The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Features / One night in London, 9 May 1970, round the back of the Albert Hall…

One night in London, 9 May 1970, round the back of the Albert Hall…

by 34 Comments

Colin H on future legends and future nonentities

0

Comments

  1. As the text didn’t appear above, here it is:

    I’ve been trawling a complete run of 1970 issues of ‘Melody Maker’ recently and scanning concerts ads featuring Wishbone Ash, for a the booklet of a forthcoming WA release. These are often fascinating things in themselves (for their content) aside from having, as images, the patina of yore.

    This is one that almost slipped through the net (the issue was misfiled). At the top is the wobbly voiced bopping elf Marc Bolan and whoever his bongos player was that month. Next, the blistering Taste – Rory Gallagher’s Belfast power trio in the ascendency to being a major attraction that year (when they split over ‘financial differences’ in October 1970, being on course to make huge sums of money the following year, it was front page news).

    Third on the bill is louche Canterbury scenester Kevin Ayers & His Whole World – which included, at this point, future multi-million selling ‘Tubular Bells’meister Mike Oldfield on bass. My good pal Peter Muir had dealings with Ayers in the 90s/00s and found the airy-fairy loucheness still present and correct.

    Fourth on the bill is gruff Yorkshireman Michael Chapman, a folk-bluesman of sorts whose first feature in ‘Melody Maker’ that year, in its folk section, was ‘I can’t stand folk music’. Michael died in 2021, probably still hating folk music, and my pal Sarah McQuaid continues to honour his support for her career by performing one of his songs and playing an electric guitar he gave her.
    Fifth on the bill is the nascent Wishbone Ash. This was their 13th appearance in a ‘Melody Maker’ advert – albeit, three of those having been taken out by their management or their agent. Paying to get the name traction in that way wasn’t unusual and eventually paid off. Highlights of their career up to this point included being sixth on the bill to the Edgar Broughton Band, so fifth on the bill to Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t exactly tragic!

    I know almost nothing about Grail, sixth on the bill, but digging around reveals that they were a heavy rock act that couldn’t get arrested in Britain – yet Rod Stewart (hardly himself a big deal at that time, albeit experienced on the club scene for several years) liked them and produced an album for them… which was licensed to a small label in Germany. It was released in February 1971 (by which point Rod had become a bigger selling point and Grail had called it a day) with the text ‘PRODUCED BY ROD STEWART’ in colossal font on the front cover.

    And then we get to number seven on the bill – Smile. And we shall, for this was Brian May and Roger Taylor’s band before Queen. The fellow who became Freddie Mercury, Farrokh Bulsara, running a stall in Kensington Market at this point, was a big fan of Smile – he may well have been at the show in this advert. The following month, he became Smile’s singer – the previous chap, Tim Staffell, reckoning a more prosperous future lay in forming a new group, Humpy Bong (I kid you not), with the drummer from the Bee Gees. I wonder how that worked out? 😃

    • Smile with Tim Staffell was (were?) generally regarded as Cornwall’s most popular band during the second half of the 60’s. I think that Freddie Mercury’s first appearance with Taylor and May was in Truro City Hall. John Deacon was a bit later.

    • Kevin Ayers & The Whole World featured a teenage Mike Oldfield on bass and occasional lead guitar. Free-jazzer/street busker Lol Coxhill played soprano sax and avant-garde composer/electronic musician David Bedford was on fairly rudimentary keyboards. Latterly featuring Kevin’s old Soft Machine pal Robert Wyatt (pre-accident) featured on drums.
      Kevin Ayers was probably one of rock’s greatest wasters of his own talent.

      There was a very amusing account of an encounter with Kevin Ayers by Word Magazine stalwart Kate Mossman, either in print or on an early Word Podcast. Even in his dotage, he regarded himself as an irresistible sex-god of some sort. The lady made her excuses and left…

  2. There’s a mahoosive research project there in those MM ads, for someone with the will (and the necessary huge quantity of time).
    So many bands and artists on the rise, sinking into obscurity or poking their heads above the parapet only to have them lopped off.

    Good Habit, Gnidrolog, Patto, Matching Mole, Rare Bird, Blossom Toes, The John Dummer Blues Band, Ring, Clouds, The Deviants, Magic Michael, Ginger Johnson’s African Drummers, Wynder K Frog…

    • I became so intrigued by the dense proliferation of Writing on the Wall in MM ads from 1970 a while back that I sought out their album on CD, with various extras (abandoned second album etc.). Must dig it out again – decent top of the third division melancholic proggish rock, as I recall, but the unwise shift in direction on the unreleased second album tracks to a saxophone-parping glam sound… well, the writing was clearly on the wall…

    • Possibly the most baffling, at this remove, of those nth division acts you mention, Mike, is one heavily promoted for a few weeks in the first half of 1970 in the MM’s ads – but which has left not a trace on ‘the net’: I speak of ‘CLIFF CHARLES and COLIN SMITH plus THEIR SHOW’, for that was how they were billed, occasionally presented at shows by John Peel, and with someone on their behalf taking out ads showing a couple of po-faced if largely nondescript vaguely hippyish guys in a field introducing them. As far as I know, nobody signed them and they disappeared from view very soon.

