote three songs, the first being ‘The Sun’. Then Phil just came straight out with it.”

Would Wally like to join the Pretty Things?

Outside Abbey Road Studios, 1968. The cab belonged to the photographer 38

Y L N

The move would necessitate Waller switching from guitar to bass, and Povey—who was a classically trained pianist—moving from drums to keyboards. Although the Pretty Things and the Fenmen had once been light years apart musically, the new direction the Pretties were pursuing opened up all kinds of possibilities for the harmony-based sound Waller and Povey were steeped in. “Phil made it clear that he wanted to change style and use more music and chords, so it was a meeting of like souls,” says Povey. “The Pretties weren’t the only boys doing drugs at that time!” he adds. “I had certainly strayed from the squeaky-clean Beach Boys image and lifestyle. I said goodbye to my bottle of fake tan and downed another upper!”

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

“I was completely gob-smacked,” remembers Wally, “especially when he mentioned Jon as well. Both Jon and I were up for it, but it was obvious that we would have to adapt considerably the way we approached making music.”

39

There was a growing sophistication to the new material, especially in the lyrics. “Basically we were using personal incidents to make songs out of,” Phil explained to Paul du Noyer in 2002.

“Pretty Things lyrics have also been about things that have happened, about people one has met.” “Death of a Socialite”, for example, was inspired by Tara Browne, the wealthy London swinger, who’d died in a car crash in South Kensington, very close to where Dick was living at the time (a newspaper headline describing the incident also inspired John Lennon’s line “he blew his mind out in a car” in “A Day in the Life”, written and released around the same time). “Photographer” is another Swingin’ London capsule, this time describing the life of a struggling fashion photographer (“I’ve got some editors to pay to keep the creditors away / I’m owing on the Nikon and the Hasselblad too”). The sombre “House of Ten” is a starkly etched vignette of urban solitude as bleakly

the course in the Pretty Things’ world, so the new lineup ploughed ahead creatively, writing and demoing new material, and supporting themselves through live work and occasional sessions for the DeWolfe company, who paid them to record original rock music under the guise of the Electric Banana for their music library, which supplied the film and television industry. “Once we got off the 45 hit single roundabout,” says Phil, “for us it was incredible freedom, and we just made music and we were actually real. There was still chaos and drunkenness and drugginess on stage, but it was at least our music, which we wanted to play.”

evocative as any Patrick Hamilton story, while “Trippin’” and “There Will Never Be Another Day” make direct reference to drug use and the emergent psychedelic sub-culture.

Y L N

“Normally someone would get a musical idea and the lyrics would be made to fit that,” explains Phil, “but these were lyric-led songs, so it was a completely different way of writing. We were looking for a way to take us into the future.”

O N O I T A R ST

Unfortunately, the impact of some of the material was dampened by Reg Tilsley’s orchestral arrangements, especially the overbearing horn parts on songs like “Photographer”, “Bright Lights of the City” and “My Time”. His use of strings was generally complementary, as in the case of “The Sun” and “Growing in My Mind”, but this was small consolation to the band members who felt their original vision had been hijacked by their producer and record company.

Released in May 1967, Emotions sold poorly and was quickly consigned to Fontana’s “Special” budget line. Many fans saw the record as a commercial compromise, and the group themselves disowned it almost immediately. In more recent years, Emotions has undergone something of a critical reevaluation, and has started to receive some of the plaudits it deserves. Several of the tracks are included here without their orchestral embellishments and in this more stripped-down form the strength of the material and the band’s own performances are more apparent. What’s most often overlooked about the album is the strength of Phil May’s vocals. Although May would remain fixed in the eyes of too many as a long-haired screamer “banging around the stage like a maimed gorilla” (to quote Nik Cohn), on Emotions he demonstrated a more nuanced approach. His tone, phrasing and natural instinct for dynamics can be heard to stunning effect on songs like “The Sun” and “My Time”, and this blossoming of his talents as a vocalist and a lyricist would serve the band well as they shifted into the next phase of their metamorphosis.

R O F | E L P M SA

Musical revolution was in the air, fueled by a new psychedelic consciousness, and though a little late to the party after the creative misfire of Emotions, the Pretty Things were soon— inevitably—on the forefront of the emerging rock underground. Inevitably because in many ways the Pretties had been an underground band before there even was an underground. Their unconventional appearance, anti-authoritarian attitude and anarchic stage act with its long, extemporized sections had marked them as social outsiders and musical extremists from the very beginning, foreshadowing the seismic shifts that had transformed the pop culture landscape by 1967.

M E D

ON

On April 29, 1967—just prior to the release of Emotions—they played the infamous 14 Hour Technicolour Dream concert at the Alexandra Palace in London, firmly aligning themselves with the emerging psychedelic movement on a bill that also included the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Tomorrow, John’s Children, the Move, Graham Bond, Sam Gopal Dream, Yoko Ono, and the Social Deviants. The event, a fundraiser for the underground paper International Times, which had recently been the target of a police raid, attracted over 10,000 people.

Meanwhile, Bryan Morrison signed up the band to his newly-formed publishing company, and bankrolled some demo sessions at Southern Sound, a tiny basement studio on Denmark Street. There the band started laying down some of their new compositions, including “Turn My Head,” “Mr. Evasion” and, most ambitiously, “Defecting Grey.” “While we were recording the demo, we started playing around with different sounds and techniques,” remembers Phil, “and not just with conventional musical instruments.

In our search for inspiration we tried recording with anything we could lay our hands on in the studio that made some kind of noise. We experimented with cross fades, interchanging tempos and time signatures—and there were four different narrative threads weaving in and out of each other throughout the song.

Their contractual obligations to Fontana dispensed with; the Pretty Things could now—in theory at least—breathe the fresh air of complete and utter musical freedom. On the down side though, they no longer had the financial backing of a record company—or indeed anyone. Jimmy Duncan had long since departed the Pretties’ management company under a cloud, and according to Bryan Morrison they were now facing mounting debts. “There was some strange story about our bookkeeper’s garden shed burning down with all the band’s accounts inside,” notes Phil. This type of adversity, though, was par for

France 1967. Members of the Pretty Things, Cream and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich 40

Dick Taylor onstage in Gladsaxe, Denmark. October 26, 1968. (Photo: Jorgen Angel) 41

We pushed the studio’s primitive technology, and our limited grasp of it, to the limits.”

Y L N

This was a textbook case of Cocteau’s maxim: art producing ugly things—or unusual, different, surprising, subversive, or unexpected things— that become more beautiful over time. “When we finally finished those demo sessions,” relates Phil, “we knew that with ‘Defecting Grey’ we had changed the rules and produced the maquette for the new album. It was the perfect template for the making of S.F. Sorrow.”

O N O I T A R ST

Now they just had to convince somebody at a record company that this strange five-anda-half minute aural tableau they’d so deftly constructed was the way ahead. “Morrison thought we’d gone totally mad,” laughs Phil.

“It’s those fucking drugs you’ve been taking, boy!” he retorted upon hearing the demo. “Well, that part was true at least,” shrugs the singer.

Because of the band’s notoriety—not to mention their long commercial dry spell—record companies weren’t exactly beating a path to Morrie’s door to sign the Pretty Things, but EMI expressed interest, and eventually, in September 1967, a deal was struck. The paltry £3,500 advance was immediately funneled towards their debts, so the band would have to support itself through playing gigs, and squeeze in recording time accordingly. However, the new deal allowed them the luxury of more or less unlimited time at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, and that’s what attracted them most. The band found a loyal ally at EMI in producer Norman Smith, who’d recently finished work on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first album by Pink Floyd, who were also part of the Morrison Agency.

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

The Pretty Things backstage in Wuppertal, Germany. November 11, 1967. (Photo: Uli Schmidt)

Within days of inking the EMI deal, Smith took the Pretties into the studio—not Abbey Road, but IBC in Portland Place, where they recorded a new version of “Defecting Grey” along with “Mr. Evasion”. EMI released the two songs on their Columbia label in November, and while “Defecting Grey” was much too radical to attract any radio play or chart action, it made a clear, unequivocal statement as to where the band was headed musically. “The point is that we have to start all over again from scratch and gradually introduce our audiences to our new sound,” Dick explained to Flower Scene magazine in December. “We think we’re offering far more with our new material,” he added, “and we enjoy our new free-form music much more. It’s quite a risk to run, such a radical change in style, but it should pay off.”

The daring experimental collage of “Defecting Grey” was in many ways a scaled-down dry run for the larger, more elaborate storyboard the group had begun to map out for S.F. Sorrow,

Paris, June 1967. (Photo: Domenique Tarle) 42

43

Y L N

R O F | E L P M SA

work on which began soon afterwards. The album would be a song cycle based on a short story by Phil, charting one man’s life from birth to death in the early part of the century.

Sessions began in November at Abbey Road’s Studio 2, and would continue of the next ten months, in between touring commitments.

Ahead of the album, another single was issued in February 1968 featuring two superb new songs, “Talkin’ About the Good Times” and “Walking Through My Dreams”, both showcasing the breathtaking three-part harmonies that were becoming a hallmark of their new sound.

Jon Povey’s dramatic keyboard flourishes on “Talkin’ About the Good Times” were played on the Beatles’ Mark II Mellotron, which was just one of the useful fixtures of Abbey Road’s studios at the time. George Harrison’s sitar and Ringo’s over-sized snare drum would also figure into the S.F. Sorrow sessions.

Early in the New Year, Skip Alan left the band, rather impulsively, to marry a French lady he’d

met and fallen in love with. His replacement was John ‘Twink’ Alder, a long-time friend of the group who’d been a member of fellow Morrison Agency clients the Fairies, and more recently psychedelic kindred spirits and EMI labelmates Tomorrow. Not long after Twink’s joining, the Pretty Things were cast in a Norman Wisdom film, What’s Good for the Goose, in which they were shown performing several numbers at a fictitious psychedelic nightclub, The Screaming Apple.

The S.F. Sorrow sessions continued, switching from the more spacious Studio 2 into Studio 3 to make room for the Beatles as they began work on what would become the White Album. Abbey Road was thrumming with creative energy at the time; in between sessions with the Pretty Things, Norman Smith was working with Pink Floyd on A Saucerful of Secrets, while the Beatles were in and out of the building constantly throughout the S.F. Sorrow sessions, and would often pop their heads in to see what the Pretty Things were up to. In this kind of environment, it’s hardly surprising that the band was firing

44

N O M

DE

on all cylinders creatively. With complete musical freedom and unlimited studio time at their disposal, the band—with Smith as their collaborator and enabler—worked tirelessly on the project, shaping the songs and the storyline, bouncing tracks and improvising new sounds and effects with devices concocted on the premises by EMI’s studio ‘boffins’ like engineer Ken Townsend. “They’d come running in with another battery sort of wired up with transistors and plasticine holding it all together, and say ‘Try this!’ and plug it into the desk,” remembers Wally.

“Sometimes it would be a dreadful failure and a puff of smoke, but sometimes it would work.”

O N O I T A R ST

early 1969. L to R: Povey, May, Taylor, Waller, Twink

For Phil May in particular the making of S.F. Sorrow was a deeply emotional, life-changing experience. “There was a lot of me in S.F. Sorrow,” he reveals, “and during the making of it I realised that I was starting to leak some deeply hidden personal truths into the grooves of that record. For the first time in my life I was opening myself up in the writing of those lyrics and it became, for me, a cathartic

45

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

“We kicked off our old image at last about four months ago, and I think people are really impressed by us now,” Phil told Melody Maker in January 1969. “We all believe in what we are doing—we’re all tuned in.”

ON

France, 1969

R O F | E L P M SA

Domenique Tarle, 1968

experience. In hindsight, that wasn’t such a bad thing as I was shedding some unwanted baggage, and I certainly needed to.”

While Phil tapped into a rich, creative, personal vein for his lyrics, the rest of the band also contributed in significant ways to the songwriting, especially Taylor and Waller, resulting in a remarkable set of songs, any one of which stands on its own merits as well as functioning as exposition for the storyline. From the opening “S.F. Sorrow is Born,” with its majestic swathes of Mellotron and harmony, through the horrifying battlefields of “Private Sorrow,” the blistering conflagration of “Balloon Burning,” the sinister nightmare world of “Baron Saturday,” through to the poignant desolation of “Loneliest Person,” the album takes the listener on an emotional journey, which like only the very best art, seems to reveal something new with each hearing.

When the sessions were finished, the band and their producer knew they had created an album of quality and significance so they were dismayed when the suits at EMI were unconvinced. “We all knew we had turned in the work of our lives,” attest Phil, “something which we would never be able to repeat. Yet, despite an impassioned presentation to the heads of EMI by Norman Smith on delivery of the finished album, it fell on deaf ears.”

