Flamin' Groovies – Teenage Grease 1972

Ugly Things #71 (April 2026)

My 16 page account of the Flamin’ Groovies in Britain in 1972 is now published in what must be one of Mike Stax’s best ever issues of Ugly Things. Alongside my piece you’ll find the final part of the real Dave Laing’s monumental and utterly brilliant history of The Saints and Frank Uhle’s stupendous interview with the one and only Danny Fields. Laurent Bigot & Phillippe Migrenne’s story of les Lou’s is equally wonderful. There’s a whole lot more to dive into, so, as Mick Farren would have said, ‘get some’.

THEM featuring Lester Bangs

To mark my survey in Ugly Things #69 of the 1973 debates in the British press about the relative merits of THEM and Van Morrison, here’s the full text of the marvellous Lester Bangs’ sleeve notes for THEM Featuring Van Morrison (1972), all 6,500 words of ’em, which pretty much kick-started things . . . It’s Bangs, in full flow, at his very best

SPAWN OF THE DUBLIN PUBS: THEM CREATURES & A WIGHT NAMED VAN. No one would question that Van Morrison is one of the finest songwriters and singers of our time, as well as being a rock ’n’ roller without peer. He has cut a swath across music which proves unmistakably that he can do it all: write some of the tenderest odes of the day, and still get down and churn out the boogie, should he be so inclined. Liking him is not merely a matter of belonging to a specialized following, as with a David Bowie or even a Neil Young: his music is so universal, and so diverse, as to be joyously inescapable. We have grown up to Van Morrison: gone through make-outs and periods of adolescent darkness, found rock poetry sans pretence in his lyrics. turned up our radios a little louder (as he counseled in “Caravan” every time he came on, heard in his music hit singles and sheer art (though never “Art Rock”) and gorgeous combinations of the two.

Blowin' Your Mind was Van’s first album under his own name, but despite the presence of the hit “Bown Eyed Girl” it failed to capture the large audience he was destined for. Even Astral Weeks, that magnificent, moody outpouring of musical poetry reminiscent both of Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman, would not take him to the heart of AM heaven. Moondance was the turning point, of course, with its mellowly mutated R&B setting trends for years to come, and with Band and Street Choir he reached the point where each successive album was guaranteed to produce at least one hit single, bridging the gap between “serious” and vicarious mass audiences (between AM and FM, to reduce the equation to its simplest level) more effortlessly and with less rankling artifice than anybody since Dylan.

But what even many of his staunchest fans don’t know is that Van Morrison was an AM star a long time ago, a jive prince of what many aging rockers of 23 or so are beginning to think of as the “golden era” (meaning their golden era, the mid Sixties when they were still in high school) who hit the scene with all roots totally assimi­lated by the time of his first album, a sometime hitmaker and man whom, if you heard him at all, left no doubt that he was destined to promulgate some non-plastic surgery on the face of Pop.

Because the first Van Morrison album wasn’t Blowin’ Your Mind it was something simply called Them, with ‘Here Comes the Night’ pasted prominently on the cover when that song rocketed to the Number 2 spot on the charts in America and most everywhere else. The band was Them, and they functioned for Van in much the same way as the Velvet Underground for Lou Reed and John Cale, or Buffalo Springfield for Neil Young and Steve Stills, or the Byrds for Crosby and others, or . . . but this was a birth of another color than most of the celebrated legendary-group-as-proving-­ground-for solo-superstar myths of our time. Van Morrison was Them, and the hand (and various bastardizations subject to musical-chairs personnel shifts which never raised the quality of their post-Morrison music) was one of the tightest, rowdiest, most diverse groups to emerge from the Isles in the twilight of the Liverpool Beat era. Peter Bardens (organ, replacing a now-obscure but incredible cat after “Here Comes the Night”), Bill Harrison lead guitar), Alan Henderson (bass), and John McAuley (drums, piano and harmonica). Most of those names are lost now (although Bardens has resurfaced recently with some less-than-train-derailing albums on MGM), but in their day they were unbeatable. Some of them hailed, like Van, from Ireland, and some from London, but their sound was enough to turn the head around of anybody who’d thought the R&B chops of the Animals, say, were pretty spiffy; and when you added Van’s busting at-the-seams vocal and compositional talents, it was enough to even make you forget the Rolling Stones for the duration of an LP or single side. And in 1965, that was saying something.

The original Them had the best of everything, their British blues chops down so solid they could let the standard forms ride and cruise out on some stuff that was pretty damned experimental, and successfully so, for its day (some of it still is). An impeccably tight and always driving ensemble sound, and soloists who knew how to compress enough feeling and enough ideas into a few deliberate seconds as to make you sob in this post-Cream era of rampant guitar ego-tripping. And a little tiny cat who was pretty funny-looking, it seemed to us at the time (we could hardly be­lieve that that short, pudgy replica of the grey nerd who sat behind you through a whole semester of Driver Education and never spoke a word, that that absolute antithesis of every Superstar image ever stamped in our skulls, could be the helms­man of this wild night’s ride), and came bounding out of far left field with a voice bigger than two Belafontes and songs that, when they weren’t taking all the best of Ray Charles and Chicago blues and Chuck Berry and Jackson and British R&B and distilling it to rusty perfection, were taking us to sonic zones we’d never dreamed of in all our born days, headphones or no headphones.

Dave Marsh’s review of the album in Creem (December 1972): ‘Lester Bangs liner notes complement a package which is just trashy enough to be perfect. Bangs' commentary is so lucid and clear that any expansion on the songs is superfluous. With it. Them's recordings can be seen in both historical perspective and in the context of the career Van later carved for himself. It is easily the best thing I've ever read on Morrison. (If only Hot Rocks had had the same advantage .. .)’

