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Posts tagged ‘Manfred Mann’

Nov 6

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Just before the world changed

Sixty years ago this month, “Love Me Do” made the charts and the world changed. But what was it changing from? Not just the drab, complacent cardigans-and-Billy Cotton caricature of post-war British culture. Before the Beatles and Stones came along to provide a focus, there were plenty of signs, if you were looking, that something was about to happen. And two dozen of them are collected in A Snapshot in Time, a new compilation of sounds from 1960-63 that can be seen today as a series of premonitions.

I was 15 at the time, primed for change and and looking for those signs, in particular anything that resembled the incursion of the blues or modern jazz into mainstream pop music. “Sugar Baby Pts 1 and 2” by Jimmy Powell, a raw-voiced R&B singer from Birmingham was one. The more decorous Lyn Cornell — formerly of Liverpool’s Vernons Girls — singing Jon Hendricks’s lyric to Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin'” was another. Anthony Newley’s skewed Cockney-hipster version of “Strawberry Fair”, too. They’re included in this collection, which is subtitled “Society, scandal and the first stirrings of modernism 1960-63”.

One of the defining events of this fast-changing culture was the broadcast of the first episode of the satire show That Was the Week That Was by the BBC in November 1962. One track is a reminder of the national mood caught and amplified by TW3: “Christine” by Miss X exploits the Profumo affair in a cocktail-piano rhumba punctuated by lubricious faux-ingénue vocal interjections from Joyce Blair (sister of Lionel). Produced by John Barry, with the piano played by the Spanish aristocrat and film actor Jaime Mora y Aragón, and released on Jeff Kruger’s Ember label, it was propelled into the lower end of the charts by scandalised newspaper stories.

More seriously indicative of the future was the music evolving among those who had come out of the skiffle, folk and trad scenes, like Long John Baldry singing Willie Dixon’s “Built for Comfort” with Blues Incorporated, the guitarist Davy Graham’s solo set-piece “Anji” and two tracks, “Country Line Special” and “Chicago Calling”, released as the first single by the singer and harmonica player Cyril Davies, the Ken Colyer of British R&B. Others also came by way of the jazz scene, like the tenorist Red Prince with the Danger Man theme and the trombonist Don Lang with “Wicked Woman” (composed by the person who was to become P. J. Proby). Oh, and Sounds Incorporated’s Markeys-like “Sounds Like Locomotion” and “Why Should We Not”, Manfred Mann’s first single, a jazz-waltz instrumental heavy on alto saxophone, organ, harmonica and tom-toms.

A number of the tracks — including those by Powell, Lang and Cordell — came into being because Jack Good, the great producer of the TV show Oh Boy, had an A&R deal with Decca Records. Good was a visionary who wrote columns in the music press extolling the virtues of US records such as Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl” and Bruce Channel’s “Hey Baby” (which, of course, provided the inspiration for John Lennon’s harmonica on “Love Me Do”). Among the three Powell tracks is a version of “Tom Hark”, a South African kwela song that had been a hit for Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes, a pennywhistle band from Johannesburg, in 1958.

The track that sums it up best for me is “Orange Street”, a finger-snapping instrumental by the Blue Flames, with Georgie Fame on Hammond organ. I bought it on a school trip to London and yearned to be a part of the groovy scene to which it provided a soundtrack. Pretty soon, we all were.

* A Snapshot in Time, compiled by Rob Finnis and Roger Armstrong, is released on the Ace label.

Jan 2

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Group Sounds Four & Five

From left: Jack Bruce, Lyn Dobson, Henry Lowther, Tom McGuinness, Mike Hugg and Manfred Mann

Tom McGuinness remembers a Sunday night in 1965 when he, Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg visited the Green Man pub on Blackheath Hill to see a modern jazz outfit called Group Sounds Five. He thinks they must have had a motive, because the band’s two horn players — the trumpeter Henry Lowther and the saxophonist Lyn Dobson — soon became members of Manfred Mann, staying until the summer of 1966. After the departure of Mike Vickers, and Tom’s switch from bass back to guitar, they were also joined by Jack Bruce. Tom recalls that Manfred lured Bruce away from John Mayall, who was miffed enough to write a song about the defection: “Double Crossing Time” appeared on the Blues Breakers album.

