For a long, long time now I have considered that Patrice Holloway as a singer was something special. There are far too few recordings of Patrice in existence, and that is such a sad thing. They are much loved, certainly, but scarce. As for footage? Well, elusive is not the word. So, if you were me, how would you feel if YouTube in its infinite wisdom unexpectedly suggests watching “unseen footage” from January 1972 of Patrice on Soul Train? The holy grail will be delivered unto you by algorithms. Right! And sure enough, there she was, grinning like mad, amid the show’s dancers, singing her wonderful ‘That’s The Chance You Gotta Take’, a glorious piece of bubblegum soul rather like Honey Cone were doing at the time. Too good to be true? Yup. But it’s there. All three seconds of it. Three totally mind-blowingly wonderful seconds, but nevertheless still only three seconds. Surely there is more? There must be. Please!
Anyway, for me, Patrice
is up there with the best. I thought that was the case even when I only knew
three of her songs. Three, the magic number eh? ‘Love and Desire’, ‘Ecstasy’, ‘Stay
With Your Own Kind’. A holy trinity very much part of my life, thanks to the Capitol
Soul Casino compilation, and the great early 1980s Kent collections: On
The Soul Side and Leapers, Sleepers & Creepers. Oh sure, we know
more now. There was even in 2011 a lovingly put-together anthology on Kent,
collecting up her Capitol singles and her
early recordings for Motown. Plus we have learned much more now, about
her role in Josie & the Pussycats, and about the work she did as an
in-demand session singer, not to mention the immortal Dylan’s Gospel project.
A newly unearthed track even emerged in 2018, on an expanded On The Soul
Side, the magical ‘Thrill of Romance’. There may be more. Who knows?
It’s true: I am an
old romantic. I like the ones who fell by the wayside, or perhaps chose to back
away from the music business, and subsequently left slim evidence of their
artistry, but somehow their torch burns brightly down all the days. Another
perfect example would be Sharon Scott, a fantastically gifted singer, who as
far as I know released one single on RCA Victor in 1966, a pairing of ‘Could It
Be You’ and ‘I’d Like To Know’, two songs that became eternal favourites on the
Northern Soul scene.
I suspect I first
fell in love with Sharon when her ‘Could It Be You’ appeared on the 1996 Music
Club CD, Northern Soul Floorshakers: 20 Anthems and Rarities from the RCA
Vaults, a priceless (though you can still get it for next-to-nothing) set
that also introduced me to Ketty Lester singing ‘Some Things are Better Left
Unsaid’, Don Ray’s ‘Born A Loser’, Roy Hamilton’s ‘You Shook Me Up’, Kenny
Carter singing ‘Gotta Get Myself Together’, Sue Lynne’s gorgeous Chris Andrews
creation ‘Don’t Pity Me’, and more again. It is an absurdly fine set of
recordings.
Another Northern Soul
collection, the 1999 Camden Deluxe set, Jumpin’ at the Go-Go, a great Richard
Searling compiled CD which had considerable overlap with Floorshakers,
included the Sharon Scott gem ‘I’d Like To Know’, and no doubt reluctantly
Richard was forced to admit: “Nothing
much is known about the artist”.
Meanwhile, back in 1994,
Kent’s Ady Croasdell had been granted access to the RCA vaults in America, and
his diligent archival activities appeared on one of the great Kent CDs,
released in 1997, Rare Collectable and Soulful, billed as featuring “Northern
Soul’s Holy Grail”, and featuring two hitherto unreleased Sharon Scott recordings:
‘(Putting My Heart Under) Lock and Key’ and ‘It’s Better’, two glorious tracks
that just float beautifully along, with Sharon’s incredibly classy, almost jazz
ballad singer stylings, elegantly atop. This was soon followed by a second volume,
with a foreword by the inimitable Dave
Godin. This also included two lost Sharon Scott tracks: ‘I’m Not Afraid’ and ‘Don’t
Wait Too Long’. So, suddenly, we had six Sharon Scott songs in total. It is utterly
perplexing why these tracks were not released at the time they were recorded,
but hey, what do we know? So there you are: six peerless performances and
productions. And how many Fall and Van Morrison LPs are there?