First of all, EMI refused to go along with the band’s concept for the album’s artwork, which would require a gatefold sleeve in order that the lyrics and the story could be presented in full on the inside cover. The execs felt this was an unwarranted expense, so the band was forced to cover the extra costs themselves, to the tune of £500. One positive side effect of EMI’s tight-fistedness, though, was that the band

46

M E D

The S.F. Sorrow material went down well with live audiences, too. In January the band presented the first side of the album as a theatrical mime performance at the Roundhouse with Twink in white-face in the lead role, Phil as the narrator, and a suitably tripped-out light and slide show. According to Melody Maker, it was “received enthusiastically by the audience.”

France, 1969

However, despite its promising reception, EMI gave the record very little promotional support. Things got worse when the group signed a deal with Tamla-Motown’s Rare Earth label in America. Rare Earth didn’t get around to releasing the album until the end of 1969, by which time the Who’s Tommy (which S.F. Sorrow predated in the UK by five months) was reaping acclaim as the world’s first ‘rock opera’. In his review for Rolling Stone, noted rock critic Lester Bangs savaged Sorrow as “ultra-pretentious,” and held it up as “a rather depressing lesson in what it means to be drowned in the torrents of an industry gone berserk.” As wrong-headed as the review was, on the latter point Bangs inadvertently hit upon the truth of the matter: Sorrow had been swept away by a flood of inferior ‘concept’ works released in the wake of Sgt. Pepper, some of it well intentioned but much of it artistically overblown. It would be decades before Sorrow bobbed to the pop culture’s surface once again to receive its rightful acclaim.

had complete control over every phase of the artwork: Phil designed and painted the cover, while the photographs of the band on the back cover—overlaid with Phil’s elegant sparrow motif and the hand-lettered song titles—were by Dick.

S.F. Sorrow was released in December 1968—more than a year after recording had started. The British music press heaped praise on the album: “They have improved out of all recognition and have produced an album which should rate as one of the best of 1968,” raved the NME. “Amazing album from, of all people, the Pretty Things,” opened the review in Disc, demonstrating just how deeply entrenched some people’s negative perceptions of the band were even at this late date. The review went on to state that “The lyrics are quite brilliant and the whole conception of the album is a mind-blower.”

Rare Earth also chose to issue it with completely different cover art. The first five albums issued by the label—which also included the debut LP by Dave Edmunds’ Love Sculpture—were packaged in tombstone-shaped covers—round at the top and square at the bottom. The tombstone shape was lamentably appropriate. Customers flicking through the album racks invariably flicked right by these corner-less sleeves, ultimately dooming most of them to the vinyl graveyard.

47

in the sixties, where everybody had a wonderful time.” “They were very strange times, but very intense,” remembers Phil, “because if we weren’t working, the lifestyle was incredibly intense, too.

One was living in a way that I can’t imagine now.

That might mean getting stoned out on acid and just losing three days, but what was going on in those three days was extraordinary. So intense.”

Having poured their creative hearts and souls into the making of S.F. Sorrow the Pretty Things were gutted by the treatment the album received, and especially its mishandling in the States. 1969 proved to be a transitional year for the band as they struggled to recover their bearings. The year saw a couple of lineup changes, most significantly the departure of founder member Dick Taylor in June (although he did return briefly in August to play with them at the Isle of Wight Festival). “We had done S.F. Sorrow and I actually felt very pleased with it,” remembers Dick, “but I also felt that the whole psychedelic/experimental thing was coming to an end. Basically I wanted to put my toe into the water of life outside of the band, which had really been the only thing I had done since leaving art school. I just felt like a change.

The fact that I got married the day after doing the last official gig had surprisingly little to do with my decision. I remember Phil doing a cartoon of me with pipe and slippers at the time, but really the easy option would have been to stay. The real truth was I was just fucking bored.” Dick went on to work as a producer with Clearwater Productions, producing the first Hawkwind album, as well as records by Skin Alley and Cochise.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

Phil describes a typical ‘day at work’: “Sometimes Wally and I would get back at three or four in the morning, stoned out of our brains, and start writing, and write until 12 o’clock the next day, and then go out to a gig. The party was part of the writing. It wasn’t something you stopped working for to do, it just fused into it. It was all of one – the life was all about the music.”

In the hazy, smoky, hothouse atmosphere of Westbourne Terrace the songs for their next album, Parachute, took root and blossomed.

“As soon as we started working seriously together, we started getting very pleased with the songs that we wrote,” remembers Wally.

“It was kind of the healing of the wounds, and also I think we were finding different places, again – new musical places to explore.”

N O M

Losing a founder member as key to the band’s makeup as Dick could have been a death blow to a lesser band, but the Pretty Things rolled with the punches, taking Victor Unitt from the Edgar Broughton Group on board. It was during this period that the Pretty Things made an unreleased album with a French singer, Philippe Debarge.

A devoted Pretty Things fan and confidante, Debarge came from a wealthy family so he had the resources to commission Phil and Wally to write and produce an entire album for him, with the Pretty Things (Phil, Wally, Povey, Unitt and Twink at the time) as his backing musicians.

Philippe hoped to find a French record label to release the album, but when no deal was forthcoming, the project was shelved. (It was eventually released on UT Records in 2009.)

E D R O F | E L P M SA

A couple of months later, Twink exited to form the Pink Fairies—after first recording a solo album, Think Pink, with contributions from Povey, Waller, Unitt, and Viv Prince.

Twink’s departure hastened the return of Skip Alan, whose seemingly inexhaustible energy helped give the group a new lease on life.

They were also experimenting with new writing techniques, recording multi-layered demos right there at the flat. “We got a Revox,” says May, “and we would record everything—guitars, bass, five-part harmonies—and build up songs.

Sometimes they didn’t have finished lyrics, but we made little maquettes with a lot of the production built in, and then we’d take them to Norman and the boys and we’d all go in the studio and work on the song or whatever.”

The sessions ‘proper’ began at Abbey Road in September 1969 with Norman Smith again in the producer’s chair. Work often stretched far into the night. According to Jon Povey: “We would get there at two o’clock in the afternoon and leave about five o’clock in the morning – come out blinking in the daylight.

It was great ‘cause it was so relaxed and you could be creative and take your time over guitar parts and harmonies and structuring parts.”

All light up! Povey, 1967. Photograph taken by Dick Taylor with Agfa high-speed film in his camera, with light supplied by the match

With Dick Taylor out of the picture, the band’s internal dynamic shifted, and Phil and Wally began to collaborate even more closely on the songwriting. At the time, the pair were living in Westbourne Terrace, in Bayswater, the latest in a series of legendary Pretty Things party houses dating back to 13 Chester Street. “It was a huge, rambling old place,” Wally recalls. “One of those great, big old communal places that were around

June 14th 1969, Dick marries Melissa, outside Nick’s Diner in Fulham. Valerie Povey on left 48

Hyde Park free gig with Twink diving off the PA 49

The album was completed over blocks of time, between live gigs, eventually wrapping up in March 1970. It was a work that reflected the contradictions and confusion of the times. After a decade of social turmoil and a renaissance in the arts unprecedented in that century, people were searching for answers and exploring alternative lifestyles. “The dream was over,” reflects Phil May. “The dream had died to some extent. There were great things going on, but it was a bit like wartime stuff. It was like how people said that in the Blitz people had great times. There was a real sense

of missed opportunity: all that energy, all that excitement; all that expectation being dissipated as everyone was sucked back into the system and re-established. A lot of people were exodusing the city for the country-pure kind of life, to collect their thoughts and gather their karma and shit.

But in true Pretty Things fashion we bucked the trend. I never believed in that. I mean, I’m a city boy and I still think rock ’n’ roll’s made in the city.”

“The way we rationalized the title, Parachute,” explains Wally, “is it’s a last form of escape, but it’s not necessarily the answer. It doesn’t mean you’re safe just because you use a parachute. There’s a lot of things that can happen on the way down.”

With this in mind, the theme of city and country became the loose basis for the album’s concept: a series of songs that explored the different positive and negative sides of the two environments.

After the commercial disappointment S.F. Sorrow, they were wary of making the concept approach too restrictive. “For me, it was kind of a ‘non-concept’ concept, really,” explains Phil.

“We didn’t want to get stuck with the tightness of Sorrow, but we didn’t want to go back to making five A-sides and five B-sides, so we split this album into two: urban and pastoral hymns.”

The album is one of sharp musical contrasts with some of the group’s most beautiful and haunting melodies set alongside their darkest, heaviest and most violent creations. Alternately tough and tender; juxtaposing cold, hard stone against majestic bucolic landscapes, Parachute is the Pretty Things’ post-psychedelic masterpiece.

Y L N

The album was released in the UK in June of 1970 on EMI’s new progressive outlet, Harvest.

The American release on Rare Earth followed a few months later. In Britain it was preceded by the release of a single, “The Good Mr. Square” backed with the excellent non-LP track “Blue Serge Blues,” a piece of vitriol aimed at the British police force, who had recently singled out Jon for attention. “We used to dress pretty outrageously in those days,” he explains. “Bright red high-heeled boots, yellow trousers, and lots of hair. I was just walking across Fulham Road and two [plain-clothes policemen] jumped out of a car and said, ‘We’re gonna search you,’ and I had a bit of hash in my pocket. Then they went back to the flat and they found some more in a Christmas present Phil had bought me. It was bad news. So I was really pissed off and so we got together and wrote this song called ‘Blue Serge Blues.’”

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA L to R: Povey, Waller, Taylor, May, Twink. 1969 50

51

Y L N

OR

F | E L P M SA

O N O I T A R ST

DE

N O M

The Pretty Things, 1970. L to R: Skip Alan, Phil May, Jon Povey, Wally Waller, Victor Unitt

Parachute was released to unanimous praise from critics. “Definitely the best they’ve ever done,” declared Record Mirror, while Melody Maker described it as “a thoughtful excursion into the realms of intelligent, progressive rock & roll,” and a review in Time Out stated, “Here’s a really fine record by one of the most experienced—and underestimated—groups in British rock.” Rolling Stone even declared it one of the best records of the year. However, they continued to struggle to change people’s preconceptions. It had been six years since “Rosalyn” and “Don’t Bring Me Down”, but that image of the group was still embedded in the public consciousness, and was invariably one of the main topics of conversation whenever they were interviewed. “Pretty well stuck with the past” was a typical headline at the time. Discussing a planned US tour with Disc, Phil said: “I have this terrible thought that people are going to expect ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ on stage.

Six-year-old Pretty Things numbers, that kind of thing. It’s a terrifying proposition.” While in Record Mirror he was forced to admit, “I’ve been living the past down for the past five years.” Living down the Pretty Things’ turbulent past—and eventually

facing up to it and embracing it—would be a decades-long process for Phil, as we shall see.

Boosted by some excellent reviews, and some memorable live performances, Parachute sold quite well in the UK, reaching as high as Number 43 in the album charts. In the States, though, it failed to make any commercial headway, despite the prestige of being named the Rolling Stone album of the year.

Meanwhile, the group’s lineup changed again.

Before the album was released, Vic Unitt had drifted back to the Broughtons, and a new hotshot guitarist had stepped into the breach: 18 year-old Peter Tolson, who had been playing with the fragmenting Eire Apparent. “Pete came round with his guitar to Westbourne Terrace, and we took some drugs and we played all afternoon,” remembers Phil. “We just jammed, and it was like instant. I couldn’t believe it.”

The effect of Tolson’s joining the group in the middle of 1970 was one of immediate rejuvenation. “The first time we went in the

Clockwise from top left: Phil, Jon, Pete Tolson, Wally, Skip. Late 1970 52

53

studio,” remembers Wally, “we did ‘Summertime’ and ‘October 26’—all that wah-wah stuff— and ‘Cold Stone’. That was basically his main riff. He was very instrumental in writing ‘Cold Stone’ and also ‘Summertime’, He would just come up with some breathtaking stuff.”

Harvest released “October 26” backed with “Cold Stone” in November. The subtle, emotional lead vocal was Wally’s, supported by soaring harmonies, ringing harpsichord, and some volcanic wah-wah guitar by Tolson.

That single was followed up in May 1971 by the more commercial “Stone-Hearted Mama” with Wally again taking the lead vocal over an almost Slade-like platform boot-stompin’ beat.

The A-side was eclipsed, though, by the two stellar tracks on the flip. “Summertime” is an exultant celebration of the English outdoors.

The group finds a tight groove based around that great descending riff, their harmonies are superb, and Tolson just wails on his solos.