  3. That was value for money – just £1 for that line up of bands.
    The Bank of England inflation calculator says that £1 in 1970 would be worth £13:30 today, so still amazing value.

    Reading through Mike_H’s list, didn’t the NME have a an extremely negative attitude to Gnidrolog, branding them the worst band in the world?

    • Gnidrolog were very arty Prog.
      Odd time signatures and complicated melodies, incomprehensible songs, plus a drummer (Nigel Pegrum) who doubled on piano, reed instuments, flute etc. and later joined Steeleye Span when they went electric.
      The later-’70s NME would naturally have hated them.

      Something I never knew: The two Goldring brothers (from whom the band’s name was semi-anagrammed) went on to form punk band The Pork Dukes.

      • Um, “went electric”? Wasn’t that their whole point? Added a drummer is the phrase searched for, wrt live performances. (Sorry to be petty and all.)
        Intriguingly, I went to see the band on Sunday, recognising only Ms Pryor and latter day later drummer, Liam Genockey. Blimey, they can rock a bit these days. And knock spots off a certain band based in Oxfordshire

  4. I’ve gone through a similar series of adverts in a local Cornish newspaper – ‘project pending’.

    Smile, an almost mythical name afterwards, are all over them! An early Queen appearance in the county, not unreasonably, describes them as ‘Roger Taylor’s new group’. He was from Truro.

    Thing is, such bills as these tend to be two-bob. Even in the sticks, you’re genuinely more likely to come across seriously notable acts on a poster, c. 1967/68/69/70, than no-one recognisable – OK, recognisable to people who buy Record Collector, Mojo etc. – on it. It makes the complete disconnect from many (90%?) who were the same age as those acts at the time even more baffling.

    Best group on that bill? The one at the top. Oh, and the day before, the last Beatles’ L.P. came out.

  5. I was at that concert in my following Marc Bolan around days. The Taste fans drowned out virtually all the preceding acts, particularly Michael Chapman, with constant chants of Rory, Rory. They all left before Tyrannosaurus Rex came on stage.

    • So…erm… no Taste.

      I meet many people who are of the age you’d think would have seen them know something about all this – even the obvious stuff like “have you ever heard of The Beatles?”
      I kid you not – and they, almost to a man and woman, know absolutely nothing about it. Zero, diddley squat.

      Ask them about the war… which I don’t, EVER, but someone is bizarrely bound to, and they’re in the trenches quicker than a rat up a drainpipe.

      I take it you do know something about this. Why don’t they? Is it a Daily Mail/Daily Express thing?
      Do others have this experience? I don’t expect granny to know the b-side of Rainbow’s Ffolly’s 45, but recognising Jimi Hendrix from a photograph, say, might be expected! Yeah?

        • I guess it really is an age thing – whilst every “young” person I’ve met recently (Hello, Silas & Kate!) has heard of the Beatles, Abba and, especially ,Fleetwood Mac, not one single one would know anything at all about Taste et al. We are dinosaurs contentedly munching the vegetation (and other dinosaurs) and, look, there’s a great big rock in the sky!

      • On the matter of Taste, I agree that the ‘name recognition’ aspect generally isn’t there these days – despite how huge they were at the time. Rory’s name eclipsed his old band’s name, just as Eric C’s eclipsed the Cream name – in a way that never happened for Jack or Ginger (or indeed the other two guys in Taste, who had a band called Stud immediately thereafter).

        It may not be widely known that there is a sort of ‘ghost’ version of Taste still going. John Wilson and Richard McCracken reformed as Taste some years ago (late 90s, I think) with Belfast bar player Sam Davidson on guitar. They toured Germany. When John and Rich opted out, they gave the name to Sam, who carried on with other players. Currently, my good pal Ali MacKenzie is on bass – though he’s been trying to encourage to drop the name, which feels like a good move to me.

        Here they are a couple of weeks ago with a Taste number:

  6. On the matter of Humpy Bong – to which vocalist Tim Staffel fled from Smile – they managed one single, both sides written by Irish singer/songwriter Jonathan Kelly, who also joined the band (being managed by its drummer and ex-Bee Gee Colin Peterson). This is the A side. Tell me that Kevin Rowland didn’t hear this before writing ‘Come On Eileen’…

    • I remember Humpy Bong – one of the lamest band names ever – appearing on TOTP after which they seem to have sank without trace. Colin Peterson had an interesting career, started out as a child star in movies, joined – and aggrieved about royalties later sued (unsuccessfully) – The Bee Gees.

      IIRC – ended up as a house painter in Sydney or maybe Melbourne

      The video of HB’s one and only performance on TOTP used to be up on YT if anyone is interested

  7. I’ve spent some time trawling through old gig guides for a possible blog or YouTube video and the one thing I’ve noticed is if you compare supposedly unknown bands from the 70s playing pubs or small venues when you dig into them there’s often a member who went on to play with a successful band but you don’t see that half as much with more recent bands.

  9. Tim Staffell of Smile / Humpy Bong has a further claim to fame. He built the models for Thomas the Tank Engine. Not just Thomas and friends but the Fat Controller and the whole island of Sodor.

Leave a Reply