It was a great privilege to be invited to talk to the legendary Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things magazine. I’ve been a regular reader since issue 13 . . . the one with The Birds on the cover. You can listen in here
It's Madness: Don't Say 'Fab' Say Mickey Finn and the Blue Men
I’ve been digging around in the pop music press of 1964, searchin’ for material on the R&B boom generally and The Yardbirds in particular. I was struck by how heavily the East End Mod group, Mickey Finn and the Blue Men were hyped, more adverts than even the Stones managed. The cartoon figures caught my eye as much as the pork pie hats
Blue Beat alongside Motown, Chicago blues, Stax and the jazz of Mose Allison and Jimmy McGriff was just part of the panoply of styles that R&B encompassed in 1964. Mickey Finn got in on the act by having their first record released on the premier UK-Jamacian label, getting a testimonial from the man himself, Prince Buster, and then pulling into the mix Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.
I’m not that keen on the band’s neophyte ska moves but I love the R&B raver on the b-side of ‘Reelin and a Rockin’, ‘I Still Want You’. Lovers of the freakbeat sound go for their 1967 release ‘Garden of My Mind’. Munster Records have pulled together all the band’s recordings from 1964–67 with top sleeve notes from Mike Stax (Ugly Things), you can hear their latest by dialing the number GER 7080 /7089. . .
Mickey Finn began the year as a five piece and ended it with six members having dropped the mod look and taken up posing on building sites and railway platforms as if they were the Stones or Pretty Things.
The added member, at least in publicity shots, was Jimmy Page – session man and harmonica player on the early singles.
Peter Aldersley review in Pop Weekly (February 16, 1964)
NME (July 3 1964). Derek Johnson also reviewed the High Numbers single which he described as ‘compelling styling but weakish material’.
Pop Weekly (July 18, 1964)
A Little less than a year after moonlighting with Mickey Finn our man is declared ‘the greatest guitarist in Europe. The greatest harmonica play in Europe. Jimmy Page is a phenomenon’. Why stop with Europe, why not the world?
Record Mirror (February 20, 1965)
Pay for an advert and get one of Record Mirror’s special reviews. Who said payola was dead . . .
Record Mirror (February 20, 1965)
Beat Instrumental (August, 1965)
Part of a set of profiles on the faces behind the hits, Sunday Times (February 20, 1966)
Amphetamine Academia – Ugly Things Review by Dave Laing
I’ve been a regular reader of Ugly Things since 1994, issue 14 when The Birds were the cover stars, so it feels a bit strange and kinda wonderful to find myself in #60 spread across 4 pages. Dave Laing reviewed Pin-Ups 1972 and interviewed me.
Momentous . . . an academic treatise that reads with the manic energy of an early Lester Bangs . . . Opposing views of authenticity, the underground’s clash with the mainstream and art’s clash with artifice and commerce, these are things that went into shaping the music, and Stanfield explores them with an addictive enthusiasm. . . Pin-Ups 1972 will leave you breathless from the number of different ways it comes at the music and reeling from the sheer number of points it makes. Together with Stanfield’s A Band With Built-In Hate, it presents what I consider to be a new way of writing – amphetamine academia – about what is some of the most exciting music ever made. I can’t recommend it enough.
Dave Laing