It’s the sound of a rock ’n’ roll band soaring on the same perfectly-attuned high, and the gleeful spontaneous whoop in the middle tells

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

you just how much fun they’re having. The short, stark “Circus Mind” is a gem with just Phil’s emotive vocal, Peter’s guitar through a Leslie, and some harmonies at the close.

Onstage this was one of the Pretty Things’ most incendiary lineups, too, as various live tapes and BBC radio sessions attest. Tolson’s guitar work stoked the Parachute material to new levels of intensity, especially songs like “Cries From the Midnight Circus” and “She’s A Lover.”

Financially though, the group was struggling to survive. Bryan Morrison was no longer managing the group, having sold his agency to NEMS (though he continued to control their publishing via Lupus Music), so that unenviable task had fallen to Derek Boltwood, a music journalist who’d written several enthusiastic pieces about them in his column in Record Mirror. Plans for the American tour, scheduled for

September, had been moving forward, but then bad luck intervened. Driving home from a gig in Reading, Boltwood was involved in a serious car crash. He was hospitalized for some time, losing an eye, and the tour plans fell apart.

By the summer of 1971, band morale was at an all-time low, and in July Wally announced he was leaving the group to take a job as a staff producer at EMI, working alongside Norman Smith. Despite the frustration he’d been feeling, the decision to leave was not an easy one for him. “It was terribly difficult,” he admits, “because the Pretty Things are like a family, really. People come, people go, but there’s a wonderful camaraderie amongst the guys.”

In the event, EMI released the band from their contract, which had been due to expire at the

end of August. Though there was no official announcement, for all intents and purposes the Pretty Things broke up in July 1971. The split marked the end of an extremely prolific collaboration between Phil and Wally. Parachute, and the singles that followed in its immediate wake, were in many ways the culmination of a partnership that had started twenty years earlier on Chipstead Road. “Wally and I have known each other since we were four,” reflects Phil, “and to come from being four years-old, living opposite each other on a council estate, to actually creating a record together all those years later, that’s what gives it to me something special.”

It may have been the end of an era, but it was not the end of the Pretty Things. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it was not even the beginning of the end; it was more like the end of the beginning. Or something like that.

Leopard skin and tambourine, 1971 54

55

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA Live in 1971. L to R: Wally, Skip, Phil, Tolson 56

57

I

PART FOUR: Under the Volcano (1971-76)

t’s at this point in the Pretty Things’ chronology that many of their fans choose to bail out for a while. The Pretty Things had always, to some degree, been a cult band—part of the underground. In the Seventies though, they took a detour towards the mainstream. As Phil once explained, the Pretty Things have always taken their own path, usually way off the beaten track, but every now and then they’d discover they were running right alongside the main highway. But what were the chances of the Pretty Things ever finding the on-ramp without crashing?

N O M

So in late 1971, the Pretty Things—May, Povey, Tolson and Skipper—reconvened along with a new bass player, Stuart Brooks, previously a member of the Black Cat Bones and Leafhound.

With Bill Shepherd’s financial backing, the group was able to invest in a new set of gear, including keyboards and a PA system (prior to this they’d had to rent a lot of their gear), and hit the UK live circuit again. There they began road-testing some of the material earmarked for their next album. With Wally Waller out of the picture, Pete Tolson now became Phil’s main songwriting partner, with Jon Povey also contributing some ideas, as he had since the S.F. Sorrow days.

By Christmas of 1971, Shepherd had successfully negotiated a tape lease deal with Warner Bros. for a new Pretty Things album to be released in both the UK and the USA. Work

Backstage, 1972. L to R: Tolson, unknown, May, Povey, Stuart Brooks

Phil in 1973 58

on the new songs now began in earnest. The bulk of the writing was done at Phil’s getaway in the Norfolk countryside where Phil and Pete holed up “with two Marshall stacks, a bag of homegrown and other assorted musical aids” and set about writing and assembling the material that would become Freeway Madness.

“The fact that the house is situated in the middle of a wood, beyond the edge of the village, meant that the Marshalls could be turned up full through those dark hours of the night,” explains Phil, “blasting out the strains of an embryonic ‘Havana Bound,’ ‘Onion Soup,’ etc.”

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

The summer of 1971 was a dispiriting time for 26-year-old Phil May and the scattered remains of the Pretty Things. Without management, record label, or even a full complement of musicians, the band was essentially dead in the water. While the others lay low and considered their options, Skip Alan found work with Sunshine, a band which also included Gordon Edwards and Jack Green, who would figure into the Pretty Things’ story a little later. Sunshine was handled by a flash young manager called Bill Shepherd, whose Circle management company also represented Quintessence and Home. When Skip played Shepherd a tape of Parachute, he

E D R O F | E L P M A S

was blown away by the quality of music and incredulous that they were no longer together.

Shepherd fired off a telegram to Phil, who was on holiday in Greece at the time, encouraging him to reform the band, and suggesting that with him as manager there was much they could accomplish—breaking the band in America being first and foremost on the agenda.

59

Work on the songs continued back in London, where Jon and Phil put together the piano-led ballad “Love is Good,” which would become the album’s opener as well as a staple of their live set throughout this period.

For a producer, Phil called upon Wally Waller, who was only too happy to take on the task.

Because of his commitment to EMI, he was forced to work under an alias: Asa Jones (a name he also used when he produced Sunshine’s album for Warners the same year).

Tony Clark, who had been the engineer for Parachute, also moonlighted from EMI for the

pleasers back in the day, though only a few grains of that energy can be detected on the studio versions (like I said: check the bonus tracks).

Some of the more mellow numbers actually fared better, particularly “Peter”/”Rip-Off Train,” a song about Tolson’s birth and eventual arrival into the band, which harks back to Parachute’s “In the Square”/“Letter”/“Rain” suite, complete with those familiar May-Waller-Povey harmonies.

That pristine harmonic blend can also be heard to pleasant effect on the impossibly languid country rock ballad “Country Road,” a song so laidback it’s practically horizontal. Although no longer a de facto band member Wally even sings lead on one song, “Over the Moon,” a romantic orchestrated number in a solo Lennon, early ELO vein. “Over the Moon” was also chosen as the single—an odd pick given that Wally was no longer in the band, disallowing the

sessions, which took place at Morgan Studios in Willesden during the autumn and early winter of 1972. The album found the band grasping for a new sound, one specifically tailored for the American market, and while Wally insists that “Once finally in the studio…we did what we have always done before and since and merely made the album that we wanted to hear,” an odor of compromise and indecision clings to much of the record. The goal seems to have been to strike a balance between heavy, blues-based rock and softer, acoustic-driven West Coast sounds—a formula that was equal parts Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Unfortunately, though, they weren’t quite up to the task and the end result was a rather flat sounding album.

The Pretty Things made their best music when they took chances, but on Freeway Madness they seemed to be proceeding with caution, for the first time following instead of leading: the tempos are too slow, the performances reined in; there’s less than the usual quota of fire, tension, ebullience and joy. It may be the Pretty Things’ most boring record. “It was a weird,

sort of in-between time,” reflects Phil. “Freeway Madness was kind of our bridge to America. We made—not an American album, but an album we thought could get us to the States. I think some of the songs are great but it was slightly laid-back for an English band. I think it was partly to do with how restricted you were with recording.

You couldn’t do it totally live, you had to do it in segments. It was still a layer cake, you’d do the backing track and then everything else, and then the harmonies and vocals came on top.”

Released at the end of 1972, Freeway Madness came in a suitably American looking cover to match its self-consciously American title (I suppose Motorway Madness doesn’t have quite the same ring to it). Designed by Phil and Hipgnosis, the front cover showed the current band members behind the window of an American car of some sort (David Gilmour’s apparently). On the back cover, the same window pictured seven of the former Pretty Things: Dick Taylor, John Stax, Wally Waller, Brian Pendleton, Viv Prince, Victor Unitt and Twink, an acknowledgement that the band’s past would always be with them.

“There have only been about twelve members of the Pretty Things over the years,” Phil told Chris

Even in their somewhat muted state there are some very good songs, many of which only found their wings in a live setting (just check out the bonus tracks for proof). “Havana Bound” remains a live favourite to this day, a fast moving (though not fast enough here) Chuck Berry-style rocker with a humorous—and topical for the time— lyric about being on a hijacked plane bound for Castro’s Cuba. “The Luger down his trousers, well that was twice as obscene,” remains one of Phil’s more memorable punch-lines. “Religion’s Dead” and “Onion Soup” were also high-energy crowd

Pretty Things, 1973 L to R: Skip Alan, Pete Tolson, Phil May, John Povey, Stuart Brooks, Gordon Edwards 60

Welch of Melody Maker. “They have all contributed to the whole and taken the good and the bad.

This band has sores. And it limps.” In the States, though, the band’s past was apparently deemed to be irrelevant or confusing so the back cover was switched out to repeat the image on the front.

Y L N

A review in Rolling Stone praised the album’s “near perfect combination of seemingly disparate elements,” and other reviews were also favourable, but it was not a big seller on either side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless it did open the door at last for the Pretty Things’ first tour of America in the middle of 1973, a relatively low-key affair that saw them playing small and mid-sized clubs, often in out of the way places like Aurora, Illinois. Prior to the tour, they welcomed a new member, Gordon Edwards of Sunshine, who filled out the sound as a second keyboardist and guitarist, as well as adding his

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

Pretty Things, 1972. L to R: Phil May, Skip Alan, Stuart Brooks, Pete Tolson, Jon Povey

chances of it being performed convincingly live or on television. “Havana Bound” had been the band’s choice for a single, but Warners decided the subject matter was too controversial.

61

America. In 1973 Bowie was the biggest selling act in the UK, and his patronage had helped resurrect the careers of Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop, but he had yet to have a significant commercial breakthrough in the States.

Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, were a dominant force worldwide—and particularly in America.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

America was the goal, the big prize, so the choice was obvious: Swan Song. Before signing the deal though, Phil made a stipulation: he wanted Peter Grant to manage them. With Grant’s infamous muscle, hustle and know-how behind them, he reasoned, the Pretty Things would not be neglected or ignored. Grant’s reaction to this proposal, according to Phil, was typically brusque: “Fucking Bryan Morrison already told me you’re fucking unmanageable, and I’ve got Led Zeppelin, what do I want to fucking manage you for?” “We’d already got a reputation for fucking ourselves up,” explains Phil, unnecessarily.

Phil May, 1973

Stuart Brooks, 1973

Jon Povey, 1973

R O F | E L P M SA Gordon Edwards, 1973

Skip Alan, 1973

considerable vocal range to the mix. “They asked me to come along and audition and I knew I would get the job because none of them were fantastic musicians,” Edwards later sniffed.

In October 1973, David Bowie’s Pin Ups album was released. It included his versions of two Pretty Things songs, “Rosalyn” and “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Bowie had been a Pretty Things devotee from the beginning, and had hung out with the band back in the R&B days when he was with the Manish Boys and the Lower Third.

At the time he had Phil listed in his address book as “GOD.” In late 1972, there had been talk of Bowie producing either a Pretty Things single or a Phil May solo single of two Lou Reed songs, “Sweet Jane” and “Vicious.” Nothing ever came of that idea, but a year or so later, in the wake of Pin Ups, there was an offer from

Bowie’s management company, Mainman, for him to produce the next Pretty Things album.

However, there would be a two-month wait before Bowie’s schedule was open and any money would start to flow. Phil wasn’t even sure he could keep the band together that long. Besides, there was interest from another quarter. Led Zeppelin were forming their own label, Swan Song, and both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had made overtures to Phil to bring the Pretty Things on board. Hitching the Pretty Things’ wagon to the Led Zeppelin juggernaut looked to be a hugely advantageous proposition. Zeppelin offered something that Bowie could not at that time:

After the American tour the Pretty Things machine gradually ground to a halt again. Bill Shepherd’s management contract was due to expire, Warners seemed disinclined to release another album, and amidst mounting frustration in the ranks Stuart Brooks decided to quit.

Although the situation looked grim, there were several options floating around that could potentially keep the band moving forward.

ON

M E D

Pete Tolson, 1973

But the deal went ahead, and in early 1974 the Pretty Things became the second act signed to Swan Song, after Bad Company. “I had always idolized the Pretty Things, and still can’t get over the idea that they’re on a label that I partially own,” confessed Robert Plant at the time.

Sessions for the next Pretty Things album began that summer at Headley Grange in Hampshire, where Led Zeppelin had recorded most of their previous three albums. The album saw the band reunited with producer Norman Smith. Since the last time he’d worked with them, on Parachute, Smith had become a recording artist in his own right, scoring a couple of hits as ‘Hurricane’ Smith (with Wally Waller on bass). Pop stardom had imparted some changes to Smith’s image.