Group Sounds Five had acquired the habit of rehearsing three times a week, even though they landed on average no more than one gig a month, according to their drummer, Jon Hiseman, and Lowther and Dobson continued with them even after joining the Manfreds. The departure of their pianist, Ken McCarthy, turned them into Group Sounds Four, with Bruce taking over from Ron Rubin on double bass. Both incarnations appear for the first time on record in a new release called Black and White Raga, documenting recordings made by for the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club in November 1965 and April 1966, preserved in the extensive personal tape collection of Hiseman, who died in 2018.

This was a remarkably creative time in the London scene, with musicians like Dick Heckstall-Smith, Ginger Baker, Harry Beckett, Danny Thompson, Brian Auger and John McLaughlin switching back and forth between the modern jazz and R&B scenes. Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, George Fame’s Blue Flames, Herbie Goins’s Nightimers and the Graham Bond Organisation welcomed players comfortable with both idioms. Lowther, Dobson and Bruce were able to make a living with Manfred Mann — whose repertoire included tunes like Cannonball Adderley’s “Sack o’ Woe” and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” alongside “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Oh No, Not My Baby” — while continuing to pursue their commitment to the sort of avant-garde jazz exemplified by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

The four pieces on the album by Group Sounds Five, with McCarthy on piano and Rubin on bass, most strongly reflect the Coltrane influence. An emphasis on modal structures is evident through “Red Planet” (a Coltrane original also known as “Miles’ Mode”), a hard-bop recasting of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”, McCarthy’s driving “Celebrity Stomp” and an extended treatment of Mike Taylor’s complex “Black and White Raga”, based on shifting between the black and white keys of the piano. The brilliant but ill-fated Taylor was an admirer of the group (Hiseman, Rubin and Bruce recorded with him), and gave them this piece, which he never recorded himself; he would have been pleased with this intense and compelling treatment, which maintains its tension and narrative thread through 11 absorbing minutes.

Seven months later, now down to a quartet, the band recorded three tracks: Sigmund Romberg’s “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”, Bruce’s “Snow” and Dobson’s “Straight Away”. These are even more impressive: the confidence has grown, individually and collectively, and there is the feeling that something genuinely original is beginning to emerge. It’s most fully evident in “Snow”, a five-minute tone poem in which the composer’s bowed bass converses with the two horns, eventually joined by Hiseman’s mallets. There’s a distinctly Northern European cast to this piece, reminiscent of the writing of Krzysztof Komeda and Palle Mikkelborg.

It would be hard to overpraise the quality of improvising, particularly on the later tracks. Lowther’s endless flow of ideas and Dobson’s rhythmical fluency and tempered aggression are matched by the response of the bass and drums, Hiseman making a particularly powerful impression with a solo on “Straight Away” as architecturally coherent as it is technically advanced. Had this band been given the chance to make an album, the product would no doubt have stood alongside Joe Harriott’s “Abstract” and Mike Taylor’s “Trio” as an fine example of the forward-looking music being made in London at the time. Thanks to Hiseman’s archival instinct, this rediscovery fills an important gap.

Between these two sessions, on March 18, 1966, the Manfreds found themselves at Abbey Road recording a song called “Pretty Flamingo”. Jack Bruce sang the high harmony and Lyn Dobson played the distinctive flute part on what became the band’s second UK No 1 hit. Those were different times.

* Black and White Raga is out now on the Jazz in Britain label (jazzinbritain.org). The photograph is taken from the cover of Manfred Mann’s 1966 EP Instrumental Asylum, and is the only one I can find featuring all three of Jack Bruce, Lyn Dobson and Henry Lowther.

Jun 6

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The sound of Shel Talmy

Shel TalmyOf the handful of Americans who landed in the UK in the 1960s to try and reverse the tide of the British Invasion, none had a more profound impact than Shel Talmy. A 25-year-old studio engineer with virtually no experience as a record producer but with a handful of Beach Boys and Lou Rawls acetates given to him by his mentor, Nik Venet, in order to persuade prospective employers of his bona fides, Talmy arrived from California in the summer of 1962. Dick Rowe, Decca’s A&R chief, was impressed enough to assign him to work with the Bachelors. It wasn’t really his idea of pop music, but when “Charmaine” was a hit, he was on his way. And after that came a handful of sessions that changed the way British pop records sounded.