That was Them, named after a rousingly lurid mid-50s American sci-fi trash flick about prehistoric monsters time-warped into the middle of the Mojave Desert discov­ered by a little cutie whom no official will believe till the things are crunching their shopping centers. Like the Animals (who took too long to shake their matching suits and ties) and The Troggs (ditto, except their delivery told the whole salacious tale), Them were a concept bordering on the kind of raw subversion the Rolling Stones were the pioneers of, and the Velvet Underground, MC5, Stooges and Alice Cooper later brought to high art. They scowled and glowered like a borough full of broken windows on their first album cover, even if all of ’em but Van did have on ties and one said in Hit Parader that his ambition upon Making It was to get a Jag so he could pick up chicks with more finesse. Like the Yardbirds, they didn't really understand the concept of pop subversion, but Van had enough organic spleen in front to carry all the aura of Danger the band needed. The liner notes of Them Again, their second American release, tell it like it maybe was: “Van Morrison, the lead singer with Them sometimes throws his advisors info a frenzy of hair-tearing despair . . . moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright wilful (and god forbid!)­­ – but always, creative. On sessions when asked to alter the phrasing of a number or in­crease the tempo, he will say with quiet rebellion: ‘No! I always sing this way . . . the way I feel,’ and he is invariably right.”

Solid! You used to read PR stories in the Beat, with Hit Parader the pre-Rolling Stone bible of the rock cultists, about how Them would come to Hollywood on an American tour and when not onstage Van would sit for hours in a corner booth alone behind the biggest, darkest shades, chain smoking and emanating a malevolent aura that mesmerized and terrified and bagged him an early reputation as a lonely, strange, distant genius who could only communicate to the rest of the world through his music. And, of course, much of that was true, His songs have always veered between expressions of traditional romantic love which would have been mawkish from a writer with less talent and a different sensibility; and explorations of the ultimate darknesses of the soul – corny as that sounds, Morrison pulls it off as authentically as the sweet stuff – the nihilistic options the present offers us all and occasional pictures of the desolation angels on their way down the slag heap. And that darkness tends to be rendered just about as romantically, with a truly Irish-literary sense of doom and fear (the same terror-as-epiphany found in James Joyce, and probably just about as rooted in Catholicism).

One of the amazing things about Morrison is that he took these natural artistic proclivities and made them work In the context of black American R&B and white British pop music, with no loss of integrity. It was a bit as if Samuel Beckett’s deranged but jivecat son had decided to take on Herman’s Hermits just to see how far he could derail the 1964 lollipop train. Van ended up laying a whole new set of tracks,

From the beginning Van and Them seemed determined to shatter the mould – when you looked at the album covers you saw bank clerks and pub-crawlers, but when you listened you heard already topnotch musicianship breaking its ass to jump out of the moptop mass and be accepted on its own terms. The liner notes again: Their “quality lies not only in the rendering of the numbers on these tracks – but in Them’s efforts to break away from the popular image of long haired maracas-shaking pop groups (!). On this album, Them have introduced vibes, sax and flute. They are not content to stand still musically and rest on the laurels of three big hit records, and are moving towards a ‘sound’ very close to the jazz idiom.”

Ego and hype, sure, but Them were hardly the forerunners of Chicago or BS&T, out to prove they can play note-perfect solos by members of big bands from two decades ago and unite jazz and rock and classical and folk and blues and anything else they can exploit. Them began as the apotheosis of the bar band – some of the tracks on these two records are right out of Wayne Cochran’s dreams – and built from there into a superbly eclectic vehicle for Van’s young and rampaging consciousness. You can hear the process in the grooves herein.

Their earliest recordings, not featured here, included an also-ran single called “Don't Start Crying Now,” a legendary talking-jam roughly equivalent to the Stones’ “Stoned” called “The Story of Them,” and “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The last was a hoary blues on more archivists’ country-blues anthologies than even the archivists can count, supposedly written by Big Joe Williams and given new life, to put it mildly, by Van and Them. In fact, it was a big hit in England, where it became the theme song for the period pop TV show Ready, Steady, Go, and a minor (but as earthshaking for those who had been waiting for something exactly like this as the early Stones singles or the Who’s “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”) hit in this country. Structurally it was way ahead of its time, featuring heartbeat bass and bitterly slicing guitar as well as Van's deja vu agonized vocal, and there are many non-purists here among us who think it the best version of the song ever laid on wax.

Released In late ’64 b/w “Gloria,” it never quite made the upper brackets of the surveys, but a few months later Parrot-London was smart enough to merely flip it over and ship “Gloria” to all the radio stations and rack jobbers (with “Baby Please Don't Go” still the flip), and the rest is history. Almost. Them’s version of “Gloria” was a monster hit In the West, but never quite made it across most of the rest of America. A few months later a prototype punkrock group out of Chicago called the Shadows of Knight covered it and hit everywhere in the country except the West, where everybody had heard, cruised and danced to and memorized the real original until placebos were unthinkable. The Shadows of Knight had lots of energy and enthusiasm, but Van’s and Them’s “Gloria” was a chromosome-blaster before most of us even knew we had ’em to blast. It was the first distinct rock ’n’ roll classic to come from the pen of Van Morrison, and perhaps still the greatest. I mean, “Doctor My Eyes” is fine and all, but it shore ain’t “Louie Louie” . . .

Van’s second Instant & Eternal Classic was “Here Comes the Night,” which managed to become a full-fledged national hit and was a delightful and surprising change from “Gloria.” Completely different, in fact, proving that the man had as many voices and visions as we could endure before turning in our brains for a mess of pottage. And its flipside [“All For Myself”], also still unrepresented on U.S. albums or U.K. either as far as I know, was a devastating employment of the classic Bo Diddley “I’m a Man” riff to build a sonic riptide that was as adventurous in its way as what the Yardbirds did with the same material, and its lyrics sealed forever the stigmatic mark of desolate brilliance on Van’s stout-sweaty brow,

Which brings us finally to those masterpieces small and large which have been gathered, reprogrammed and manna'd on all of us in the set you are holding in your hands. From “Gloria” to the covers like “Out of Sight,” all the music here is vibrantly alive with the spirit-feel, as Milt Jackson would have it, both of its funky roots and its significance as solid, ripup, bring-’em-on-in commercial rock ’n’ roll. Commercialism is much derided in some hipper than-thou quarters these days, but it’s still the firstest with the mostest pulsation when it comes to propelling you off your ass and into some primordial rug-cutting. And as gorgeous as Van’s recent work has been (and as fine as he must feel to have somehow, finally resolved the tensions brimming from his early music), any reasonable ear just gotta fess up to the fact that one or two “Wild Nights” an album don’t really satiate, especially when these early Them albums were burger heaven and wham, bam, thank you ma’am from stem to stern.