“Norman eventually turned up at The Grange in his bloody great Rolls Royce looking just like Jason King,” Skip remembers. “He had acquired this fucking dodgy black Zapata moustache and a natty line in double-breasted ‘squire’ suits with silk shirts and matching ties. The shirt collars were about three feet long and you could’ve beaten a man to death with the tie knots.” Almost immediately, Norman and Phil got into a huge dust-up over some lyrics. Norman took offense to a song called “Psychosomatic Boy” (an early draft of “Singapore Silk Torpedo”), and after a heated argument jumped in his Rolls and headed back to London. The next day Peter Grant called to see how the sessions were progressing. “Fine, Peter,” Phil assured him. “We haven’t played a note of music, the piano hasn’t arrived, and the producer’s stormed out because he doesn’t like the lyrics—business as usual, really!”

Three days later Norman returned and the sessions resumed, though not without further

Pretty Things, 1973. Back row (L to R): Stuart Brooks, Skip Alan, Pete Tolson. Middle row: Gordon Edwards, Jon Povey. Phil in bottom left corner 62

63

situation. An internal power struggle was going on, and all too often Phil was willing to concede ground if he could be persuaded it was for the good of the song. In terms of pure vocal range, Edwards could out-sing pretty much anybody else in the group—even Povey—so he’s all over everything. But “co-lead singer”?

calamities. Peter Grant had arranged for the delivery of a very expensive 18-foot Bosendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano for the song “Is It Only Love.” “I was absolutely itching to try it,” Povey remembers, “and when it arrived I went out to see it unloaded. It was beautiful, brand new in black with gilt finishing. I stood and watched as the guys loaded it onto the tail lift, and then in slow motion the van’s tail lift mechanism let go and the whole bloody thing dropped ten feet onto the flagstones behind the drawing ornamental pond.” The piano was completely destroyed. “They could have taken it back in a matchbox,” notes Jon drily.

“Typical. The curse of the Pretty Things.”

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

Stuart Brooks’ replacement, Jack Green, arrived midway through the sessions. He’d previously played alongside Gordon Edwards in Sunshine, and had spent the last year slinging bass with T. Rex. By the time he joined the Pretties, Tolson had already tracked most of the bass parts for the album, but Green contributed to the vocal harmonies.

Silk Torpedo became Swan Song’s first worldwide release, and was launched on Halloween 1974 with a lavish press party at Chislehurst Caves in Kent with magicians, a fire-eater, an escape artist, and the obligatory, for the time, naked women writhing in tubs of jelly.

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

The album came in a sleek, airbrushed package depicting the titular “female hipno” atop a gigantic torpedo. Very literal. Very phallic. Very Smell the Glove. As Cocteau might note, it has only become more ugly over time. On the inside cover, the six band members look confident and relaxed, every inch the jet-set rock stars they aspired to be, superimposed against the backdrop of a Caribbean beach they’d never been to. The contents are equally sleek and airbrushed. Silk Torpedo is a state-of-the-art Seventies production, layer upon layer of sound, buffed to a fine sheen, locked and loaded for American FM radio. For Pretty Things fans raised on “Rosalyn” and “Defecting Grey”, its enjoyment requires a leap of faith, but beneath all the frosting there’s some delicious cake to be found. “Joey” is magnificent, a rare moment of pure unfettered pop music for the Pretty Things, but one that rings true thanks to the song’s unstoppably elastic groove and the utter ebullience of Phil’s lead vocal. “Singapore Silk Torpedo” is also quite splendid, especially on the verses where May and Tolson are out front; less so on the shrill, Edwards-sung bridge.

Pretty Things, ca. 1974-75. L to R: Tolson, Jack Green, Phil, Skip, Povey, Gordon Edwards

Case in point: “Bridge of God” where Phil is reduced to a supporting role on his own song, an overinflated pomp rock dirigible that sounds more like Yes than the Pretty Things. On some of the better tracks, like the aforementioned “Singapore Silk Torpedo”, “Maybe You Tried” and “Come Home Momma”, the band works up a ferocious head of steam on the verses, only to be swamped by an ungodly choir of multi-tracked voices on the choruses, with Edwards’ high-pitched caterwauling dominating. “We got quite involved in our sort of harmony expertise,” reckons Phil, “and we forgot about the basics. I was quite uncomfortable for three or four years, although onstage it was fantastic.” On the plus side though, this battle of wills imbues everything on the album with a certain amount of tension, no doubt amplified by the band’s prodigious cocaine intake, giving Silk Torpedo a wide-awake intensity that had been severely lacking on Freeway Madness. The negative vibes rippling through the album would be magnified ten-fold by the time the Pretties cut their next record.

Upon release, Silk Torpedo was the subject of numerous glowing reviews, especially in America, where it sold well and eventually became their first album to chart in Billboard (albeit only at #104). Writing in Rolling Stone, Bud Scoppa praised the band’s “wide-ranging intelligence, general adventurousness and rock & roll intensity” and concluded that “The Pretty Things have refined risk-taking into an accessible style, and they take their chances with as much confidence, ease and effectiveness as any band now working in British rock.”

“Is It Only Love” b/w “Joey” was released as a double A-sided single in January 1975. “Is It Only Love”—the nominal ‘real’ A-side—is a big production ballad featuring only two band members, Phil on lead vocals and Gordon on piano, accompanied live at Olympic by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and a Welsh colliery brass band. The song is poignantly rendered, but, if truth be told, it sounds a bit like Elton John. The first and only Pretty Things song your granny might like.

With the Led Zeppelin money machine behind them, the Pretties spent much of 1975 on the road in the States, mostly playing concert halls and arenas as an opening act, including

The arrival of Edwards and Green had completely transformed the band’s internal dynamic— Edwards’ billing as “co-lead singer” in the press releases of the time speaks volumes as to the

Phil May, 1974 64

65

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA 66

67

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

Pretty Things, 1974-75

a tour in January and February with the Kinks on their Schoolboys in Disgrace tour.

With Swan Song bankrolling the tours, they were well looked after, but this situation led to inevitable excesses for a band of musicians already predisposed to unhealthy habits. During these tours, the band began to preview some of the songs for their next album, Savage Eye, including “Remember That Boy”, “Under the Volcano” and “It Isn’t Rock and Roll.” Meanwhile another Swan Song single appeared in June, the loping, reggaeflavored “I’m Keeping” backed with “Atlanta” from Silk Torpedo. Like its predecessor, it failed to gain any traction commercially.

Sessions for the next album were held at Olympic Studios during late 1975 and early 1976, with Norman Smith again producing—or, more accurately, over-producing. Released in May 1976, Savage Eye is a darker, edgier album than Silk Torpedo, a reflection of too many days and nights on the road; too many lines on too many hotel room mirrors. The divisions within the band are more clearly laid out on this album, but creatively all of them seemed to thrive on the competition—particularly Phil May, whose lyrics here are a return to form after some slack moments on Silk Torpedo. The album opener, “Under the Volcano” (inspired by the Malcolm Lowry novel), is one of the big

standouts, a hulking slab of Led Zep rifferama, shot through with corrosive Tolson leads, and topped by May’s sharp, autobiographical lyrics: “Chuck Berry riffing drove me into my teens / the way I swaggered it was pure James Dean.”

Phil is also at the peak of his powers—vocally and lyrically—on “Remember That Boy”, a taut, intense rocker that also features one of Skip Alan’s most exhilarating drumming performances. “It’s Been So Long” is lithe and soulful, while “Drowned Man” plunges headlong into the darkness that was now encircling the band, an eerie post-psychedelic piece, it pays tribute to a roadie, Howard Parker, who had drowned while holidaying in Greece.

Pretty Things live circa 1975. Jack Green on bass. Povey clapping his hands 68

69

Phil. “We sat in Des Moines or Memphis or whatever, and watched the record fall off the charts. There were promotion problems and the Teamsters hadn’t been straightened. We were buried and I lost heart for a while.”

Y L N

Moreover there was no hit single. “Tonight” had sunk without trace—in retrospect a fortunate turn of events as it’s now been more or less written out of the band’s history (but not here—sorry, Phil!).

ON

Phil May, J.J. Jackson (who co-wrote “Come See Me”) and Robert Plant on Midnight Special. Los Angeles, March 1975

R O F | E L P M SA

On a couple of the other tracks on the album, you may find yourself wondering “Where’s Phil May?” “My Song” is a very commercial, well-crafted number sung by Gordon Edwards, while the lovely ballad “Sad Eye” is essentially a Jack Green solo performance. Meanwhile, Gordon and Phil switch off lead vocals on “It Isn’t Rock and Roll”, a banal exercise in good-time clap-your-hands shake-your-arse rockaboogie that fails to convince on almost every level. The worst was yet to come.

Consensus at Swan Song was that the band needed a hit single. “Sad Eye” had been released in advance of the album, but had done nothing: something more commercial was needed. So a month before the album was released the band returned to Abbey Road to cut a new Gordon Edwards song, “Tonight”.

It was a desperate move that Phil disowned almost immediately: “It’s just a total piece of shit,” he would say later. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the Pretty Things.”

70

O N O I T A R ST

It had long been a habit of Phil’s to wander off alone at night and walk the deserted streets of the city. These ‘walkabouts’ were a familiar part of the band’s routine, so the other band members weren’t particularly concerned when he disappeared into the night in early June 1976, a few days before they were scheduled to play a big show at the Empire Pool, Wembley, opening for Uriah Heep. It wasn’t until they were backstage waiting to go on that they realized for sure that Phil wasn’t turning up and they’d have to play the gig without him. Edwards and Green stepped up to cover Phil’s vocal parts, and evidently pulled it off. Their performance received a positive review from Jonh Ingham in Sounds, an indication of the degree to which May’s contributions had become marginalized within his own band.

M E D

“I felt very uncomfortable,” confesses Phil. “I felt the Pretty Things are becoming less spiritual and more commercial, and that’s why I left.

One night I just felt that was the end of it and I walked out of the band because I felt we were being coerced by Atlantic and everybody else into becoming a stadium rock band, which was alien to me. Also we were about to go on Top of the Pops with ‘Tonight’ and I refused to sing it. I just thought it was such an un-Pretty Things single. So I wasn’t going to do it and that [TV appearance] probably would’ve made that one of the biggest Pretty Things singles ever. I couldn’t bear that thought. It was shit.”

A meeting was called at Swan Song’s office at 484 Kings Road in Chelsea. “Robert and Jimmy said ‘Go back and talk to them’ and I did,” remembers Phil. “But the band felt they wanted to continue as they were. They were very adamant that they wanted to do their own thing.”

Savage Eye was to be promoted by an extensive world tour, but almost immediately things began to fall apart. The drug habits of certain band members (Phil, Pete, Jon, Gordon) were out of control, and in some cases heroin as well as cocaine had entered into the already volatile chemical equation. Much of the tour support money was being funneled in the direction of Charlie, and promotion and distribution were uncoordinated. “There was a fuck-up on the tour planning,” remembers

The announcement from Swan Song’s press office came a few days later: Phil May had quit the Pretty Things; the band would continue without him. In reality it had been more like a coup d’etat, but that wasn’t the spin at the time. “We are eager to support Phil in his solo endeavours, which we are all very excited about,” piped the press release cheerily. “Phil wants to move in a different direction, and the band wishes to continue as the Pretties.”

71

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

The idea of a Pretty Things without Phil May was ludicrous, unthinkable, but for a short time that was the reality. Peter Grant paid for some studio time and let them spin their wheels, then gave Phil a call. “If you want to record, Phil, be my guest,” he told him. “But if they’re going to try to work without you, they can record for a hundred years and I won’t release a fucking note of it.” (True to his word, he didn’t, though two tracks are included here.)

After the commercial failure of “Tonight,” and, more significantly, Savage Eye, the Pretty Things’ days were numbered anyway. Like numerous other British bands, they’d spent most of the decade attempting to break into the lucrative American market, a soul-sucking exercise that had been met with only very limited success.

In their absence, a new breed of groups had taken root in the pubs and nightclubs of London, a growing horde of disaffected young people who felt no affinity whatsoever for the

done a very comprehensive job of destroying themselves. Before the long hot summer of ’76 was over, so were the Pretty Things—in any way, shape or form. The final full-stop was typed when the May-less Pretties changed their name to Metropolis, at the same time shedding Jon Povey from their lineup.

jet-setting cocaine lifestyles of stadium-filling rock stars like the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and Led Zeppelin, or their overly-sophisticated, homogenized, Americanized music. The 1976 edition of the Pretty Things were guilty by association, a situation that was brought into cruelly sharp focus on July 9th, 1976, when the post-Phil Pretties played an all-nighter at the Lyceum in London on a bill that also included an unknown, unsigned band called the Sex Pistols.