Talmy had worked as a studio engineer in Hollywood, miking up the Wrecking Crew. He knew how to make records that didn’t sound as though the desks were being manned by men in lab coats who regarded distortion as a form of heresy. The results, when he was let loose on a new generation of English bands, included the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting for You”, and the Who’s “I Can’t Explain”, “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” and “My Generation”. He knew how to use session men like Jimmy Page and Nicky Hopkins while retaining the raw energy that characterised the young bands in their club appearances.

Making Time is the title of a new Ace Records compilation of his work in London’s recording studios. It’s full of riches and curiosities. My favourite — indeed, one of my favourite singles of the decade — is “Jack O’Diamonds” by the American actor Ben Carruthers and the Deep. As I wrote in a piece on this blog three years ago, it’s based on a poem Bob Dylan gave to Carruthers at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1965, and on a snatch of a Blind Lemon Jefferson song of the same name, and it’s played by a band put together for the session with Page on guitar, Hopkins on piano, Ian Whiteman on Lowrey organ, Pete Hodgkinson on drums and a bass guitarist remembered only as “John”.

My second favourite is very different, although no less of a pure product of the mid-’60s: “Surrender”, by a teenage singer from Belfast called Perpetual Langley (real name: Mary Langley), is a record I’d never heard before. It’s an early Nik Ashford-Valerie Simpson-Joshie Armstead composition, and Talmy gives it a perfect New York girl-group treatment. That would be Bobby Graham, I think, doing the Gary Chester thing at the drums in IBC Studios on Portland Place, Talmy’s favourite location. It was released on Talmy’s own independent Planet label, which was also the home of the Creation track that gives the anthology its title.

Although Talmy made his reputation with guitar bands, Making Time is quite a varied collection, including tracks by Roy Harper (“Ageing Raver”), Pentangle (“Light Flight”, the theme from the TV series Take Three Girls), the Nashville Teens, Lee Hazlewood (singing one of Talmy’s own songs), David Bowie (as Davy Jones, with an unreleased mix of “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”), the Easybeats, Chad & Jeremy, Tim Rose, and the Rockin’ Vickers (with Lemmy). There’s also “Drowning in My Own Despair” by Oliver Norman, a halfway decent pastiche of the Four Tops “Seven Rooms of Gloom”.

One band Talmy didn’t record at IBC was Manfred Mann, whose manager, Gerry Bron, called him in after they’d been dropped by EMI — who had given the departing Paul Jones a solo contract — and signed with Philips/Fontana. He made two singles (“Just Like a Woman” and “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James”) and one album with the band and their new singer, Mike D’Abo, at the Philips studios on the corner of Bayswater Road and Stanhope Place. Wondering what it was like to work with Talmy, and what made him special, I emailed D’Abo and Tom McGuinness, who told me first of all that EMI had turned down their request to let John Burgess, the staff producer who had supervised their early hits, continue his successful collaboration with them.

“My recollection of Shel is of a cool, hands-off producer,” Tom replied. “We weren’t easy to produce. We were all very opinionated. We were also insecure as to whether we could carry on successfully after Paul’s departure. And we missed the security blanket of John Burgess. I can’t honestly recall how much Shel contributed. I know I read an interview with him years ago where he said something like, ‘Manfred Mann weren’t that easy to produce. They would stop in the middle of a take to discuss the political situation in Nicaragua.’ We were also schizophrenic in direction. Fontana wanted pop hits, but bands like Traffic were showing that albums were the way forward. A divide we never bridged.”

A couple of years ago D’Abo visited Talmy in Los Angeles, to which the producer returned in 1979. “I think Shel found recording the band quite a frustrating experience, pointing out to me that during recording sessions Manfred seemed to be forever making or taking phone calls, invariably related to finding out the latest price for his stocks and shares! I don’t think he felt much of a musical common bond existed within the group, and that perhaps our approach to recording singles was a bit too formulaic. Also, being brought up with American culture, it probably made it harder for him to relate to our English character, outlook and idiosyncracies. As a producer, he knew what format a song should take and trusted his instincts as to what made a hit song. He was a basically shy man, but once he felt comfortable in people’s company, he could be most entertaining, amusing and charming. His track record makes him a bit of a ’60s legend, I’d say.”

That’s certainly true. London was a richer place in those days for the presence of Sheldon Talmy, a man who was never afraid to let the needles go into the red and who celebrates his 80th birthday on August 11.

* The photograph of Keith Moon, Shel Talmy and Pete Townshend is from the cover of Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production.