Interestingly enough, the bar-band traces were for more in evidence on Them Again,
the second album to be released in America, than on Here Comes the Night. Although, since the English releases differed so drastically From both of these in content, and the American LPs were probably selected from a body of work covering several months, sessions, and recordings from Over There – well, it probably  doesn’t make too much diff vis a vis American album chronology.) And an edited edition of Them Again comprises the first record here, minus “Call My Name” (which was as exciting as most of the material around it and memorable for Van's pronunciation alone: "When you're burdened down with cur/And troubles seem so hard to burr”) and “Don’t You Know,” a passable jazz-rock thing heavy on the flute and Ray Charles influence.

It’s also worth mentioning that much of the material here was written not by Van but by their producer Tony Scott, who would make heavy attempts to mould Van’s sound in much the same way as Bert Berns did later. The only difference is that Berns had a way of turning out hits that Scott seemed to lack. But the music is just as good, and not really very far from Van’s own early work.

Like “Could You Would You,” a great opener with strong guitar chords bearing what Miles Davis called “the Spanish tinge” and quite close to Berns’ own Spanish Harlem musical proclivities as evidenced in Van’s later work. There is a strong organ line that puts you in mind of the Band when they’re willing to be hot ’n’ nasty, and Van sings the first line almost like Arthur Lee would, shifting later into a classic middle-period (meaning circa–“Brown Eyed Girl”) Van Morrison vocal. The song is unmistakably Morrison-penned, and proves that the utterly old-fashioned romanticism of his recent music is not mere sentimental dreck (as some people, who seemingly will never forgive him for surviving those Astral Weeks will claim), but as true an expression of a sensitive and original sensibility as the darkness of “Mystic Eyes” and Weeks. Why, it almost sounds like he’s saying “Janney, Janney, Janney, I love you!” at the end.

“Something You Got” is a great Chris Kenner song popularized by Chuck Jackson, done here as a sort of mutated New Orleans R&B with a wondrously old-fashioned vocal by Van.[i] Followed by none other than “Turn On' Your Lovelight,” which is fun and tight – to hear its familiarity is just like breathing the airs of home, which is more than can be said for some recent renditions. The thing that makes recorded (basically) bar-band music work is when the natural excitement and the authority of the band are so strong as to cut through the banality and familiarity and keep your attention by the purity of that power. It’s no easy trick, but Van and Them pull it off more than once in this album, and if I didn’t want to make patrons of Good Rock mad I’d say how delighted I am at the proximity of the organ work here to that on the best records by stalwarts like the Kingsmen and Question Mark & the Mysterians.

“I Can Only Give You Everything,” co-authored by producer Scott, is a period piece of filler which ends up exciting enough to stand the test of time. Its fuzz guitar line is such a cliche it’s become a classic (Hint: it wasn’t recorded before “Satisfaction” and the lyrics were gloriously rank enough to induce the Troggs to cover it. In fact, it’s just about as close as Van Morrison ever got to true punk-rock, with his vocal overtones of Jagger, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and even a taste of Iggy Stooge.

Followed by the perfect contrast of a prototype Van Morrison romantic ballad: “Fill me my cup/I’ll drink your sparkling wine and tell you everything is fine until I see your sad eyes/Throw me a kiss across a crowded room some sunny windswept afternoon is none too soon for me to miss/My sad eyes/Ohh, not bad eyes/Uh, glad eyes/For you my sad eyes.” The romanticism is lavish enough to verge on the sticki­ness and purple “poetry” of a Rod McKuen or Erich Segal, if not for Van’s strong, rich delivery, his incredible way with words – “across a crowded room some sunny wind­swept afternoon is none too soon” rolls off his tongue and around the rhythm like some of Dylan Thomas’ more sonorous recorded cadences – and the traces of the other, darker side of this life he never left out. The poetic sense is all but Victorian, the wine could come from ancient Greek couplets or Omar Khayyam (though it just spills in with his wine lyrics running through Blowin’ Your Mind, the other Bang album, and just about everything on Warner Brothers – just as with sweet young things, when the man finds a subject that gladdens his heart he keeps returning to it – and who wouldn’t), and the song itself is just one of the most polished early expressions of his vision of love and harmony as a state of innocence, even naivete. Van’s work really does comprise songs of innocence and experience, innocence being the breeding ground for love and knowledge the mutable terrain where darkness creeps up quickly from behind and mugs you in the middle of your purest joys. Even in this song, the attraction is in the melancholy, and when he sings “Who are you and I to wonder why we do so?” the fatalism and sense of how little it is that things really do make sense is subtle but firm.



[i] Which reminds me of the time, in the day of “Brown Eyed Girl” when an American pop paper reviewed a Morrison concert at which he must have done much of the material on this album by complaining that his music was too “old-fashioned” to be really listenable today and that no one so backward could have much of a future In the new Hip Art realms of show-biz.

Van was not best pleased with the album . . . of course he wasn’t . . .New Musical Express (September 16 1972)

 

A 1974 collection that pulled together many of the more significant omissions from the double-album and the first release of ‘Mighty Like A Rose’

And if there really is a vacuum in every joy, then the only recourse is to fill it with more wine and general animation, and pubs become tabernacles, and parties are indicated. So side two roars off with “Out of Sight,” a great bar-band cut that illustrates, like two songs on the first Who album, the English mid-60s R&B band's fascination with James Brown. Its instrumental break isn’t going to give Brother JB any sleepless nights (although with the kind of music he's making these days, it should), but this music always sounds better and has more charm in retrospect. It was so much fun to just slap it on and let all 2:21 of it grind out, especially when you know that if it was any of today’s bloated jazz-rock bands it would probably run three or four times as long and be flabby with preening solos.

