The Who and the Young London Look

March 1965 . . . Seventeen magazine runs a 20 page survey of London fashion trends . . . The Who, who were the self-proclaimed face of London 1965 [here], play backdrop in one of the fashion shoots, possibly orchestrated by photographer Joseph Santano.

At least two other images from this shoot are in circulation and Richard Barnes has used the following of the band alone in Maximum R&B. Are there more to be seen?

This one is usually cited as being from the ‘Young London Look’ themed issue but I suspect it’s from a subsequent edition. Joseph Santano is credited lower right

The Yardbirds (and Georgie Fame) also played the role of props in a Seventeen fashion shoot (September 1967)

The Word from Mose Allison and the Yardbirds: "I’m Not Talking"

If you want to demonstrate to a non-believer why The Yardbirds are among the elite movers and shakers of second-generation rock ’n’ roll then ‘I’m Not Talking’, as found on the flip-side of the US release of ‘Shapes of Things’, will cure their apostasy. Recorded at Advision Sound Studios on 13 April 1965, just one short month after Jeff Beck’s first recording session with the band, none of their peers at that point in time came anywhere close to the coiled controlled aggression displayed on this cover of Mose Allison’s jaunty sounding yet intently spiteful song.

‘My Girl Sloopy’ on the top-side, ‘I Ain’t Done Wrong’ and ‘I’m Not Talking’ jammed together on the flip

In every which way, this cut on US Epic leaves all others behind . . . sonic perfection

Allison was a darling of English art school common rooms; his seemingly effortless bridging of rustic and sophisticated, country and city, black and white, modern and traditional styles was conjoined by a reserved cool that made him sound like no other, until Georgie Fame. The boys and girls in their art school days looked to similarly cross the divides, most usually between home and exile, their time studying art also a time to figure out adult identities (or refuse them, to be forever adolescent).

Rolling Stone Discotheque, New York, September 1965

Part of the attraction of Allison’s music was his undoubted authenticity, a white Southern man who played in a mixed-race trio and who had, it appeared, permission to play the blues, yet who vocalized without blatant imitation of Black voices. Allison seemed to take the blues into the modern age, an ambition that the Yardbirds shared. He was a model worth emulating, as Townshend surely comprehended with the Who’s covers of ‘Young Man Blues’, ‘Eyesight for the Blind’ and ‘One Room Country Shack’.

Allison played on the same bill as the Yardbirds at the fourth National Jazz and Blues Festival in August 1964; they had lifted ‘I’m Not Talking’ from that year’s The Word from Mose, his third album for Atlantic. The Yardbirds kick his song in the head with two drum rolls under revving guitars before exploding down the straight, Beck riding the clutch into the corners, Dreja, McCarty and Samwell-Smith pumping full-throttle, no let up. ‘I’m Not Talking’ is 100 per cent greased-up rock ’n’ roll, the toughest number recorded in Britain in 1965, no question, no argument. Recorded seven months earlier, ‘I’m Not Talking’ is a fulsome precursor to the Who’s ‘My Generation’, scratching the same attitude and style into a Bentley’s paintwork. Both numbers reached the similar conclusion that talking only breeds confusion – things said at midnight might not be said in the morning.

The Swedish version of For Your Love is an improvement on the US edition excluding ‘Sweet Music’ and ‘Putty’ but is still less than perfect.

Gomelsky wasted the two tracks by hiding them on the lower deck of a British EP and on the ragbag For Your Love album, squeezed between Clapton-era rejects of Major Lance’s ‘Sweet Music’ and the Shirelles’ ‘Putty (In Your Hands)’, both trite exercises in the Yardbirds’ hands that fail as pop and anything else they might have aspired towards; the rest of the album included the six sides from the first three singles and their woeful cover of the Vibrations’s ‘My Girl Sloopy’. ‘I’m Not Talking’ and ‘I Ain’t Done Wrong’ would have been better held in reserve to be coupled with subsequent singles and the numbers they would record in the States.