The Pistols had tapped into the same kind raucous, chaotic energy that had once fueled the Pretty Things—an energy that by 1976 had been dissipated in a fog of compromise, cocaine and confusion. Standing onstage at the Lyceum in their satin flares, silk scarves and snakeskin boots, the battered remnants of the once proud Pretty Things epitomized the very rock dinosaurs the Pistols and their ilk sought to destroy.

As for Phil May, he’d bolted to Paris, and was living, along with his wife Electra and daughter Sorrel, on the house boat owned

by Philippe Debarge. Relaxing with his family on the Seine, Phil had no idea what his next move would be, only that it was time to put the past behind him. “It was kind of a weird time,” he reflects. “There was a lot of coke, a lot of emotion, a lot of shit going down. A lot of it was down to the drugs I guess. It was just basically not liking what was going on, I suppose, from my point of view. I didn’t feel that what was going on was right, and it wasn’t fair to let it go on anymore under my name.”

In the event though, that wouldn’t be necessary: the Pretty Things had already

72

73

Y L N

O N O I T A R T S

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S Pretty Things, circa 1981. L to R: Phil, Dick, Tolson, Wally 74

75

PART FIVE: No Future (1977-81)

O N O I T A R T S T

OR

F | E L P M A S

he three-year period following the breakup of the Pretty Things in the summer of 1976 was marked by a range of half-baked or abandoned projects. In the winter of ’76, Peter Grant coaxed Phil out of hiding to start work on a solo album. Sessions were held at Rockfield Studios with several ex-Pretties helping out, including Wally Waller, Pete Tolson and Skip Alan. Grant was hoping the project would coalesce into a de facto Pretty Things album, but Phil’s heart wasn’t in it, and he halted the project after only a few songs had been recorded. Soon afterwards Swan Song agreed to release him from his contract.

ON

M E D

A couple of songs from those sessions, including “Dogs of War”, were carried over to May’s next project, the Fallen Angels, a band that also included Wally Waller on bass, Mickey Finn and Bill Lovelady on guitars, Chico Greenwood on drums, and Jack Johnston on keyboards. An album was recorded in Geneva in July 1977 under severely chemically and alcoholically impaired circumstances and was released in Holland the following year as Phil May & the Fallen Angels.

Meanwhile, in July 1978, Phil May, Dick Taylor, Wally Waller, Jon Povey and Skip Alan were persuaded by a Dutch friend to reunite for a one-off Pretty Things show at the Midas Club in Amsterdam. Aside from a guest appearance on a BBC radio session in 1972, it was the first time Dick had played with the band since 1969. He’d left the music business altogether in the early ‘70s, but had recently got excited about playing guitar again after seeing the Clash live. The reunited Pretty Things were unrehearsed, but, with 600 fans egging them on, they blasted their way through a ramshackle set comprised mostly of songs from the first album, along with “Old Man Going” and a few R&B standards like “I’m A King Bee” and the inevitable “Route 66.” The gig was recorded, and the band was furious when a shoddily packaged album appeared later titled Pretty Things Live ’78.

Although the live reunion experience had left a bad taste in their mouths, it proved to be the

Pretty Things, 1980. L to R: Povey, Taylor, May, Skip Alan, Tolson, Wally 76

Y L N

77

move only seasoned self-saboteurs like the Pretty Things could have come up with. “Edge of the Night” (co-written by Wally) and “Sea of Blue” have their moments (excellent lyrics on the former, for example), but despite containing Dick Taylor’s first recorded guitar solo since 1968’s “Old Man Going,” “Lost That Girl” just seems cute and contrived. The elements that make Cross Talk great don’t really click until “Bitter End,” a pulse-racing rant running on a twisted “Peter Gunn” riff, on which May spits out an autopsy for an eviscerated love affair.

R O F | E L P M A S

Pretty Things, 1980

conduit to a more fulfilling reconciliation a little further down the line. Phil and Pete Tolson had started writing together again, and with the help of David Gilmour began recording some demos.

Discarding the excesses and affectations of the Swan Song years, they got in tune with the new musical currents pulsing around them, and set about creating something fresh and vital of their own. The songs would be taut, inventive, concise, and above all real. Nothing but the truth would be good enough this time.

With the completed demos in hand, Phil headed to Los Angeles and over the course of “some very stoned games of tennis” successfully brokered a one-off deal with Warner Bros. for a new Pretty Things album. Determined to do it right, he pulled together what he considered to be the ideal Pretty Things line-up with both Peter Tolson and Dick Taylor on guitars, Wally Waller on bass, John Povey on keyboards, and Skip Alan on drums. Now all in their early to

mid-thirties, most of the band members were working regular day jobs at this point: Dick was driving a delivery van for Jean Machine, Pete was working at the Co-op biscuit factory, Jon was making surfboards, and Skip was putting in twelve-hour shifts at his father’s factory. They’d arrive for the evening sessions at Matrix Studio in London already exhausted, but with Phil driving them they’d invariably pull it together long enough to lay down their tracks. Cocaine was still an inescapable presence, especially for Phil, Pete and Jon, fueling their energy levels, but also feeding into the mood of paranoia and aggression that dominated the sessions. With only a limited recording budget to play with, tracks were laid down relatively quickly during February and March of 1980 with the help of producers Jon Astley and Phil Chapman. The speed of the recording process benefitted the songs, the arrangements for most of which has already been tightly mapped out by May and Tolson.

78

with “Wish Fulfillment” and “Sea About Me.” The other two tracks, “Goin’ Downhill” and “Goodbye, Goodbye” would later appear, in a much changed form, on the Rage Before Beauty album. Before work on any of these tracks was complete though, the sessions fell apart in rather dramatic fashion.

Y L N

“We had been working on keyboard overdubs,” remembers Mark, “and Jon was really flying, until he noticed Rogie [his girlfriend] was missing. The next thing I knew, he was running up the stairs out of the studio and screaming like a maniac for Phil and Rogie. Marc [Franks] the engineer and I followed them and saw him crash the door of Brahms & Liszt (the local ‘pretty young things’ watering hole) dragging Phil behind him by his hair. They took out a window or two on the way and were heavily involved with beating the shit out of each other by the time the police showed up. Both were bleeding badly and were very, very pissed off. As I had made the mistake of trying to stop them, and received a knee in the face for my troubles, I was pretty fucked up too, so I was invited to the party back in the cells.

O N O I T A R ST

Phil’s powers as a lyricist are also in full force on “Office Love,” a powerfully wrought tale of middle-aged deceit and betrayal that explodes into a sensational flame-thrower Tolson guitar solo. But the Pretties saved their best shot for last. The emotionally-charged “No Future” is another fraught tale of lies and adultery in the English suburbs, the raw, menacing stop-start guitar chords and tempo changes perfectly underpinning the angst-riddled vocals, which are full of mad leaps and hesitations. It’s a remarkable performance by the entire band, seething with tension and barely contained animosity.

ON

M E D

corrected that problem but managed to reverse the labels; promotion and distribution were sketchy at best, and the label became embroiled in a payola scandal. Such reviews as Cross Talk did receive were generally lukewarm. The band played some gigs in support of the album, but ultimately it spluttered into commercial oblivion. It’s only in the last decade that Cross Talk has started to receive some of the acclaim it deserves, in large part due to the enthusiasm of Pretties manager Mark St. John, who has tirelessly championed it as “arguably the band’s finest collective moment.”

Once again, the Pretty Things had defied the odds and come up with a brilliant album. If you’ve read this far, it goes without saying what happens next: everything goes wrong, no one buys it, and the band falls apart.

Yep. Pretty much. The album’s release was botched at every level by Warners: thousands of copies were pressed with two Side Ones, a repressing

And it’s at this point that Mark enters our story.

Having become a fan of the band several years earlier (an event documented in his liner notes to the Savage Eye CD reissue), he became obsessed with the idea of producing an album with them. By 1980 he was working at Freerange, “a funky little studio in London’s Covent Garden” owned by Nick Abson.

“I was absolutely besotted with the Pretty Things,” recalls Mark, “and I managed, god knows how, to persuade Nick to let me produce them for the studio’s label—if I could find the band and persuade them to agree.” Mark is a very persuasive man, and besides he was the only interested party beating a path to their door at this point. So in the spring of 1981 the Pretty Things went into Freerange to begin work on some new recordings. As Skip was busy working at the factory, ex-Be Bop Deluxe drummer Simon Fox was brought on board for the sessions. Five tracks were eventually more or less finished, of which “The Young Pretenders,” written

by Phil and Jon, was the most promising. It appears here as a bonus track on the Cross Talk CD, along

Released in August 1980, Cross Talk marked a bold, brave new sound for the Pretty Things. Not for the first time they had completely reinvented themselves, and in doing so created one of the defining records of their oeuvre. The album was also a starkly personal statement for Phil May as a lyricist. Now 35 years old, he was facing down middle age with a withering intensity, and writing lucidly about real life, grown-up issues like sex, adultery, ageing, and sexual orientation.

It’s a very English album too - instead of Atlanta he’s singing about London and Croydon.

The uncharacteristically infectious “I’m Calling” opens the album and flashes its modernism right in your face, Tolson’s sharp, angular guitar sound biting and chattering against May’s tightly wound vocals, which display a startling new range of phrasing and inflection. The song was also the album’s first single, but despite some BBC Radio One airplay it failed to chart. The album then drops a few notches by lining up its three weakest tracks all in a row—a

79

“The next time I saw Jon, it was to hand him a sizeable cheque more than ten years later,” he adds. “That was the end of part one of the album.

Freerange went bust about three months later.”

Once again, the Pretty Things scattered, and, with the exception of Phil and Dick, saw very little of each other—or Mark St. John—for the next ten years or more. It would be a full eighteen years before the next ‘real’ Pretty Things album appeared.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA 80

81

T

PART SIX: Not Giving In (1982-2014)

he 1980s and early 1990s were a barren wasteland for the Pretty Things, dotted by occasional clumps of activity and guarded assurances that yes, really, honestly, better things are coming.

With no obvious path forward, Phil and Dick went backwards, right to the beginning, re-exploring the blues and R&B songs that had been the original band’s foundation stone. In early 1983, Phil started running an R&B club on Tuesday nights in the upstairs room of the Bridge House pub in North London. For the modest sum of 50p, patrons could see Phil and a revolving cast of musicians jam on a variety of R&B standards, including many tracks from the first Pretty Things album. Dick’s appearances at these gatherings gradually became more frequent, and eventually a new Pretty Things lineup coalesced with May and Taylor joined by ex-Doll by Doll guitarist Joe Shaw, bass player Dave Wintour, keyboardist Dave Wilki, drummer John Clark, and sax player Kevin Flanagan.

A rather tepid live album was recorded on March 13th, 1984, and released by Big Beat in the UK as Live at the Heartbreak Hotel.

Phil and Dick continued to keep the Pretty Things’ name alive with frequent live shows, most often in Germany and Holland where they’d always maintained a loyal fan base.

Another album appeared in 1988, Out of the Island, a low-budget affair mostly consisting of pointless live-in-the-studio remakes of old Pretty Things songs. More encouragingly though, a handful of new originals were also included, of which “Cause and Effect” was the most memorable.

By late 1988 progress on the album appeared to be stalling. Mark called a meeting to evaluate their progress and a sobering conclusion was reached: it stunk. “It sounded like nothing,” Mark later wrote.

“Too produced, no ‘Pretties’ vibe, no attitude, and worst of all, no fucking balls.” Dick was hesitant, but Phil agreed: “You’re right, man. It’s a piece of shit. We should never have let it get this far.”

The album was scrapped, and they started over from scratch with a new lineup that teamed Phil and Dick with Frankie Holland on guitar, Steve Browning on bass, and Mark himself on drums. Frank was a long-time friend of Mark’s, the two of them having played together in the progressive rock group England, who’d released

Unused promo pic from Eve of Destruction photo session at Dungeness 82

an album, Garden Shed, on Arista in 1977.

In September of 1989 the new incarnation of the Pretty Things was launched on a 12-inch single headlined by an updated version of the P.F. Sloan/Barry McGuire classic “Eve of Destruction,” along with two original songs, “Can’t Stop” (from Out of the Island) and “Goin’ Downhill” (which dated from the ’81 Freerange sessions). The release led to a bitchy piece in the notoriously putrid UK tabloid The Sun headlined: “The Pretty Things are back… looking pretty terrible.” It was like 1964 all over again.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

By this time, Mark St. John was back in the picture again. In the spring of 1984—three years to the day after the Freerange sessions had ended so abruptly—he knocked on the front door of Phil’s place in Notting Hill and handed over the master tapes, as stipulated in the terms of their original contract. “Phil acted as though I wasn’t even there,” remembers Mark, who stalked away from the house resolving never to have anything else to do with the Pretty Things. In late 1987 though, there was a reconciliation, and in 1988 the band started recording tracks for a new album at Mark’s Basement Studios in Soho with US producer, Denny Bridges. Mark also began providing free office space for the Pretty Things’ new manager, Shannon O’Shea, who started looking into the legal case for the band getting the rights to their back catalogue from Phonogram (who controlled the Fontana catalogue) and EMI, neither of whom had paid them any royalties for years, despite countless reissues of that material.