“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is a classic cover (and covers certainly can be classic – just ask the Stones or Ike and Tina) and perhaps the most unusual version of this song ever recorded. The piano sounds like droplets running down a windowpane, and with Van’s vocal the song becomes not Dylan’s declaration of irrevocable separation, psychic displacement and vindictive rejection taking the form of a self-righteous putdown; there’s a feeling here of real love and regret, shot through with painful resignation, as if to say “We’ve both lost something, but it’s no good pre­tending that it’ll ever come back.” A very traditional rendition, in fact, far less “hip” and independent than Dylan’s – perhaps the shift in emphasis is summed up when Van changes “your lover who just walked out the door” to “your lover who just walked through the door.” Like the emotional difference between John Lee Hooker and Smiley Lewis singing about a breakup.

“Bad or Good” is some of the best Ray Charles influenced white pop gospel of the period, finding a soulful strength in absolute fatalism just as Gospel always has: “Don’t even have to say one word/lt ain’t nothin’ that we’ve seen or heard/Get out/Get out/Jump and shout/Then you know what it’s all about . . . Gotta hold on when all is good/Make out like all is fine/ Gotta let it happen/Bad or good.” And, in spite of all obvious influences, unmistakably a Morrison original—lyrics don’t lie.

“How Long Baby" takes similar musical strains deeper into a soul blues ballad with prominent Pop Staples type Delta echo guitar, leaving Van no recourse but to rear up and ride the side out shouting “Bring ’Em On In.” Raveup time, enhanced by the narrative style which appears in many of his songs. When not exploring a bleak corner of some urban scene with a novelist’s attention to detail : “Madame George”), or merely reflecting the joys his wife and child have brought him, (Tupelo Honey), Van delights in moving on, down the sidewalk, across the steet, from here to there and across the water. I saw him once on American Bandstand in 1966, stewed to the gills, and when Dick Clark: tried to conduct his usual Barbie Doll interview and asked him what he’d been doing lately. Van drooled a few seconds of garble and "WuhhhIll, y'know, man, l just like, I just walk on down the street, right along, and keep on comin’, and come by some cafes, and see somebody or whoever, and they say and I say an’ we sit and drink an’ then walk on . . .” Clark hustled him off camera in favor of a zit-creme commercial pronto, but that reply, essentially, is what this song is about. Places: “I was walkin’ down by Queensway/When I met a friend of mine/He said ‘Come on back, back to my pad/We can have a good time’” and “When I stepped off the boat and I walked upon the dry land/Slowly!/To the carpark/And I jumped in” and rolls off down the road once more, reeling in and out of a great scat section that bridges into a blustery 50s sax solo. Off the wall and up the avenue of dreams. When he sez “out of my mind!” it ain’t like Neil Young fainting in the back of an ambulance, it’s jumping loose enough to smash your head against the wall and pour half a pint of Bordeaux on the wound! Shout don’t stop!

The second record, which corresponds except for two dropped songs again and some shifts in sequence to the Here Comes the Night album, is less raucous, perhaps, not so pub-loose, but better produced and a far more potent statement by a band and an artist beginning to feel the heady extent of their powers. Heavier on the basis of being almost all Morrison originals alone, it is really a landmark album in the rock ’n’ roll of the Sixties that nobody who cares about the music (or wants to have their skull pulverized now and then) should be without. To say it’s essential is to understate its importance – it’s more than history, it’s timeless jive that drives you straight out of your mind and into your body, as John Sinclair would have it, and maybe even clear up the wall if visceral music ain’t yer cup of meat.

Opening with the showstopper of them all, “Gloria.” This, folks, is the Rock of Ages, sure as “Long Tall Sally” or “Sweet Little Sixteen” or “Let's Spend the Night together” or maybe even “Are You Ready.” It’s a demonstrative self-contained definition of rock ’n’ roll that will have you moving or shrivel you into a Librium puddle of MOR drool. It’ll be heard as long as rock ’n’ roll endures, and never sound less timely than it did the day they cut it. A paraplegic could dance to it – it has the magic that’ll set you free like few songs by the Spoonful or anybody else. Cruising for burgers to it in 1965 was more cosmic than any acid trip, and after even one hearing no one could ever forget those creaming lyrics and how seethingly Van spat them out: “She comes around here/Just about midnight/ She makes me feel so good, Lord/Ohh, I wanna say she make me feel all right/Cause she walkin’ down my street/She knock upon my door/And then she comes to my room/Man, she make me FEEL ALRIGHT!!!!!”

Myles Palmer’s notes for the British version of ‘Featuring Van Morrison’: ‘Ultimately this album needs no bendiction. Them’s music reaffirms the primal rock and roll values of urgency, simplicity and danceability’

Ah, sexism! The joys of that utterly apolitical horniness has brought a tear to the eye of many a reminiscing campus revolutionary as he wrestles with the problem of whether he’s got a right to ask his girl to shave her legs! In the days of “Gloria’s” first ascendance, people sweated other neuroses. Just dig “Here Comes the Night” for some real sick sentiments: “I can see right out my window walkin’ down the street my girl with another guy/His arm around her like it used to be with me. oh it makes me wanta cry!”

“Like it used to be with me” (“his arm around her”)? What is this, Sunday Bloodly Sunday? Nahh, it’s just the remarkable rhyme scheme of this song which pulls off the all but unparalleled achievement of being simultaneously perfect and awkward as hell. The words seem to tumble backwards over each other in true spazz spew. Which is absolutely appropriate, since the song was about being a poor awkward pube losing his long dream and short steady to some strutting BMOC [Big Man On Campus]. Adolescent angst is technicolor and Todd-A0, and if we all came clean who has not mused more than once ’twixt twelve and twenty or even after “Wonder what is wrong with me?”, just as Van does here. If you went to high school with this song, like I did, you probably lived it too. If not, you may even be living it now. In any case, it was Them’s first solid national hit on this side of the pond, shooting straight up the charts and nudging into the number two spot only because the new Beatles single came out at the same time. And despite being a superhit, it’s a totally bizarre song, as the lyrics attest. The way Van barks “Wow, here it comes!” is enough to keep you awake nights, and the structure is unusual, changing from a vaguely Latinish balladic lament (the Bert Berns touch, again; the man never quite got the hot sauce out of his ears after his “Twist & Shout” conquered the world, and though Van didn’t suffer by it, it did make some of his music fairly predictable) into a sort of wierdo hillbilly roundelay, which is where the gawky lyrics quoted came in. There’s no doubt that is was as much a rock ’n’ roll classic in its way as “Gloria,” if destined by Its form never to become such a standard, and even ends with the protagonist playing voyeur outside the window where the objects of his jealousy carry on in every unmentionable way his fertile pube brain can dream up.