Beck had auditioned for the band in February and made his debut at the Fairfield Hall on 5 March. That the song meant something to him and the band is indicated by it being a key feature of two sessions recorded for the BBC in March 1965 and a third in June, bookending the Advision session in April. All the parts are already present and correct on the Saturday Club take from 20 March but it is a slight, thin affair lacking in the released torque that is exhibited to killer effect on the version cut for Top Gear just two days later.

The third version played for the Saturday Swings show, 4 June, is more cocksure; the band sound comfortable and almost at ease in putting it over, but the cut lacks the nervous rush of tension of their second March run through. They carried over that agitated tautness into the Advision session and then added a bottom end to the sonic structure that is missing on the radio takes. That base constrains and releases Beck’s lead which spools free and snaps back like the screaming line an angler lets run to pull in a hooked marlin.

The BBC sessions are best heard, no argument, on the new Repertoire 4 CD set The Ultimate Live at the BBC which not only boasts of 28 previously unreleased tracks but has seriously improved audio taken from newly discovered and best available sources. Compiled by Ashley Wood, who also provides the authoritative session notes, this is a serious upgrade on all existing collections of off-air and transcription disc collections. Essential  

Penny Valentine and Simon Napier-Bell in a tête-à-tête about John’s Children

Of all the weekly music press critics who took a turn at reviewing the latest singles, Penny Valentine was by far the most astute, witty and all around entertaining. You can get endlessly and delightfully lost browsing her column in Disc, which she wrote between 1964-1970. She could be equally enthused about the latest from regular chart toppers or a debut offer from complete unknowns. She didn’t work on a grace or favour basis, her recommendation had to be earned. Her style is intimate, personal, reflective. She will explain what she wants from a record and why it does or does not meet with her expectations. She is without cupidity in her love of pop: never curtly dismissive, patronising or elitist.

She filled the role of an interlocutor mediating between the pop machine and the pop consumer; her endorsement of a record genuine, honest, her critique considered. Most importantly she made her reader feel part of an ongoing conversation about pop, she was inclusive – writing in the same temper as the records she so clearly loved.

You can see how this played out across her reviews of records produced by Simon Napier -Bell in 1966–1967 in which she engaged with him as if he, the reader and her were sharing the same space.

Her column would highlight half a dozen releases but she also dealt with twice that number in the ‘Quick Spins’ section, which is where she reviewed John’s Children’s second 45:

A gentleman phoned me last week and accused me of being very anti the musical works of Simon Napier-Bell. I wish to disagree – while admitting that I have so far remained unimpressed with the odd sounds Mr Bell has produced. Now to ‘Just What You want’ by John’s Children which is odd weird peculiar and disturbing but some tricks work and the overall is effective. Do I see the light? (February 4 1967)

It doesn’t appear that she reviewed the band’s debut – ‘The Love I Thought I’d Found’ aka ‘Smashed Blocked’ –  back in October 1966 so that accusation of being antithetical to SNB productions was most likely in response to the discs by The Yardbirds and Keith Relf:

 Keith Relf – ‘Mr Zero’ (Columbia)

I'm very fond of dear Keith Relf with his starved face, and I too thought that this would have been just the sort of sad song cut out for him. BUT. . . I hate to make comparisons but if people will do songs that other people have already made then they must be prepared. It's been done much faster than Bob Lind's, and consequently you lose a lot of the of impact of loneliness. I'm not at all sure about this record at all. Other side is "Knowing." (May 14 1966)

Two weeks later, beneath the headline ‘Now Yardbirds go Russian and Arabic!’, she reviewed ‘Over Under Sideways Down’ (Columbia):

 I can only suppose that on their next record the Yardies will have the entire Dagenham Girl Pipers playing pick and shovels . . things have got to quite а pitch in their search for new sounds. On this they have great clapping and Russian-type "Heys, Indian rave-ups and a part that sounds like the Arabic call to prayer. Fact, I think it's fascinating and all very splendid. So there! (May 28 1966)

Hardly dismissive in either case but the idea of engaging with SNB must have appealed to her. Whatever, she definitely refused to continence their next single. As she explained:

 Yardbirds – ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago (Columbia)

The time has come, the walrus said, to have a go. Well, he didn’t actually say that, but I am going to have a go.