83

After this short spurt of high profile activity things settled back into the now familiar pattern: for the next several years Phil and Dick continued to pay their bills by touring Europe with various temporary lineups (“bolt ons,” as Mark so generously refers to them), and also engaged in assorted low rent side projects such as the British Invasion All-Stars (with members of the Yardbirds, the Creation, the Downliners Sect, the Nashville Teens and Procol Harum), the Pretty Things/Yardbird Blues Band (with Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty), and the Pretty Things ‘n Mates (with members of the Inmates). In early 1992, Phil was also involved with John Coughlan’s Diesel, a band built around the ex-Status Quo drummer. While there was merit to some of these projects, none of them appeared to be advancing the Pretty Things’ career in any meaningful way.

Behind the scenes, though, a lot of very constructive business had been taking place.

Recordings for the ‘real’ new Pretty Things album—by now habitually referred to by Dick as “the albatross”—continued sporadically with Mark St. John at the helm. Mark also took over

Mark St John at his studio, 145 Wardour Street at the time of recording Rage Before Beauty with friend, songwriter Pete Harlen

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

The Pretty Things (with Arthur Brown) at Chislehurst Caves 1999 Circa 1999

management of the band from Shannon O’Shea, and doggedly pursued the legal case against EMI, an expensive, time-consuming and frustrating process that would take him to the brink of bankruptcy. He was forced to give up ownership of his studio to finance the ongoing court cases, and by late 1993 he was almost broke. Finally, at the end of 1993, EMI caved in, and agreed to pay a substantial cash settlement, and return all the Pretty Things masters. It was an unprecedented victory for Mark and the Pretty Things, and it came in the nick of time. The following year, an agreement was also reached with Phonogram, and the band’s catalogue rights were returned to them. In facing down two powerful corporations to regain control of their catalogue, the Pretty

Things were once again breaking new ground.

“The whole music industry was looking at me and the Pretty Things as crusading leaders for a generation of unpaid bands,” relates Mark, “and I was getting calls daily from old unpaid artists who had a story to tell.” He has gone on to help quite a few of them, but that’s another story.

The Pretty Things were now in control of their own destiny. The EMI settlement, which Phil had insisted should be split with the original EMI period band members (even though they weren’t part of the legal action), brought the May, Taylor, Waller, Povey and Skipper lineup back in touch for the first time in a long while. According to St. John, this was all part of his plan: “I was

84

never happy with the half-baked side projects and always believed that their future lay in their past,” he says. “That classic line-up, the whole catalogue, and a great new album.”

So in a way it was revenge on EMI and Phonogram for their unscrupulous activities that brought about a reunion of the 1967-68 lineup of Phil May, Dick Taylor, Wally Waller, Jon Povey and Skip Alan, who began rehearsing together in April 1994. Peter Tolson also attended some rehearsals, but dropped out in October. Jack Green was briefly considered as his replacement, but eventually Frankie Holland stepped in, and has since become a permanent, integral member.

85

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

After a bizarre ‘warm-up show’ at the Marriott Hotel, alongside Donovan, for a charity supported

by Princess Diana and Joanna Lumley, the reconstituted band made their true live debut on September 26, 1995, at the 100 Club, an event announcing the release of Unrepentant, a career-spanning 2-CD anthology. Sub-titled Bloody But Unbowed, the collection came in a hardbound, long-box that included a lavishly illustrated and annotated book, and included 43 tracks from all phases of their evolution, most of them re-mastered from the original tapes for the first time in decades. The band

took the stage in sharp three-button black suits with white shirts and black ties, like heavies from the Kray or Richardson gangs—a look they would keep for the next few years.

They were joined onstage for an encore of “Rosalyn” by original rhythm guitarist Brian Pendleton. Also in attendance to give the band his blessing was Peter Grant. He had spent the long, 16-hour working day performing as an actor in the band’s crackling promotional video for the re-mastered “Rosalyn” (included here). It was the last gig he ever attended. He died two months later on November 21st.

First official Snapper promo pic, 1996

Unrepentant was the opening salvo of a comprehensive Pretty Things reissue campaign that kicked off in earnest when the band inked a deal with Snapper Music to release all their albums on CD, along with appropriate bonus tracks. On September 6th, 1998, the impending reissue of S.F. Sorrow was marked by a special concert at Abbey Road Studios at which they performed the album in its entirety for the first time before a specially invited audience of friends, family and fans. In another first, the show was broadcast live over the internet so fans around the world could share the experience in real

Photo opportunity at the Mayfair Marriot hotel with Joanna Lumley and Kim Wilde for a charity show that was the first official re-formed Pretty Things concert. Donovan was also performing.

86

The Pretty Things in Brussels with Arthur Brown at the Brussels rock and roll exhibition – circa 2006 87

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

Mick Taylor, Dick Taylor

Ron Wood, Dick Taylor

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S

time—or as near to real time as their clunky dial-up connections would allow (this was early days, folks). The story of S.F. Sorrow was narrated

by Arthur Brown, and the band was also joined

by David Gilmour on guitar, Mark St. John on a battery of percussion, and Dov Alan, Skip’s son, who joined his dad on drums. The near flawless performance was released on CD as Resurrection.

A few months later the band flew to New York to play the Cavestomp festival at Coney

Island High, their first US concert in more than twenty years. Since then their music had helped inspire an underground movement of garage bands that spanned the globe. As they were now coming to fully realize, the legacy the Pretty Things had just reclaimed was not some dusty catalogue of old relics but an archive of timeless artworks that would continue to attract new admirers indefinitely.

Like the Frenchman said: art not fashion; ugly things becoming more beautiful over time.

88

A new addition to that ongoing legacy arrived on March 8, 1999 with the release of Rage Before Beauty. Yes, after 19 years in flight, the albatross had fucking landed. Pretty Things fans were not disappointed; in fact, most of us were pretty stunned. For an album recorded in fits and starts over such a long period of time, it all hung together exceedingly well, from the muscular, hard driving opener “Passion of Love” to the curtain closing “God Give Me the Strength (To Carry On).” In between there were numerous

Mick Taylor, Ron Wood, Dick Taylor

highlights, some of them among the best they’d ever recorded. “Vivian Prince” is a smart tribute to their iconic fallen drummer, a slow Diddley beat groove with shimmering, tremeloed guitar chords, mournful harmonica, and subtle electric piano. On “Love Keeps Hanging On” Phil May lays his soul bare on a heart-wrenching Shakespearean tragedy of a ballad, enhanced by some tasteful lead guitar work from his old mate David Gilmour, and an epic wide-screen production. “Fly Away”, on the other hand, is

Jack Greenwood

pure gossamer, a stark acoustic ballad with Phil’s achingly heartfelt lead vocal joined by the group’s caressing harmonies. Recorded live in one take, it’s the Pretty Things at their purest and truest; an absolute gem. Phil was singing better than he ever had. Now in his mid-fifties, his voice had taken on a new resonance and depth, while his phrasing remained as instinctive and expressive as ever. Other standouts include the tense, attitude-stoked “Everlasting Flame”, “Not Givin’ In”, the hauntingly desolate “Pure

89

Cold Stone”, and “Blue Turns to Red.” In fact, if the album has a fault it’s that there’s too much of it. The CD format encouraged more than 64 minutes of music to be included, Mark St. John, who produced the record, shoulders the blame for not keeping it brief, and they all believe that a far more impactful statement could have been made in 45 minutes or less, jettisoning the cover songs: the previously released “Eve of Destruction”, “Play With Fire” and Phil’s duet with Ronnie Spector, “Mony Mony”.

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M A S 90

91

Y L N

O N O I T A R ST Phil May, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page

The legendary Ronnie Lane Mobile Studio parked outside the 100 Club, owned by Mark St. John since the 1980s and used by the band to record their 40th Anniversary show and their 50th Anniversary Live Album

E D R O F | E L P M SA

N O M

The band returned to America in September for a three-week tour that began in Vancouver, Canada, then sent them across the United States. This momentous occasion was marked by the American release of a brand new single on Norton Records, “All Light Up”. A bold psychedelic anthem with wheezing, surging Mellotron, chanting school children and stomping drums, it was described by Phil at the time as “sort of a cross between ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.” It was backed by another fine new song, “Pretty Beat”, which referenced a number of infamous episodes in the band’s history, including the Phil the Greek shotgun incident, and the night Phil and Viv had a double date with Judy Garland and Rudolf Nureyev.

Nineteen ninety-nine had proved to be one of the most eventful years in the Pretty Things’ long history, and its momentum carried them through the next several years. They returned to the States in August 2001 for another Cavestomp performance, and on October 19th of that year performed the S.F. Sorrow album at the Royal Festival Hall in front of more than 2,000 people, again with the participation of Arthur Brown and David Gilmour. They also kept busy with regular tours of Europe and the UK. Ultimately it proved impossible to sustain this lineup of the band. Skip was the first to drop out, at the end of 2001, citing health issues, although he would return from time to time, whenever he was up for it.

In Skip’s absence John Povey and Mark St. John

92

took turns behind the drum kit and the band rolled on, including a short but memorable performance on Riker’s Island, New York in August 2004 at Little Steven (Van Zandt)’s Underground Garage Festival.

Work also continued on a new album, but the sessions proved to be problematic. With so many members involved in the songwriting process, the band was being pulled in too many directions.

Thirteen months into the sessions, with eight tracks completed, they decided to pull the plug.

Phil, Dick, Frank and Mark later reconvened in a huge old church in Brighton and began work on another project, a blues album; a return to their Dartford Delta roots. “We’d been trawling through all the blues catalogs,” explains Phil.

“We were given access to a complete archive of stuff, which was very interesting, and basically we were in search of stuff that we’d never recorded before that we thought Dick and I—or with Jon and Frank—could do something with.”

From the ‘blues’ sessions came several tracks that would later be included on Balboa Island: the raw, slide guitar-driven “Feel Like Goin’ Home”, the soulful, piano-dominated “Freedom Song”, and an absolutely chilling take of Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”. These and other blues-based numbers were also road-tested in parts of Europe in 2006 by a stripped down semi-acoustic Pretty Things line-up featuring just Phil, Dick and Frank.

Eventually the concept of a pure blues album

was also abandoned, but the experience helped give the band the impetus and the direction they needed to pick up work on the ‘real’ new album again. “We now felt like there was a direction,” says Phil, “and the only way we were gonna have some control of that was by being selective about the material we went in to record.”

The task of writing much of the new material fell to Phil May and Frank Holland, and some of the other band members were forced to take a backseat for a while. “I gave Phil and Frank a writing brief to fulfill the dark, grown up, relevant, deep blues with attitude,” recounts Mark, “which the record does achieve in its best parts. To affect this, we all had some harsh words, and Skip bowed out of the

93

recordings. Jon was out for personal reasons and Wally was less than impressed by the direction, keeping a little distance, dipping in and out as things developed. Accordingly, for a lot of the time, it was Phil, Dick (on bass), Frank (usually on his fabulous Epiphone ‘65 Texan acoustic), and me on my ancient 1957 Trixon Telstar kit—shaped like flowerpots! Frank just hit the ground running and kept coming up with great starting points for the songs, which we developed in the studio.”

This relaxed, organic approach, recorded entirely on vintage analogue equipment at Mark’s Cote Basque studio served the material well. “The new writing was based very much around detuned guitars,” explains Phil. “A much more

Y L N

SuperMin! - our trusted Tour manager for the last 7 years - caught in a rare quiet moment in Italy

Viv Prince, November 2009

Mark St John 17.11.11, singing backing vocals

N O M

E D R O F | E L P M SA

SuperMin, Jack, George, Dick & Mark - Australian Tour in 2012

basic blues, raw, live approach—the way we’d been doing the blues album. So the songs that came in were approached like that. And the signpost for us was ‘Robert Johnson.’ When we put that down, we knew where we were going.” Based around a simple, hypnotic bass line, the atmospheric eight-minute “(Blues For) Robert Johnson” is a deep, dark journey into the very heart of the blues, and it became the album’s spiritual centerpiece. Povey and Waller later added their distinctive harmonic blend to the track, although others like “Beat Goes On” and “In the Beginning” featured a new Pretties vocal blend—harder, looser and more off the wall. Hardly The Beach Boys, but a shout for attention, that was a strange throwback to the callbacks of their first incarnation.