The next song is, simply, one of the most powerful pieces of music you are ever going to have the opportunity to hear. "Mystic Eyes" was an all-time brain blitz that’s fully as devastating today as it ever was; vicious, utterly nihilistic barrages of sound, coherently performed and pristinely recorded, making the rage that much more vivid. The lyrics are cornball but terrifying (an early liner says that the song was originally supposed to be instrumental and they were adlibbed in the studio, which is believable but detracts not a whit from their impact), and the guitar lines are as razor edged as anything Mike Bloomfield did on Highway 61 Revisited or the first Paul Butterfield album (both of which came out after this, by the way . “Mystic Eyes” is an exercise in pure adrenalin frenzy, Van Morrison’s darker side at its most ferociously anguished. And if all that wasn’t enough, it also contains one of the best harp solos (almost cer­tainly by Van) ever recorded. When he finally returns to his harp after the vocal it is with a savage snarling chomp!, as of a barracuda biting down.

All of which makes “Don’t Look Back,” a bar-band ballad harkening back to the other album, a welcome relief. Originally a John Lee Hooker song, it’s not as senti­mentally innocuous as it might at first appear. After all, Dylan named a movie after it. And even if that’s not really true, it’s a beautiful composition and performance with an unforced message that becomes neither preachy nor sappy. When he says, “Those days are gone,” he means no Gee-whiz but exactly, strongly what he says: “Stop dreaming and live on in the future/Darlin’, don't look back.” Which seems doubly applicable today, even if the appearance of an album like this one is evidence of the uses and vitality of the past.

“Little Girl”. Ah, nymphomania! Well, not necessarily, but there comes a point where the honest chronicler must deal with certain recurrent themes, as I said before, in Van’s oeuvre, and this is the cookingest mutation of “Good Morning Little School Girl” this side of Vladimir Nabokov. It has a great chugging construction, and voyeurism of so poetic a turn as to make a grown lecher cry: “Saw you from my window” – “Cypress Avenue,” here we come – and a dreamscape middle section: “In miles and miles of golden sand/Walkin’, talkin’, hand in hand”. Leading to a final lust-crazed raveup. Another classic – “Sweet Little 16” was a stunner, but you shoulda seen her little sister. Van did.

“One More Time” links generically to “Don’t Look Back” and “How long Baby” as blues ballad and functions as throwforward to his current stuff: “It won’t be long till I’m comin’ on home/Gonna get you in my arms and make love to you, darlin’, just one more time.” Straight, to your heart like a cannonball. The spoken section even reaffirms that “There’s a girl for every boy,” which was nice to know in the 11th Grade and nice to know now if you’re in between embraces. Their lives were saved by rock ’n’ roll.

And rescued not even once this side but twice at least: “If You and I Could Be As Two” comes complete with spoken intro: “I kicked my heart when I saw you standin’ there in your dress of blue/The storm was over, my ship sailed through!” How could it not’ve? Perfect penetration, perfect joy. It’s the eternal teenage dream, rendered in a classic ballad form: “What is this feelin’?/What can I do? lf you and I could be relieved/To walk and talk and be deceived/I’d give my all, and more I would do,” even to the point of “Sew this wicked world up at the seams.” Love will win, and despite the Utopian cast which links it to such prime slices of puppylove megalomania as the Troggs’ “Our love Will Still Be There”, Van is realist enough to declare his willingness to be deceived, knowing full well he’s gonna be anyway whether he apprehends any sweetness or not. The most pragmati­cally horny anthem you could name.

“I Like It Like That” ain’t Chris Kenner’s 1961 hit; today they’d probably call it a boogie, though it’s closer to a shuffle, a traditional medium-tempo R&B form common to many British getdown bands of the period. You can dance to it and you don’t need a Funk & Wagnall’s to apprehend the kozmik import of the words. Same thing applies to the closing raveup, Bobby Troup’s “Route 66”, which was one of the few songs that Chuck Berry ever wrote or popularized that the Rolling Stones managed to cut old Chuckle on, and even though this version don’t cut the Stones’ (that’d be a mighty tall order), its latter-day-barrelhouse piano and cheerfully (beerfully) bash­ing drums make for more great party music, taking the album out on a joyous note.

In between those two mainstream whoopups, however, lies one of the greatest pieces of pure psychedelic music ever recorded: “One Two Brown Eyes.” Sure, it preceded the fad, doesn’t sound anything like Chocolate Watch Band ersatz fuzz-feedback anyway. What makes it really chilling is that it’s so lucid, deliberate and ungimmicky. Strange as anything Astral Weeks, perhaps stranger, more vein-chilling than “T.B. Sheets,” it’s put together like no other song here or elsewhere, with elements that shouldn’t mix in a month of stolstices but somehow, eerily, do. Like the weird irony of the tinkling percussive background (glockenspiel?), not to mention the infernally, surrealistically vindictive lyrics. Or the brilliant use of the pocketknife alternative to bottleneck guitar, which slithers and slides and makes all appropriate incisions, almost as if peeling skin away from a still-warm body. A further perverse twist is provided by the underpinning of a bossa nova beat. Astrud Gilberto will never sing this, though, that’s for sure. “I’m gonna cut you down to my size,” hisses Van, and you look at the diminutive unsmiling presence on the old album cover and think simultaneously of A Clockwork Orange: real horror show. Well, he does say “Don't read about it in good books,” and it ain’t nothing like Lou Reed singing “Like a dirty French novel” or Joni Mitchell watching “all the pretty people reading Rolling Stone.” Beyond Sade. Bizarro, years ahead of its time in both that and its structure, and totally coherent to boot. The Chill as Van hasn’t rendered it since save perhaps in some of the remoter labyrinths of Astral Weeks. And nobody can put The Chill on like he can, and he don’t even have to indulge in no juju hocus-pocus; plain old fashioned cold blooded virulence does just fine.