I have always thought that a record should give, to each individually it should impart something musically nice. This does not give. It takes. I have had enough of this sort of excuse for music. It is not clever, it is not entertaining, it is not informative. It is boring and pretentious. I am tired of people like the Yardbirds thinking this sort of thing is clever when people like the Spoonful and the Beach Boys are putting real thought into their music. And if I hear the word psychedelic mentioned I will go nuts. (October 22 1966)

Being dull and condescending was a grave sin, while hiding behind the mask of psychedelia was no excuse for pretension. She was, however, ready to make amends with Relf’s second solo disc, ‘Shapes in my Mind’, which she reviewed under the title  ‘Make Me Break This Spell’ (Columbia), even if she still felt ‘Happenings’ was a ‘monstrosity’:

 I have a strange feeling that Simon Napier-Bell has been groping around in the dark – In the musical sense for a long time and may at last be coming out into the light.

This is as strange and weird as some of his other efforts (that includes the last Yardbirds’ monstrosity) but unlike the others this actually works. Here then we have Keith's off-beat, sad, echoey voice in a desperate state at losing his girl. Once you've got over the shock of everything stopping and starting and feeling that somewhere lurks the phantom of the opera at his organ keyboard, you'll like it. It may even move you. It did me. (November 26 1966)

Napier-Bell had cut the backing for Relf’s single in Los Angeles at the same time as he had the city’s top session men record John’s Children’s debut, musically and thematically the two singles make good companion pieces.

‘Marc explained about their stage act “We don’t just do a musical performance . . . it’s a 45-minute happening . . .”’Record Mirror (June 10, 1967)

It would have been a fair exchange . . . . Velvets for John’s Children Melody Maker (July 15 1967)

The third release by John’s Children was also placed in the ‘Quick Spins’ section:

Some have said that ‘Desdemona’ is a very dodgy song indeed, and JOHN'S CHILDREN say no, it's not. So be it. But even to my uncontaminated mind the words don't seem to leave much to the imagination. All very weird, with Marc Boland's [sic] odd black magic voice coming through well. (May 13 1967)

Valentine had reviewed Bolan’s debut The Wizard and had rather liked it:

On the strength of this strange young man's looks and weird background, I suspect we'll hear more of this odd record about meeting a wizard in the woods who knew all.

I prefer the other side, 'Beyond the Rising Sun' which has more tune. Jim Economides, ace producer, does lovely things on this. I'm a bit put off by the way this boy sings with Dylan phrasing, but that’s all. (November 19, 1965)

She missed (or avoided) reviewing ‘The Third Degree’ and ‘Hippy Gumbo’.

Melody Maker (June 10 1967)

Napier-Bell’s pursuit of the sensational, however phoney, had made its mark with ‘Desdemona’, how then to follow that line of provocation?

John’s Children – ‘Come and Play With Me in the Garden’ (Track)

Some people, including Simon Napier-Bell himself, think I have a "down" on Simon Napier-Bell's productions. Well, I haven't. I do try to be fair – really. But so often it strikes me that all he and his groups агe after is a controversial lyric and such a way-out production that nobody would be any the wiser if they were all playing and singing on their heads. Perhaps they are. Down here, mother, where the air is clean and your children are innocent, I couldn't understand what was going on. In fact, I couldn't even follow the tune.

John's Children sound as though they have been recorded suspended from crystal balloons. All disconcerting. But see "Emily Play" and look how wrong I was about THAT. (July 22 1967)

The admission of error when it came to predicting hit records was one of the traits that enhanced her appeal. The previous month she had written off Syd and the boys:

Pink Floyd – ‘See Emily Play’ (Columbia), didn't really go mad over this group's last record, and I' can't in all honesty say I like this much either. It's another of those songs which appear childishly innocent on the surface but actually carry messages of doomy evilness. (June 17 1967)

With the next John Children’s effort,was Napier-Bell replying in kind to her commentary about his charges?