By the summer of 2007 the album was more or less completed. It was released the following year on St. John’s Cote Basque label in Europe and on ZOHO Roots in the US. Although Balboa Island is a dark, bluesy album at its core, a

Stephen Dale Petit, Ron Wood, Dick Taylor, Mick Taylor

range of other styles were also on display, including gutsy rockers like “Buried Alive” and the album’s stirring opening track “The Beat Goes On”. Starting with a stampeding drum intro that recalls the Damned’s classic “New Rose”, “The Beat Goes On” is a storming, surging anthem of a song with crashing power chords, thunderous drum work from Mark, and a sneering punk vocal. Fame may be fleeting, is the song’s message, but authentic rock ‘n’ roll passion never dies: “The beat goes on inside me and you … it does!” Phil reiterates as the song powers towards its climax like an out of control locomotive. Other highlights include the raw, emotional “Livin’ in My Skin,” “Mimi,” a playful Bo Diddley shuffle authored by Dick Taylor, and the May/Povey composition “Dearly Beloved.”

One of the last tracks to be completed, “Dearly Beloved” was inspired by a TV documentary that Phil’s daughter, Sorrel, a freelance TV producer, was involved in making. The film investigated a rash of teenage suicides spurred by earlier childhood sexual abuse within a cult in Southern

94

O N O I T A R ST

California. “[The song] starts off with the grave scene that the documentary started off with, which I found quite moving,” says Phil. More ornately structured than most of the rest of the album, its layered vocal harmonies, stately keyboard lines and shifting movements harkening back to Parachute, especially when the lead vocal passes from Phil to Wally, whose vocal on the bridge is just terrific. “Wally was huge in that,” emphasizes Mark, “really in his element: big, flowing bass, and he’s such a great singer.

We were all having a blast by then, with Jon back on piano and the whole thing just burning really.” Nestling comfortably next to “Dearly Beloved” is the similarly psychedelically-tinged “All Light Up”, which, along with “Pretty Beat”, predates the rest of the album by several years.

The album ends with the title track, a soft, mesmerizing acoustic number written by Frank, who also sings the lead vocal, accompanied by Scarlett Wrench of Cote Basque label-mates the Malchicks. It’s a beautiful, deep, delicately

Jack Greenwood, Frank Holland, Phil May, Dick Taylor, and George Woosey

delivered piece about loss and grieving. “How do we go on?” it asks, only to reply that we must, all of us, go through that loss yet somehow continue: “World leaning over,” is the eerie refrain, “World carry on.” “Balboa Island” gives the record an eerie, reflective coda that follows in the tradition of other Pretty Things albums like “Loneliest Person” (S.F. Sorrow), “Parachute” (Parachute), “Bruise in the Sky” (Silk Torpedo), and “Theme for Michelle” (Savage Eye).

Of Balboa Island, Phil May says: “For all the things that happened to us, everything’s that gone on in the band, it was the perfect album expression of where we were, in a kind of naked way, not a triumphal, flamboyant ‘this is who we are’ way. It’s almost self-derogatory; it’s opening up. It’s almost a wounded piece rather than a proud piece. I think this is a very honest album.”

By the time the album was released in 2008, 17-year-old Jack Greenwood was occupying the drum seat. However, plans for a US tour

with Arthur Brown and the Malchicks fell through due to family health problems. Wally Waller and then Jon Povey dropped out of the band shortly afterwards, and the Pretty Things reconfigured as a leaner, more compact unit, bringing in another teenager, George Woosey from the Malchicks, on bass. This infusion of young blood seemed to give the band a new lease on life, and they embarked on a rigorous live schedule across Europe and the UK that continues to the present day. In 2010 they toured Japan for the first time, and in December 2012 they trekked to Australia and New Zealand for a series of rapturously received live shows.

In Melbourne they were joined onstage by original bass player John Stax, who also blew some harp on “Don’t Bring Me Down.”

At the time of writing, a new live album is about to be released, Live at the 100 Club, featuring a December 2010 performance of the entire first album, recorded on the Ronnie Lane Mobile (which Mark purchased from Ronnie in 1983) in

95

full-blooded analogue sound. Full circle then, as we liner note writers always like to say.

An album of brand new material is also in the works, and should see release in late 2014. The beat goes on… again and again.

More than a half a century after Phil May, Dick Taylor and John Stax first got together to form a scruffy, anarchic R&B group to play their art school dances, the Pretty Things roll on, defying expectations, confounding critics, avoiding the ruts, and keeping all of us guessing as to what their next move might be. In a career plagued by bad timing, bad decisions, bad habits, and just plain bad luck, they’ve stayed true to themselves. They’re still the art school outsiders: immune to fashion, immune to commerce, immune to compromise; filling our grey streets with bouquets from a cloudy sky.

Mike Stax June 6, 2014

sectioned song. This rather concise edit (just over three minutes long) was discovered on an EMI acetate notated as “Defecting Grey No. 3.”

24 Rain

(Johnny Dee) Peer Music UK Ltd p 1964 BBC (Ellas McDaniel) ARC Music Corp p 1964 BBC

11 Why

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Co Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

RARITIES DISC ONE 1 Don’t Bring Me Down

2 Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut 3 Johnny B. Goode

(Chuck Berry) ARC Music Corp p 1964 BBC

(McGuinn/Crosby) Reservoir One America/Sixteen Stars Music p 1968 Snapper Music

band’s set since the art school days, and has been rolled out as an encore regularly ever since (often with Skip on lead vocals). The fact that in fifty years they’ve only ever bothered to learn the lyrics to one verse is a testament to their deeply ingrained nonchalance.

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Co Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

25 Cries From the Midnight Circus

11 Joey

1-3: Live On The Beat Room, BBC2.

December 1964. The Pretty Things made at least two appearances on BBC TV’s The Beat Room, but all that appears to survive is this audio recording, which provides some indication of the ferocity of the band’s early live performances. What is also notable is Phil May’s exhortation to parents in “Mama Keep Your Big Mouth Shut” that “I’m in love with your little girl, and your little boy’s in love with me.”

Live In Hyde Park, London, July 27, 1968. This

4 Cry To Me

13 Alexander

20-25: Westbourne Terrace Demos, June-September 1969. In the summer of 1969, Wally and Phil began recording home demos for the upcoming Parachute album on a Revox tape recorder, sometimes bouncing down tracks so they could multilayer vocal harmonies or guitar parts.

Producer Norman Smith would then listen and select the strongest songs, after which Phil would refine and complete the lyrics. The six songs songs here comprise the embryonic version of most of Side One of Parachute, with many elements of the final arrangements already in place.

14 Renaissance Fair

RARITIES DISC TWO 1 I’d Love Her If I Knew What to Do (Version 1)

era Pretty Things performed this number in a satirical horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker. Vincent Price starred in the movie, and the sight of him dancing to the Pretty Things is yet another surreal moment in the band’s history.

15 S.F. Sorrow Is Born

2 Seen Her Face Before

13 Cause And Effect

(Bert Russell) Robert Mellin Music Publishing Co p 1965 Snapper Music

Alternate Version, Recorded May-June 1965.

The band’s recording of Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me” originally featured the backing vocals of just Brian Pendleton and John Stax. It was only after promo copies were circulated that they brought in Leslie Duncan and Ian Stirling to sing additional backups.

Dick Taylor’s lead guitar was also brought down lower in the mix. When the single was issued in America, the original mix was used in error.

5 Photographer

(May/Stirling/Taylor) Dunmo Music Publishing Co p 1966 Snapper Music

Rough Mix From Acetate, Circa September 1966. Source: Acetate from Mike Stax collection.

This early rough mix of “Photographer” is significantly hotter than the version that eventually appeared on the Emotions album. The horns are much lower in the mix, and it features a completely different lead vocal take.

Byrds song was a staple of the Pretty Things’ live set throughout 1968-69, and often served as a platform for improvisation. This raw but undeniably powerful version was apparently taped by a young Nick Saloman a.k.a. Bevis Frond.

12 She Says Good Morning

(May/Taylor/Waller/Alder) Lupus Music Co Ltd p 1969 Snapper Music (May/Taylor/Waller/Povey) De Wolfe Music Ltd p 1969 Snapper Music (Crosby/McGuinn) Reservoir One America/Sixteen Stars Music p 1969 Snapper Music

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

(May/Taylor/Waller) Lupus Music Co Ltd p 1969 Snapper Music

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

12-15: Live At The Paradiso, Amsterdam. March 29, 1969. This good quality live recording shows the

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

SF Sorrow era band at the height of their powers, performing two songs from the album along with “Alexander” and a superb cover of the Byrds’ “Renaissance Fair” (which is reprised on this year’s brand new Pretties album).

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller/Jon Povey/Antoine Debarge

17 Eagle’s Son

(May/Taylor/Waller/Povey) De Wolfe Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller/Jon Povey/Antoine Debarge

(May/Waller) Intersong Music Ltd p 1967 Snapper Music

7 Out In The Night

(Stirling/Taylor) Dunmo Music Publishing Co p 1967 Snapper Music

8 One Long Glance

(May/Taylor/Waller) Dunmo Music Publishing Co p 1967 Snapper Music

6-8: Emotions Demos, Circa Early 1967. These are working demos of three songs that would later appear on the Emotions album. None of them yet have the input of arranger Reg Tilsley, who would add horns and strings to most of the album, and all three have different vocal tracks. In fact “Bright Lights…” is a completely different version, the lyrics not yet completed.

9 Children

(May/Taylor/Waller) Dunmo Music Publishing Co p 1967 Snapper Music

Alternate Version, Circa Early 1967. Another stripped down alternate version from the Emotions sessions. Among other things: no kazoos!

10 Defecting Grey

(May/Taylor/Waller) Lupus Music Co. Ltd p 1967 Snapper Music

Alternate Mix/Edit From 1967 Acetate.

Source: Acetate from Brice Baron collection.

Norman Smith and the group experimented with several different mixes and/or edits of this multi-

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller/Jon Povey/Antoine Debarge

19 It’ll Never Be Me

(May/Taylor/Waller/Povey) De Wolfe Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller/Jon Povey/Antoine Debarge

16-19: Philippe Debarge Sessions, Circa Summer Of 1969. Philippe Debarge, a wealthy Frenchman and a good friend of the group, commissioned Phil and Wally to write and record an album for him in 1969. The lead vocal tracks were sung by Philippe, while all the backing vocals and music are performed by the Pretty Things. You can hear the fledgling “Scene One” (from yet to be released Parachute) in “Graves of Grey”. The strongly psychedelic “Eagles Son” and “It’ll Never Be Me” were culled from the fabled Electric Banana sessions of a year earlier, and given new arrangements for Debarge’s project. The album, which gives a unique insight into the band’s psychedelic credentials at the time, remained unreleased until 2009.

20 Scene One

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

21 The Good Mr. Square

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

22 She Was Tall, She Was High

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

23 In The Square/The Letter

(May/Waller) Lupus Music Ltd p 1969 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

96

was remixed and edited down to just over three minutes for release as a single in several countries. US promo singles featured both mono and stereo mixes.

(May/Tolson/Povey) ITC Filmscores p 1980 ITC Filmscores

Movie Soundtrack, 1980. In 1980 the Cross Talk

4 Cold Stone

(May/Waller/Tolson) Lupus Music Ltd. p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller (May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

EM

(May/Waller) Copyright Control p 1970/71 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

1-6: Westbourne Terrace Demos, June 1970-Early 1971. After Parachute was completed, May and Waller continued to record new demos, sometimes with the help of new guitarist Pete Tolson.

With the exception of “Cold Stone,” none of the songs here have ever been released in any other form. The hi-hat effect on “Cold Stone” is the sound of the metal rotating device of a standing ashtray being struck with a drumstick. The effect worked so well that the ashtray was duly transported to Abbey Road for the final “Cold Stone” session.

7 Wild And Free

(May/Waller/Tolson) Copyright Control p 1971 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

8 I’d Love Her If I Knew What To Do (Version 2)

Out Of The Island, 1987. Recorded in Munster, Germany, in July 1987, Out Of The Island was essentially a live-in-the-studio set, made using a twotrack digital recorder. For the sessions Phil and Dick were joined by Joe Shaw (guitar), Roelf Ter Veld (bass) and Bertram Engel (drums). “Cause And Effect” was the standout track, and one of just a handful of new songs included.