This is not the latest or the last Van Morrison album you’re ever going to get, but before scrawling my John Hancock at the end of these perhaps overly effusive notes I must say that when it comes to this man’s music you're never going to hear anything better than the best moments of these two albums. Which is not at all to denigrate his current work, but to note that genius never stands still and when he laid down these sides with Them he was moving at a pace perhaps more furious than he has ever matched since, simply because it was all new and there were so many things to say at once that the man literally exploded. I don’t know much about his personal life, which is probably just as well for our purposes here, since I suspect that the creative eruption comprising these records, Blowin’ Your Mind and Astral Weeks laid the same heavy tax on his soul and body as that which Dylan endured in the process of living and recording the cycle that ended with Blonde On Blonde. Like Dylan, Van seems to have found a modicum of the harmony he was always lunging after in his post-apocalypse, connubial country life. But that does not make the artistic product of the apocalypse any less crucial and exciting – more so, if anything. Even wanting to believe that we don’t really want our heroes to immolate themselves to sate our vicarious craving for the truth and profundity and danger they have lived, we’ll always have the disturbingly beautiful music of the outer edge to move and keep us aware of what lies there. I think Astral Weeks was Morrison’s haunted cathedral erected on that precipice, and much of the music here belongs to an earlier, perhaps easier and certainly more prosaic period. But it’s inescapable that some of the music here, and it is usually the very best of it, comes from that singed outpost on that harrowing highway where artists push against either the looming crunch of the juggernaut or outward into sheer nothing­ness. And that extremism is this music’s strength. “Mystic Eyes” is strong and vital because for all its agony and desperation its totally unafraid.

And it’s strong because, like everything around it on these two pieces of wax, it’s real rock ’n’ roll of the sort that comes rarely and scores your life without your even trying, by its truth. Music like this can’t stay out of sight long, and if all goes well and there are no contractual snags this company may even get around to putting out a second collection of early Van Morrison­-Them material in a few months, with all the goodies and masterpieces that a mere two albums couldn't hold: “Baby Please Don't Go,” “All For Myself,” “Richard Cory,” songs from English albums like “Just a Little Bit,” “I Gave My Love a Diamond,” “You Just Can’t Win,” “Bright Lights Big City,” “The Story of Them,” “My Little Baby,” “Don't Start Crying Now” and all the others.

In the meantime, should you be standing even now in the records section of the local department store with the plastic slit by thumbnail and this package open, reading these words and trying to decide... don’t hesitate.

Get it while you can.

Lester Bangs

CREEM Magazine

Bangs’ sleeve notes – a design nightmare – overly crammed, squeezing out the very cool photo. The UK edition has a better set of tracks . . . MORE! . . . and a readable layout

Danny Holloway recalls going to see THEM play at the Whisky A Go Go and elsewhere . . . I wish I’d been with him . . .

UGLY THINGS – The Creation: In The Beginning

Very pleased to have a feature article in the latest issue (#64) of the great Ugly Things

Copies can be had from here – direct from the publisher or with cheaper shipping in the UK from 14th Floor Music here

There was a small formatting glitch in the print edition and a column of text went AWOL. So, if you’re interested in what Penny Valentine had to say on Ealing’s finest, here’s what’s gone astray:

Inside The Velvet Library

A small stream of new books on The Velvet Underground have joined with Todd Haynes’ documentary to produce yet another upswing in interest in the band; maximum momentum maintained even if, as a fan, you can barely find the energy to pull the cellophane from yet another behemoth record set that you surely already own in multiple versions. The fix is in, the fascination doesn’t pall, the same conjuring tricks still tantalise and please; familiarity and repetition a certain comfort – expectations will be met, satisfaction all but guaranteed.

Everything is known, now only the skill of the story-teller is there to give life to the tale. Chris Roberts is one of the better recitalists, he is an eloquent writer, conversational in style, who promises in The Velvet Underground (Palazzo, 2022) an element of novelty based on his three encounters with Lou Reed. The book is well-designed with numerous, well-chosen, images but, for all that it offers, a reader’s prior knowledge will leave the author behind, racing on ahead of the biographical sketches; his rendering of the chance encounters and short-lived creative alliances that produced the first two albums; the sundering of Reed and Cale’s partnership and the trials and tribulations of trying to achieve popular acceptance, before Reed returns to the family home, suburbia, therapy and prescription pharmaceuticals.

The novelty offered to bring renewed excitement to these story conventions in All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground (2023), Koren Shadmi’s graphic novel, is front and centre. His tale is focused on the relationship between Reed and Cale, the former all ego, paranoia and anger, the latter a bemused and betrayed friend. The story as good as ends with the fallout, missing entirely the third album, before briefly sketching in the run of Max’s Kansas City gigs and Reed’s retreat to Long Island, which make up my favourite set of panels. The characters are all adroitly rendered, wholly recognisable, Nico is surprisingly sympathetic, Cale surprisingly passive in the face of Reed’s excesses. Reed is volatile, self-obsessed, endlessly resentful – a negative presence. Why anyone would put up with him is unanswered. Moe and Sterling, as always, are secondary bit part players, blank buffers – calm, mundane presences to counter Nico, Cale, Warhol and Reed’s overindulgences. Like the high-end boxed sets, the novel is a slick production; its spot gloss perfection somewhat at odds with its subject, yet its deftly rendered caricatures readily escape their packaging.

“New Wave USA’ . . . we’re not talking CBGBs 1976 here . . . The first photograph of the VU to appear in the British music press, Melody Maker (November 25, 1967)

 Dylan Jones’ Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of The Velvet Underground (White Rabbit, 2023) follows the formula first introduced in Jean Stein’s Edie Sedgwick biography (1982) and deftly developed in his earlier Bowie volume: a careful assembly of previously published quotations, supplemented with new interviews, all held together by Jones’ narration and critical interjections. Even if a good number of the sources are known to a reader that familiarity is mitigated by the cumulative effect of the pieces, by Jones’ editorial curation. If the reader’s tendency is to race ahead of Roberts, here the effect is to keep pace with Jones, who pauses the rush with either a new voice, story or comment, such as Jimmy Page watching the Velvets over three nights at Steve Paul’s Scene club or Marco Pirroni’s observation:

At the time I couldn’t discern any influencers the band had. It didn’t sound like anything else. Now I know that all my heroes – Bryan Ferry, David Bowie and Lou Reed – were all obsessed with Bob Dylan.