 John’s Children – Go Go Girl (Track)

The clever thing about this group is that their records are always so outrageous they always manage to get a big review. This one, I understand, was made in desperation after continual harsh words from me. It sounds like it. I will accept no responsibility for this extraordinary send-up. It's chronic and a joke. But then, of course, it's meant to be. Haha. Ignored it will surely not be. Goodnight Simon. (October 7 1967)

Was Penny Valentine – all put together with chocolate n’ feathers – the subject of ‘Go Go Girl’? Undoubtedly not, but it kept the conversation rolling on though that was the last of the John’s Children 45s. Valentine did, however, review two of Andy Ellison’s solo singles:

 Quick Spins:

From ‘Round the Mulberry Bush’ a pretty song of lost summer love, sea and sand, called ‘It’s Been A Long Time’ by Andy Ellison (January 6 1968)

Andy Ellison, who has stunned many by recent TV appearances, makes Beatles’ ‘You Can’t Do That’ into a pretty evil-sounding proposition. (June 8 1968)

Had others heard the evil masquerading as innocence in ‘See Emily Play’ and Ellison’s version of the ‘You Can’t Do That’? While her dialogue with Napier-Bell faded his replacement was waiting in the wings:

Tyrannosaurus Rex ‘Deborah’ (Regal Zonophone)

Once you've staggered over that name this is a very interesting record. Apparently this is John Peel's favourite record at the moment but don't be feared doesn't mean it's that incredibly obtuse. What it is, is a very interesting record. By that I mean it's a new weird sound from Marc Bolan's highly distinctive vocal. Few words, lots of sounds, and it's pretty in a strange way too. Unexpectedly nice. (April 27 1968)

Tyrannosaurus Rex ‘One Inch Rock’ (Regal Zonophone)

I dig you now, Tyrannosaurus! It has taken me much longer than all those hip people who have been digging them for ages to appreciate this group. I now admit I find their sound rather endearing, certainly very individual, and totally fascinating. I have also met Marc Bolan in my lift, and he’s much smaller and delicate looking close to than I had suspected. I’m glad they put a title on this because I couldn’t understand a thing he was singing about. But there’s power in those vocal cords, by jove! And they do get a very good sound. (August 23 1968)

Most of Penny Valentine’s reviews of Bolan’s records have been quoted in There was A Time – Marc Bolan: a Chronology (2024). I can think of no better way to idle away the hours than tracking with Cliff McLenehan the traces Bolan left behind.

ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE! . . . The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin – University of Kent 1967 and 1971

I’ve eaten a good many meals in Rutherford Dining Hall, the idea of Led Zeppelin playing there, as rumour had it, seemed as fanciful as them playing the even smaller venue Bridge Place Country Club (now a restaurant) in a village near to Canterbury. I’ve been there once and I can’t figure out where they would have played – all the rooms seem entirely inadequate for a rock band. . .

The Who had played Eliot Dining Hall the year before, which is the same size as Rutherford, holds approximately 600 bodies, but then, as it turned out, the event took place in the Sports Hall and not where I bought chips and beans.

The gig was part of Zeppelin’s ‘Back to the Clubs’ tour and their sixth UK jaunt, the idea was to reconnect with their audience. . . . which Robert Plant, at least for this reviewer, singularly failed to do . . .

Back when they played in Bridge in December 1968, Zeppelin were billed locally as ‘The Yardbirds’, possibly the last time they were promoted as such in Britain.

Before the three original Yardbirds up and quit on him in the Spring of 1968, Jimmy Page had played alongside Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja for the University’s Summer Ball, 1967 . . . Their performance was slammed in the student paper InCant.

No Ball!

NOT AGAIN! YES, AGAIN I’M AFRAID – ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE!

The really significant word in the above statement/exclamation is ‘Dance’. Friday the 2nd of June was to be the University of Kent at Canterbury Summer Ball. What we actually got was a rather upper-second-rate hop.

What price non-culmination? About £200 in the red! Much of this debt probably due to the £300-odd paid for 50-minutes’ ‘worth’ of un-danceable Yardbirds.