By this time a story
was emerging, where Sharon was a singer recording for Pied Piper Productions, a
Detroit organisation run by Jack Ashford and Shelley Haims, with a revolving
cast of singers, musicians, writers, arrangers, etc. Some had links to Motown’s
Funk Brothers like Joe Hunter and Mike
Terry. Initially detail about Pied Piper was slightly vague, but it became
apparent the company worked with some familiar names, like Rose Batiste and Sam
E. Solo of ‘Tears Keep Falling’ fame, a highlight of that old Leapers,
Sleepers & Creepers Kent set. And that beloved Northern Soul
Floorshakers CD featured Pied Piper productions, apart from Sharon Scott,
like The Metros’ ‘Since I Found My Baby’, Willie Kendrick’s ‘What’s That On
Your Finger?’, The Cavaliers’ ‘Hold To My Baby’, and The Dynamics’ ‘I Need Your
Love’: classics one and all.
Also featured was Lorraine
Chandler with ‘I Can’t Change’, and she is a singer who has appeared on many a
Northern Soul compilation, and indeed she forged close links with the UK scene.
But, again, she released just a few singles ostensibly, under the Pied Piper productions
umbrella in 1966 / 67, one on Giant, which RCA picked up, then two more on RCA.
Her first for RCA was ‘I Can’t Hold On’, a song Lorraine co-wrote (she was a talented
songwriter: her credits include the O’Jays’ ‘I’ll Never Forget You’ (or The Metros’)).
For some reason ‘I Can’t Hold On’ reminds me, or rather in my mind the intro becomes
conflated with that, of The Undertones’ ‘My Perfect Cousin’. I freely admit I
have cloth ears, am tone deaf, and am far too fanciful, but that bass bit or
riff at the beginning? Is it me? Probably. After all, in my mind Joy Division’s
‘Dead Souls’ morphs into Alder Ray’s ‘My Heart is in Danger’, so there’s no
hope.
Coincidence? Who
knows? Would Damien O’Neill and Mickey Bradley in 1980 have heard Lorraine
Chandler’s ‘I Can’t Hold On’? Well, maybe. An earlier incarnation, an early
rummage among the RCA archives (remember, absurdly, most tracks were barely
more than a decade old at that point), on vinyl of Jumpin’ at the Go-Go, released in 1976 on RCA itself where
Richard Searling was working, featured Lorraine’s ‘I Can’t Hold On’ and ‘I
Can’t Change’. I have absolutely no recollection of seeing it, but I imagine it
would have been right up some of the Undertones’ street if they were lucky and found
it in Good Vibrations or wherever.
That same Jumpin’ collection
featured the Bobbettes’ ‘Happy Go Lucky Me’, a perfect cousin to a highlight of
Vic Godard’s Northern Soul-inspired suite of songs, ‘Happy Go Lucky Guy’, as recorded by Johnny Britton for Bernard
Rhodes’ Oddball label. No? A step too far? Oh well, it gave me an excuse to
mention another astonishing bass intro. Aptly ‘I Can’t Hold On’ and ‘Happy Go
Lucky Me’ are back-to-back on that original Richard Searling collection, and
coincidentally or not the folk hero Ady has them next to one another on Kent’s
ridiculously good Rare Collectable and Soulful Vol. 2. There seems
something pre-ordained in that, as in a sign from up above. These things
matter.
There are many
reasons to love Kent’s compilations and, while I only know a fraction of them, this
is one of the joys: the unfolding stories contained in their series, and a
special kind of humility in admitting to not knowing everything, allied with
the joy of discovery, be it an unearthed acetate or a freshly-revealed piece of
information. So, gradually, over the course of a handful of CDs with an RCA or
Pied Piper Productions-theme quite a story emerged. And some previously
unreleased tracks have gone on to be much-loved recordings. Perhaps foremost
among these is Lorraine Chandler’s ‘You Only Live Twice’, which is not a
version of the Nancy Sinatra Bond-theme, written by John Barry and Lesley
Bricusse, but an all-together different and completely astonishing song from
the same time by Jack Ashford, Randy Scott, and Mike Terry.