Where the collage approach is at its weakest is in following up such an insight, pushing the idea just that little bit further. Instead the perspective shifts to another facet of the revolving glitterball Jones is spinning. The polyphony of voices also tend toward recalling the impact of first hearing the Velvets, sometimes years after their demise. The dependence on such after the fact contributors is understandable and the takes of Tracey Emin, Jarvis Cocker or Bobby Gillespie are not without interest, but they twirl the ball away from the history of the band (and give the whole a very British perspective on things). A problem facing all VU chroniclers is that Reed & co. gave so few contemporaneous interviews, the band members and Warhol acolytes’ views are all, therefore, delivered with their own spin on events. The passive voice of the editor in such oral collections means that commentary on the more wilfully self-serving often goes unchallenged, which is not necessarily a problem, or at least it isn’t when it comes to Mary Woronov’s acerbic commentary.

Clipping floating around on the internet, can anyone help identify its original source?

A welcome corrective to the overwhelming focus on the Reed/Cale axis in just about every other volume on the band is Ignacio Juliá’s Linger On: The Velvet Underground: Legend, Truth, Interviews (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2022), an expanded edition of his Feed-Back (Munster Records, 2008), which gives centre stage to Sterling Morrison. The introductory assemblage sets the scene: Bobby Gillespie (again) on the VU as rock’s ‘best kept secret’ willed above ground and into the open by Juliá’s ‘dream power and soul energy’ that is laid alongside the author’s declaration that ‘The legend of the Velvet Underground fades away. It is no more. It's been totally exposed to the light. Their secrets have been revealed and the myth evaporated’. Carried by an occult iconography, legends, though, exist only in the process of their tale being told, otherwise we are dealing with history, and all this productivity being reviewed here suggest the legend is doing more than just sputtering on, it’s the history that is fading.

In his talks with Juliá, Morrison is lucid, thoughtful – centred. He’s not competitive, appears to have no regrets and, like Maureen Tucker, is alarmingly modest in discussing his contribution to the band. There’s a marvellous section where he recalls playing Poor Richards in Chicago while Reed was in hospital with hepatitis:

We played for a week, with all different versions of the songs, with John on vocals, and we did lots of practicing just to make the songs work. It was fun. That was the first time that anybody could go missing and the shows would go on – John or Lou or anybody, it didn’t matter. . . we moved Maureen to bass and rhythm guitar. We got Angus MacLise, the original drummer, back to play drums. So here’s this astonishing incarnation of the band. “Sister Ray” grew out of this one gig.

Here he is, finally in the limelight, but the spot on Morrison quickly shifts away and he is soon back on the periphery of things, stage right, looking in. In band photographs, from 1965/66, Morrison’s face is always concealed behind a mop of long hair, wraparound dark glasses, swirling cigarette smoke. Tall and skinny, cuffed Levi’s worn over black engineer boots, he was the Velvets’ suburban juvenile delinquent figure, a perfect foil for the other three but never the main event. As Juliá’s interviews mount up, with all the old Velvets – Nico, Lou, John, Moe and Doug – and with others who have stories to tell – Jackson Browne, Gerard Malanga, Lenny Kaye and Todd Haynes – as the volume of voices increases, as in Jones’ Loaded, the centre contracts. What were they all talking about? In its parts Linger On is a work to cherish, but as a whole it is a babel of competing voices all demanding equal attention.

That the story’s broad outline no longer need be tendered is conspicuously the case with two lengthy articles by longstanding Velvets’ aficionado, Phil Milstein, in two recent issues of the inestimable Ugly Things. (It’s also worth noting the magazine’s publication of David Holzer’s exploration of Lou Reed’s obsession with the white light mysticism of Alice Bailey #61, Winter 2022). In #55 (Winter 2020) Milstein takes a deep dive into the world of Michael Leigh who wrote the pulp exploitation book from which The Velvet Underground took their name. The topic is, as Milstein admits, peripheral to the main event, even if the book’s cover imagery has been purloined numerous times to ground the band’s interest in the fetishistic and the taboo. Over 11 A4 sized three column pages, Milstein tracks the biography of the author and the various incarnations of his tale of the ‘bizarre sex underground’. It is an epic undertaking, excessive in its obsession and quite marvellous, even if the included photograph of Tony Conrad’s dirtied, torn and frayed personal copy – an occult relic if ever there was one – is sufficient in itself to maintain the book’s iconographic potency.

‘Doug is just plain groovy . . .’ Disc & Music Echo (November 30, 1968)

In Ugly Things #60 (Summer 2022), Milstein is back and surpassing his earlier effort with a 22 page inquiry into the pre-Velvet Underground activities of Reed and Cale, with a focus on the former’s Pickwick-era songwriting and recordings. The research is once more impeccable and just as obsessive – has the flotsam of an exploitation record company ever been picked through with such care and attention as Milstein practices here? I find it all delightful, but to what end, to what effect, does all this expended energy add to the matter of The Velvet Underground?

 The question of why The Velvet Underground matter should surely form the heart of any academic study of the band yet, until now, there has been no such book length exploration of The Velvets. Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s edited collection The Velvet Underground: What Goes On (Bloomsbury, 2022) corrects this situation and presents sixteen essays from academics aligned with a range of disciplines, film, queer, cultural, literary, music and media studies – a good half of the book, however, is less concerned with the band than with its cultural and musical influence on other artists and on the post-VU careers of Nico, Cale and Reed. Though there is a panoply of theoretical approaches in play, none of which would or should bother Milstein, they do share the same desire to focus on an aspect of the story rather than the story itself. With a few notable exceptions, what they don’t share with Milstein is his output’s basis in primary research.

Like all such collections, the editors, as they themselves reflect, are at the mercy of who responds to their call for papers. Such a state of affairs usually leads to a fairly eclectic set of essays and this is no exception, so they will forgive me, I hope, if I only focus on the contributions that play directly to my interests. Their introduction sketches in the broad dimensions of the band’s legacy – cult rebel outliers, inside the Factory with Warhol, their place within the Pop avant-garde and the chance meeting of Cale and Reed (the classically trained musician and the songwriter of pop novelties) whose ambitions coincide, as one slips down and the other climbs up the ladder of cultural capital. Recognising that Cale, Reed and Nico garner most of the attention, the editors finish the introduction by profiling Morrison, Tucker and Yule.