To cap it all, the buffet served day-old lemon mousse . . . . the horror

In defence of The Yardbirds, there were complaints about nearly every band subsequently booked for freshers week or the end of year ball. You couldn’t dance to any of them and they were always too loud and money was inevitably lost . . . Of all the bands who played the University in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s – Manfred Mann, Kinks, The Move, Procol Harum, Ten Years After, The Who – only Fairport Convention, twice, turned a profit. University gigs were subsidised and always ran at a loss, but lemon mousse, at least, was never again on the menu . . .

What's In A Name? Them Who Are Dissatisfied . . .

Looking for some context to place Mick Farren’s Social Deviants in Pin-Ups 1972, I took a sideways glance at how groups named themselves in the early to mid-1960s. Top of my short list of group names was Them. The pop correspondent of The Belfast Telegraph neatly captured the truculent provovation the band no doubt intended by adopting the pronoun:

He drew grimly on a cigarette and said: “We’re not wanted here. If you don’t belong nobody wants to know you”. He is, in fact, one of Them.

One of them in more ways than one – Billy Harrison.

One of “Them” – that quaintly named Belfast rhythm and blues group which sailed off this week for England – for good.

And one of them – those who find that society is not yet conditioned to really accept them.

For them are a five-strong outfit resembling the Rolling Stones with hair that must be longest in Ireland

Belfast Telegraph (June 12, 1965)

Disc Weekly (February 26, 1965)

From Pin-Ups 1972:

In any revised edition ‘The Dissatisfied’ will be slotted in between The Others and The Measles:

Despite playing with such esteemed Marquee headliners, and getting a stamp of approval from ‘Birds man Chris Dreja, I’d never heard of The Dissatisfied. Turns out there was a very smart looking bunch of likely lads from St. Austell (great band bio HERE) but they formed a year after this Dissatisfied, who I reckon were otherwise known by the much less truculent name The Dissatisfied Blues Band helmed by guitarist Jim Cregan who went on to play with Blossom Toes, Cockney Rebel and Rod Stewart [HERE].

The Dissatisfieds supporting The Yardbirds )ctober 31 1964

nicked from kernowbeat.co.uk . . . forever The Dissatisfied . . .

From the same issue of the Belfast Telegraph (September 26, 1964) in which Them appeared Maureen Cleave gave her opinion of the Bo Street Runners: ‘ugly but memorable’ which in this context seems fair . . .

Nik Cohn – Lost and Found: 'Mad Mister Mo'

Nik Cohn has published only a handful of short stories, ‘Mad Mister Mo’ from the October 1966 edition of King magazine is therefore something of a curiosity piece .

Given that his father was a celebrated history professor I guess you could chance a Freudian reading of this story of Mad Mo the history teacher: ‘He smelled of chalk all over and wore a ragged black gown with holes in it. When he walked, he gathered his black gown in tight around him like a shroud’. He is a monstrous figure who ‘threw out his arms like a mad messiah and he preached me lust and thieving and blashemy. He shouted at me and he said that religion was bad and murder good, love was bad and hate was right’. He preached me the triumphant victories of evil’.

Mo is certainly mad, but is he a tyrant, drunken fool or phantom figure of a child’s imagination?

Illustration by Peter Adkins

King was a fairly high-end men’s magazine, backed initially by Paul Raymond. It ran from 1964–68 when it was subsumed by Mayfair. I like to think its ideal reader found his surrogate in this male model puting some shape into the latest line in car coats – the well groomed man . . .

This issue also featured a piece and photograph by the great Val Wilmer on Thelonious Monk

Following on the heels of Cohn’s story is a report on drugs and Oxford, there’s no writer’s credit, but I imagine whoever penned this piece had some first-hand knowledge of both Oxford and the scene even if the tone is sensationalist.

The image of the student in mortor board and gown transforming into a bird imprinted on a sugar cube is rather wonderful, blocked and trippy even

What really catches the eye is the description of the dealer working the room with a Bob Dylan record under his arm:

The boy in the combat jacket with a face like the lead singer of the Yardbirds, but with a different intention has found a customer. In the airless bedroom, among the socks, he carefully unrolls a cigarette, watched by the young and eager faces of his new-found friends, and spills the tobacco on to the back of his Bob Dylan record.

