A chance encounter in a local record shop, the jacket so grubby it might almost have been a revenant from 1959. But what a great sleeve it is, a superb design that looks like the cover of some titillating true crime or confidential magazine pushed out by some back street Soho publisher.
The price asked for the beat up copy was too high so I skipped on it and went home and checked on-line. A tenner for the mint copy you see here.
I thought at first this white label boot on Velvet Touch Records might have been something that slipped out from behind the counter at Rock On around the same time as Ace and Charly were putting out all those rockabilly 10 inch discs, but this all feels a little too arch and artful for the early 1980s.
All, apart from the Bern Elliott and Tom Jones unknown to me, and those two tracks I’d always thought of as more Beat Merchant material than Rock n’ Roll even if they make perfect sense in the present company.
Most first generation British Rock ‘n’ Roll comes across as if it was conceived as a novelty recording backed by jobbing big band jazzers. That’s not hidden here, especially with the inclusion of The Basil Kirchin Band, who have that swing thing down, and Clay Morton’s ‘Tombstone No. 9’ which is delivered in an execrable cockney accent, or Tommy Bruce who is so burnt up by his girlfriend he has to call for a fire engine. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman telephoned in that composition.
Adam Faith’s reworking of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ as ‘I Vibrate’ has some fire in its groin and Dean Shannon’s ‘Ubangi Stomp’ drives the cool cats wild, but it still sounds like it was recorded in Teddington upon Thames and not anywhere near Memphis.
This is all clearly neither here nor there because the disc as a whole is a solid ‘Whoop Up’ as Johnny Keating and the Z-Men demonstrate. Brilliantly curated from the opening introduction from some Pathé newsreel warning of the latest folk devils to the last cut on side two.
I’d love to know who put this together and when, but if I live the rest of my life in ignorance I don’t much care as the sleeve is the real thing, pure 100% rock ‘n’ roll