What Goes On has been graced with a superb opening chapter, which puts the band back into the context of 1960s pop culture. Jeffrey Roessner’s ‘Saved By Rock ’n’ Roll: The Velvet Underground In and Out of History’ begins with the image of Petula Clark heading downtown as The Velvets head in the opposite direction in 1965 Manhattan. Countering the idea that they were the supreme rebels, pushing against the flow of their times, Roessner argues you can find analogues for their experiments, for almost every radical gesture they made, among their immediate peers:

Their distinctiveness, then, is less about musical style than about the rejection of the florid psychedelic image and countercultural politics that have become the dominant image of the time.

He moves through the posthumous construction of The Velvets as being a band out of time:

When we say they don’t fit, we must mean that they don’t fit our conception of the era. That’s one clue that the problem is less with the band and more with our restricted, stereotypical view of the era.

Roessner is not out to deny the band’s originality, but to give back to their story some historical context. In doing so he doesn’t denigrate their achievements, instead he enhances our understanding of why they matter. As an entrée to a book of essays on the Velvets it can’t easily be improved upon.

‘marathon freaky hard-rock'. . .’ review of White Light/White Heat by, I guess, Hugh Nolan. Disc & Music Echo (June 8, 1968)

‘A hippy must . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat in Record Mirror (June 8, 1968)

Johnny Hopkins and Martin James follow up with an essay that could not, in turn, have been better aligned with Roessner than if it had been commissioned by the editors, perhaps it was. The joint authors’ concern with the contemporary pop scene of the sixties is less with the overlaps the Velvets shared with the American counterculture than with their place in a transatlantic network. Despite never having played London and with only a few traces left in the contemporary British music press, the links were, as they show with numerous primary sources, tangible. Countercultural communications through outlets like Better Books and International Times fostered the already fermenting Pop Art connectivity of Warhol’s artistic enclave with his British counterparts, while the personal connections of Cale and Nico coalesced with the London-centric nature of the pop scene circa 1965 and into 1966 with the repeated Atlantic crossings of The Beatles, Stones, Animals, Yardbirds and The Who. Of all the aspects discussed and analysed in the volume it is this one I find the most intriguing. Into this communal hothouse of cultural exchange figures like Barry Miles, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Mick Farren, Mike McInnerney, Ken Pitt and his charge, David Bowie, Simon Napier-Bell and The Yardbirds flit before the eye – filtered through high expectations of the imminent arrival of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable on English shores. One of the great ‘what ifs’ of pop history.

It’s a shame that an essay could not have been found on the impact of the band and their connection with Warhol on the British art school scene, developing perhaps the insights given by Michael Bracewell in his study of Roxy Music on the trans-Atlantic connection between Newcastle and Manhattan, orchestrated by Richard Hamilton and experienced by his student Mark Lancaster. Nevertheless, Hopkins and James’ piece is followed by another strong entry, Glyn Davis on the link between Warhol’s filmmaking and participation of The Velvet Underground in that practice. Symphony of Sound (1966) and The Velvet Underground in Boston (1967) are held up for brief consideration alongside Nico’s appearances in shorts and in Chelsea Girl, but it is the ‘Screen Tests’ that are the focus and how these, in turn, became part of the EPI experience –‘aural and visual agitation combined’ where total cinema met total rock ’n’ roll.

‘Raving, out-of-tune, distorted sound . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat by Allan Evans in New Musical Express (June 1, 1968)

‘Utterly pretentious . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat in Melody Maker (June 7, 1968)

And on the good stuff rolls with Thom Robinson’s study of the literary underground – Grove Press  – and its impact on Lou Reed, which adds depth and weight to the too readily tossed about remark that Reed brought a literary sensibility to the band’s music. The interlacing of the Press’ story with Reed’s reading, his participation in the literary community at Syracuse University, is as fascinating as it is enlightening. Robinson has rifled through the archives of the University’s newspapers to place Reed’s juvenilia within the context of the day, especially the sensation and outraged caused (and courted) by Grove Press. Through the twists and turns of his story, readers, if they so wish, can make a connection back to Millstein’s research on Michael Leigh to think anew about what the ‘underground’– literary, cinematic, musical – meant then and now.

With the first four essays this volume marks itself as essential for even the most jaded VU head. While for me these initial contributions represent the book’s highpoint there are 12 further essays to pursue: on musicology and archetypes; Lou Reed’s Great American Novel’; Nico, cultural accreditation and experimental rock; solo careers through the ‘long-1970s’; the influence on Ziggy Stardust; Berlin, 1973 & 2006; Nico, Cale and Eno in Berlin; Metal Machine Music; Jonathan Richman; Live: Take No Prisoners – improvisation and performance; Songs for Drella; and finally Cale and Reed in the twenty-first century. Collectively these 12 chapters make for a lively, insightful, critical account of post-Velvet Underground activities. On the other hand, over emphasising the participants’ solo careers produces a centrifugal force that pulls attention away from the putative object of interest.

Beyond all the clatter and clutter these various volumes testify to the still far from faded legend of The Velvet Underground:

It's a hundred years from today, and everyone who is reading this is dead. I’m dead, you’re dead. And some kid is taking a music course in junior high, and maybe he’s listening to the Velvet Underground because he’s got to write a report on classical rock ’n’ roll and I wonder what that kid is thinking? [here]

–      Elliott Murphy, liner notes to Velvet Underground Live: 1969

We’re halfway there now and I wonder if Elliott Murphy is still wondering? I am . . .

 

Recent reissue/upgrade of Sweet Sister Ray boot . . . just like . . . dose yerself before and after reading . . .

Sister Ray . . . ‘The most ugly, yet most hypnotic performance in rock history’ New Musical Express (July 15, 1972)

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

These days with inflated shipping charges, Ugly Things is often hard to find here in the UK, but recently I’ve been getting mine from Juno (here). The mag’s home site is here