The Pusher Men of Oxford . . . but ‘with a different intention’. Rave (May 1966)

The Coolest Place In England – Richmond Upon Thames

Andrew Humphreys, Raving Upon Thames: An Untold Story of Sixties London (London: Paradise Road 2021)

Counter to the prevailing idea that culture is disseminated from a hip centre by an irrepressible centrifugal force, in truth the worthwhile things take form first at the margins and then are dragged toward a hub, Soho say. Andrew Humphreys’ wholly enjoyable and needle-sharp history of the bands and venues, entrepreneurs and audiences in and around Richmond in the sixties is a testament to the fact that the real stories, the one’s that matter, belong first to the suburbs.

From 1960, but could have been from anytime from then until the end of the 1980s. The title page from a Weekend exposé of the Eel Pie Island scene. Reproduced in Raving

The availability of venues – The Station Hotel, Richmond Athletic Ground and Eel Pie Island – can partly explain why Richmond became the centre for the early activities of the Stones, who were closely followed by the Yardbirds and all those bands that thought they could read their own names in the contrails left in the wake of Mick Jagger. But more importantly, it was the art schools, teacher training colleges and further and higher education institutions, in and around the area, that meant there was a big enough demographic of young people who wanted to make a culture of their own, which in turn created the scene. The Stones and the ‘Birds found that audience as much as the audience found them.

Humphrey’s book gives a small cameo to The Others who produced one of the finest RnB pounders of the era and then vanished into utter obscurity

1964: The Others from the same management stable as The Pretty Things and The Fairies and with the same poise, attitude and style

My parents met in the ’50s at St. Mary’s teacher training college, opposite Richmond Lock. I doubt they went to Eel Pie Island to dance to the jazz and I know they never looked as wonderfully bohemian as their peers pictured here. My dad’s second wife did, however, see the Stones at the Station Hotel. She lived in Gunnersbury about two and a half miles from the venue, after one of the gigs Brian Jones had given her the bus fare she needed to get home. She missed her bus or chose to walk, either way she kept his gift. When I got to know her in the early Seventies she still had that pile of pennies, which she kept on the mantelpiece.

Inside the dance hall Eel Pie Island

That brief moment before a band moves from being entertainment for the in-crowd to becoming revered is the story told in Raving Upon Thames. The Stones and the Yardbirds have a ready familiarity but that is more than compensated for by Humphreys’ fine-eye for contextual detail and the way he so effectively musters a myriad walk-on parts for those who may have left only the faintest trace of having passed that way. With the eye of a detective he shows how their trails, when pulled together, make up a map of the times more revealing than any star’s biography.

One such trace was the pen letter a 16 year-old, Andrea Hiorns, wrote to her American friend, it is a perfect encapsulation of why Humphreys’ history is so much more than just about the local.

Wednesdays are good days. I go to my Island. I must tell you all about it, it is an important part of my life. It’s in the River Thames. You cross a steep bridge over the river and pay a toll of 4d to an old lady called Rose. Then walk along a winding road with bungalows on either side. There’s lots of trees and its dark and mysterious. You turn a bend and see a large decrepit hotel and a crumbling façade. You hear loud blues music. Walk through the gates and you are in another world. All material cares disappear and we are the only people who exist.

There’s a large converted barn, you go down some steps after conning your way in with 6d – it’s usually 3/6d – your wrist is stamped and you go down. It’s very dark with just red and green lights. Long John Baldry is singing with his band at one end of the hall. The walls are white flaking and full of cobwebs, with cartoons, murals and names printed over them. People dance there crazily. Next door is the pub, where we and the musicians all congregate, we con drinks and play the jukebox and talk to everyone. I often go there on my own but always end up meeting someone I know to dance with.

Outside there is a long strip of grass down to the river with large stone nuts and bolts lying around and convenient bushes where couples make love and smoke hash. It’s the coolest place in England, there’s nowhere else like it.