It was unveiled by
Kent in 1997, and features an incredibly beautiful guitar motif that graces the
song so superbly. It quickly became a big favourite on the Northern Soul scene
and beyond, complementing the already much-loved Bond-infusion that is Yvonne
Baker’s ‘You Didn’t Say A Word’. And, again, is it just to my cloth ears that The
Chesterfields’ ‘Think It Over’ shares the same backing track as Yvonne’s magic
moment? Talking of coincidences, Yvonne Baker and Lorraine Chandler both recorded the excellent
Pied Piper tracks ‘I Can’t Change’ and ‘Mend the Torn Pieces’.
Anyway, Andy Rix, the
Northern Soul DJ, writer, and researcher, had been busy doggedly tracking down
Sharon Scott, and eventually struck gold with a call to Philadelphia, as
revealed on the Soul Source Forum in 2012. This, in turn, allowed Ady Croasdell
to reveal more about Sharon, and when Kent put out volume 2 in the Pied Piper
story in 2015 we even got to see a particularly striking photo of the elegant
and classy Sharon in her 1960s heyday, thanks to Matt Baker. Ady adds: “She is
one of my favourite unheralded singers who managed to record six superlative
soul songs in her only two recording sessions.”
I share with Ady that
fascination with those who got lost along the way and had a very limited output:
not so much that they made overlooked recordings, more that they made so few,
for whatever reason. One of my favourite bands, the Purple Hearts, spring to
mind. It is perfectly possible you can go and see them playing live in 2024 in
a modified but very recognisable form. Nevertheless, 45 years on from their
debut single, there are still only two studio LPs to their name. The second of
these, Pop-ish Frenzy, was recorded in 1986, a second coming half-a-dozen
years on from their superb debut, Beat That!
Pop-ish Frenzy
I guess you could call a secret that’s always on display. I don’t recall seeing
any reviews at the time of its release. I only found out about the LP, by
chance, when it appeared in a local record shop’s sale a year-or-so later. I really
had no idea it was out. And I haven’t seen much about it since. I know I have
mentioned it various times over the years, and have probably been a bore on the
theme, usually pointing out with bemusement and varying degrees of frustration
how it was so immediately apparent on hearing ‘Made of Stone’ and ‘She Bangs
The Drums’ that at least the Stone Roses were listening carefully and taking
notes: credit to them if not to the critics.
And I suspect I
wasn’t the only one to rush home from school to see Purple Hearts perform ‘My
Life’s A Jigsaw’ on Get It Together in 1980 and being much taken with the
insouciant Simon Stebbing’s pop-art guitar and Robert Manton’s shrunken striped
t-shirt and mop top. Was that really their only TV studio performance?
What’s that all about? A touch of the Patrice Holloways?
Has there been subsequently
a detailed analysis anywhere on a Pop-ish Frenzy theme? Maybe I have just
been looking in the wrong places, but I am not aware of one. It’s a rum old
record. I know that most of the songs date back to the early 1980s, and I realise
that by 1986 the Hearts were really only a now-and-then thing, and that their
pop-stock was not particularly high: “Are you doing what you did two years ago?
Yeah? Well, don’t make a career out of it.” They didn’t. Just somehow a pattern
emerged of sporadic, occasional, celebratory live shows, with sometimes gaps of
several years in-between, but pretty much no more new material.
Pop-ish Frenzy
reveals the group had three strong songwriters, each distinct, though singer
Manton appeared to be writing less. My personal favourite moment on the LP (or,
you could say, my big obsession) is Robert’s ‘Shell Shock’ which I find utterly
compelling, and I suspect it is one of the few newer songs on the record. It’s
got the lot: a jazzy bassline, classical guitar flourishes, and seemingly fleeting
references to T.S. Eliot with its mention of “those hollow men leaning together
like pieces of straw” and a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer at the fade out
under the adventurous blaze of Stebbing’s variations on Marquee Moon virtuosity.