ON

5 You Never Told Me Lies

14 Holding Onto Love

(May/Taylor/Holland/Engels) Cote Basque Music Publishing Ltd p 1989 Snapper Music

Rage Before Beauty Outtake, 1989. As the sessions for the Rage Before Beauty album were spread out over 18 years, inevitably there was a surplus of material. This agonized slow burner, recorded in 1989 and mixed down in ’91, was one of the best of the tracks that didn’t make the final cut.

15 You Can’t Judge A Book

(Dixon) Jewel Music Publishing Co Ltd p 1991 May/Taylor/Yardbirds

16 Chain Of Fools

(Covay) Warner Chappel Music Ltd p 1991 May/Taylor/Yardbirds

7-8: Home Demos, October/November 1971.

After Wally left the group, Phil and Peter began writing together, recording their ideas on the trusty Revox.

Both of these songs were demoed during the run-up to Freeway Madness, but were discarded as the album took a different direction.

15-16: Pretty Things-Yardbird Blues Band, 1991.

In January 1991, Phil, Dick, and Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty traveled to Chicago where producer George Paulus teamed them with ex-Canned Heat bassist Richard Hite, and rhythm guitarist Studebaker John for sessions at Seagrape Recording Studios.

The album, The Chicago Blues Tapes 1991, was released later that year on Demon in the UK and St. George Records in the US.

9 Spider Woman

17 No Questions

(May/Tolson) Copyright Control p 1972 BBC

(May/Paulus/Grinaldi) Be Seeing You Music p 1991 May/Taylor/Yardbirds

BBC Radio Session, 1972. This high energy rocker was in the group’s live set for a while, but never made it onto a record.

Pretty Things-Yardbird Blues Band, 1993.

(May/Waller/Tolson) Copyright Control p 1971 Licensed from Phil May/Wally Waller

10 Route 66

(Bobby Troup) Troup-London LLC p 1973 BBC

(Dylan) Special Rider Music p 2005/06 Serpentine Holdings

19 Hoochie Coochie Man

(Dixon) Bug Music p 2005/06 Serpentine Holdings

20 Look Away Now

(Holland/May/St. John) Cote Basque Music Publishing p 2005/06 Serpentine Holdings

18-20: Balboa Island Outtakes, Recorded 2005/2006. The Balboa Island sessions also yielded

more recordings than were needed, including a chillingly intense reading of Willy Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”, and the stirring “Look Away Now”.

DVD ONE Midnight To Six 1965 - 1970 A Documentary Film By David Peck & Reelin’ In The Years Productions

Y L N

Director: David Peck Producers: David Peck, Phillip Galloway, Tom Gulotta & Rob Bowman for Reelin’ In The Years Productions Associate Producers: Mike Stax & Mark Decerbo Editor: Steve Scoville for Blue H20 Productions Executive Production for the Pretty Things: Mark St. John

O N O I T A R ST

12 Monster Club

3 Everything You Do Is Fine

D R O F | E L P M A S

6 Bright Lights Of The City

18 Graves Of Grey

Mono Us Single Mix, 1974. Silk Torpedo’s “Joey”

(May) Cote Basque Music Publishing Ltd p 1987 Melville Corporation Ltd

6 Take A Look At Me

16 You Might Even Say

(May) Sole Survivors Music Inc p 1974 Swan Song Inc

18 It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

Two years later, the same musicians reconvened in Chicago for more sessions, resulting in the Wine, Women & Whiskey album, released by Demon in 1993.

This original number was the standout track.

21 Helter Skelter

(Lennon/McCartney) Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC p 2012 Serpentine Holdings

The White EP, Fruits Der Mer, 2012.

In December 2012, the Fruits de Mer label issued a double seven-inch vinyl EP featuring various modern psychedelic acts covering songs from the Beatles’ White album. The Pretty Things’ submission was this monolithic reading of “Helter Skelter.”

10” ACETATE 1 Defecting Grey

(May/Taylor/Waller) Lupus Music Co. Ltd p 1967 Snapper Music

Full-Length Demo Version. IBC Acetate, Circa September 1967. Source: Jon Povey.

2 Turn My Head

(May/Taylor/Waller) Cote Basque Music Publishing Ltd p 1967 Snapper Music

Demo. Advision Acetate, September 19, 1967.

Source: Acetate from Brice Baron collection.

Interviews

Jon Povey & Phil May interviews: Filmed at Metropolis Studios, London, May 2, 2010 Skip Alan, Wally Waller & Dick Taylor interviews: Filmed at Metropolis Studios, London, May 3, 2010 John Stax: Filmed in Melbourne, August 22, 2010

All interviews conducted by Rob Bowman except John Stax interview, conducted by Robert de Young © 2014 Reelin’ In The Years Productions, LLC under license to Snapper Music Running time: approx. 2 hours

The Pretty Things. On Film Directed by Caterina Arvet & Anthony West Written by Caterina Arvet Produced by Bryan Morrison Executive Producer: Anthony West © 1966 Snapper Music Running time: approx. 13 minutes

Rosalyn Video

(Duncan/Farley) Francis Day & Hunter Ltd © 1995 Melville Corporation Ltd Running time: approx. 2 minutes

This track dates from the same period as the demo sessions for “Defecting Grey”, and shows the band stretching the limited technology of the demo studio as they began to hone a new sound for themselves.

They would revisit “Turn My Head” for a BBC Top Gear session a few months later, but this original demo version, transferred from a recently discovered acetate, makes its first ever appearance here. Due to the degraded condition of the acetate disc, the sound quality maybe less than perfect, but we felt this track warranted inclusion. The band just cut a brand new version of this song for their next album.

Eve Of Destruction Video

3 Don’t Bring Me Down

Phil and Skipper John and Wally Dick Mark and Frank

(Johnny Dee) Peer Music UK Ltd p 1964 Snapper Music

4 I Can Never Say

(The Pretty Things) Intersong Music Ltd p 1964 Snapper Music

Unreleased Versions From Emidisc Acetate, Circa Late 1964. Source: Acetate from Andrew Few collection. These two tracks, which appear to be

demos or rehearsals, were discovered on an acetate disc by collector Andrew Few. The version of “I Can Never Say” is particularly interesting as it shows one of the band’s first original compositions first taking form.

Again, due to the condition of the acetate some surface noise may be evident. N.B. “Don’t Bring Me Down” fades in late on the acetate.

Credits:

Mastering and sound restoration: Mike Kamoo at Earthling Studios (assisted by Mike Stax). Thanks to Brice Baron, Andrew Few, Phil May, Wally Waller, Mark St. John and Mike Stax.

Live At The Hippodrome, Golders Green, August 1973. This number had been in the

97

(Sloan) MCA Music Ltd © 1989 Snapper Music Running time: approx. 3 minutes

DVD TWO S.F. Sorrow Live At Abbey Road Filmed at Abbey Road Studios, 6th September 1998 Director: Steve Graham Producers: Steve Graham, John Doukas, Brian Leafe Editor: Dan Nelson Executive Producers: Dougie Dudgeon, Jon Beecher

Meet The Pretty Things

Bonus Content Roadrunner

(Ellas McDaniel) Arc Music Corp/Jewel Music Publishing

Route 66

(Bobby Troup) Troup-London LLC © 1998 Snapper Music Running time: approx. 2 hours

THE PRETTY THINGS WOULD LIKE TO THANK: The Band - All The Way Back – to all members of The Pretty Things, past or present, living or dead, then or now. You know who you are – we know who you are. It’s a small, select club – and we all wear this badge with pride. Thank you, guys…..

Y L N

The Family And Friends – we want to thank our families, Mums and Dads who put up with the flak we attracted back in the day and even now. Our wives and partners – past and present, thank you, we’ve never been easy, but the ride was smoother with you and the memories sweeter. To our friends – and you know who you are – thanks for still being there – however many years later – and for the many years to come. And to all of you - thanks for the love, fun, support, tears, passion, energy, highs, lows, triumphs and regrets. Without all of you, it wouldn’t have happened like this. And this was how it should have happened.

O N O I T A R ST

Lost, Dead Or Missing In Action – Brian Pendleton, Bryan Morrison, Tony Howard, Jimmy Duncan, Lionel Bart, Steve O’Rourke, “H” - Howard Parker, Pete Watts, Robbie Acda, Peter Grant, Glyn Johns, Ian Stirling, Simon Dee, Norman Smith, Gordon Edwards…..

The Special Record Producers – Bobby Graham, Steve Rowlands, Bernie Andrews, Glyn Johns, Norman “Hurricane” Smith, Mark St. John…..

The Special Managers – Bryan Morrison, Peter Grant, Mark St. John.

Musicians Who Helped To Make The Noise – Muddy n Wolf, Bo and Jimmy, John Coltrane (for Dick), Nicky Hopkins, Jimmy and Robert, Brian Jones and the rest of the early Stones, Bob Dylan, Margo Lewis, Van Morrison, David Gilmour…..

DJs, Scribblers, Movers n Shakers And Supporters – Brian Matthews, Johnny Walker, Simon Dee, John Peel, Jeff Dexter, Mark Lamarr, Keith Altham, Alan Clayson, Kenny Kessler, Robin Denselow, and the very special Mike Stax.

N O M

Faces – Then And Now - John Stephens of Carnaby Street, Brian Jones, Rudolf Nuryev, Judy Garland, Paul Danquah, Fabulous Magazine Radio Caroline, Annello & Davide, Long John Baldry, Lionel Bart, Norman Wisdom, Tony Calder and Andrew Oldham, Cora Barnes, Lynn Seymour, Judy Totton, Iggy, Stephen Tyler, David Bowie, Bill Nighy, Ian Broudie, Henry Padovani, Serge and Kasabian, Mike Stax, Jon Beecher and Dougie Dudgeon, Thomas Neelson, Paul and The Smokehouse crew, The Ronnie Lane Mobile, Little Steven.

E D R O F | E L P M SA Stops Along The Way – Sidcup Art School, The 100 Club, The Star Club, The Scotch, The A&R Club, Blaises, Philip’s Stanhope Place, The Marquee, Biarritz, The Speakeasy, The Revolution, UFO, The Riki Tik, tiles, The Eel Pie Club, Maida Vale Studios, Olympic Studios, The Olympia and Alhambra, Paris, Brighton, 1st IOW Festival, The Rainbow, IOW (Dick lives there!), The Whisky, Cavestomp, The Ronnie Lane Mobile, The Giaconda, Alberto’s, Fouberts, and….. Abbey Road Studios.

On The Road – Peter Harasim, Lofty Riches, Phil the Greek (Alexander Andropolis), Pete Watts, Howard Parker, Clive Caulson, Colin Graham – “Jock”, SuperMin (Mindaugas Nutautas), Jim Driver, Jeff Horton, Henry at The Blues Garage.

Extraordinary Legal Services – Mark St. John, Neil Peakall and Jonathan Crystal – without them this Box would never have happened and we would never have had the chance to tell the story to anyone. Thank you, guys.

The Business – Bryan Morrison, Norman Smith, Peter Grant, Tony Howard, Cora Barnes, Nigel Elderton, Crispin Evans, Cliff, Fred, Johnny and Richard and everyone at Snapper Music – 20 years now guys, without a cross word – almost a marriage! Thomas and Repertoire Records, Mike Stax, Billy and Miriam and Norton Records, Colin Miles, Ian Crockett (super salesman!), Jon Beecher and Dougie Dudgeon, Judy Totton and Lea and Rolandos Pyliotis – our old friends!

Our Special Thanks – to Carl Glover, for his incredible artwork on the box, and for us on other projects across the years, Thanks Carl. To Brice Baron, for your fantastic collection and access to your archives – what a collector!

To Paul Drummond for your mint LPs and artwork – couldn’t have done it without you. And to Mike Kamoo, for your fantastic mastering and retrieving those old sounds from the grave – Thanks, Mike.

Finally to Mike Stax - our staunch supporter and old friend, who has been fundamental to the production and creation of the Box Set and for the wonderful writing in the book, and for Ugly Things – still the best fanzine on the planet!

And With Our Love – to Mark St. John, our longest-serving manager, with nearly 30 years served. Our friend, supporter, producer, ally, co-conspirator and an integral part of The Pretty Things – this box wouldn’t have been possible without Mark and all his work and effort. This music wouldn’t have been here to document without him and we wouldn’t still be out there, walking the walk, without him.......... Thanks again, Mark – in it to the end together!

The Pretty Things Are - Phil May (lead vocals), Dick Taylor (lead guitar), Frank Holland (guitar, harp, vocals), Jack Greenwood (drums and vocals), George Woosey (bass and vocals).

Still In The Frame – Skip Alan (drums and mischief), Jon Povey (keyboards, sitar and vocals), Wally Waller (bass, vocals, rhythm guitar).

98

99

Y L N

N O M

O N O I T A R ST

E D R O F | E L P M SA 100