It’s an epic song
that still makes my head spin. I dunno: it’s like the ultra-pop side of Scars
circa Author! Author! meets those post-Reggie songs by The Action, the
ones written by Ian Whiteman, just as they were becoming Mighty Baby. And then
there’s possibly a reference to Thoreau’s quiet desperation, and even maybe
Milton’s eternal night. I really don’t know. I am simply hypothesising, projecting,
playing games. And this seems one occasion when it would be completely pointless
using your search engine of choice. The song really is pure hallucinatory
abstraction, a post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario, with the group looking into
the heart of darkness. The prize exhibit from the band’s psychedelic phase?
Could well be. The cover cartoon even depicts Manton in a paisley shirt. Incidentally,
someone has just posted on YouTube a wild, almost
dub-like ‘alternate mix’ recorded through damaged
speakers which is quite something.
With reference to
‘Shell Shock’ Manton makes allusions to Huxley in his sleeve notes (and these
are my favourite sleeve notes ever, with mentions of Giant Steps and Philip
K. Dick, James Brown and Lee Dorsey, Hancock’s Half Hour and ‘Sweet
Suburbia’, Dylan and Lennon, plus Zola too!) so it is feasible the title refers
or connects to Brave New World Revisited where Huxley talks of the
impact of World War One on young men’s minds and how “every individual has his
breaking point”. Maybe. Again I am simply having fun speculating. I have been
doing so for years, and in a way I almost hope no-one will shatter my
illusions. I just love the LP so much. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the
imagination, but I am inordinately and perhaps illogically fond of it.
At least now there is
a lovely 3CD Purple Hearts box set, put out inevitably by Cherry Red, which
pairs the group’s studio recordings with a couple of great live ‘comeback’ sets
from the mid-1980s. The accompanying booklet features an introductory note by
Mani, and in Lois Wilson’s excellent text she mentions Ian Brown used to play Pop-ish
Frenzy to John Squire for inspiration. Really? Who’d have thought it? She
also mentions the Hearts’ early “trifecta of speed-freak mod hits ‘Millions
Like Us’, ‘Frustration’ and ‘Jimmy’.” I do very much like Lois’ use of trifecta
there. And appropriately these three ‘hit’ singles were very smart, articulate
songs, genuine pocket kitchen-sink symphonies, which still sound remarkably
good.
The box set was put
together with close co-operation from the Hearts’ elegant guitarist Simon
Stebbing, and he provides some classic quotes, particularly about their Fiction
label boss and producer Chris Parry with his mantra: “You have to leave an
element of mystery.” Quite. My great love ‘Shell Shock’ features what has long
seemed to me to be some intricate Television-inspired guitar filigree, so
appropriately when speaking of a fantastic live version of The Creation’s
‘Painter Man’, recorded in 1986, Simon mentions it has “lots of references to
Tom Verlaine and Television.” Coincidentally the group early on could have
signed to Ork, home of ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, plus Alex Chilton (Robert Manton
and Simon were apparently huge Big Star fans around the time of recording Pop-ish
Frenzy) and so on.
Lois’ liner notes
bring home how odd it is that the Purple Hearts got lost in the wilderness
sometime in the early 1980s, which in retrospect seems absurd if you listen to
the demos from that time included in this box set. Imagine if the Paul Weller-produced
and Ray Bradbury-inspired ‘Concrete
Mixer’ was actually released in 1981/2 (a song with an intro so good it prompted
a ‘resurrection’, sort of!), with an LP to follow? It could all have been a different
story. In terms of age and sound they were close to, say, Edinburgh’s Scars or TV21
(whose ‘Playing With Fire’ they covered) or The Bluebells over in Glasgow.
Indeed one of the Hearts’ best numbers of that time, the joyously infectious
‘Friends Again’ with its wonderful disco bassline, had a title which would be
used by a band up in Glasgow, coincidentally or not.
I have loved the
Purple Hearts for 45 years (an oddly apt number!), though curiously have never
seen them live. I am still strongly aware how little I really know about the
group, which rather appeals to me. In particular what do I really know about the
singer Robert Manton? I don’t recall ever coming across an in-depth print
interview with him, now or way back when, for whatever reason, and I kind of
like that. There, however, are a few recent podcasts around that he features
on, but only one, with long-time fan Eddie Piller, where Bob is on his own, and
it is quite revealing, particularly where Manton talks about shaping forces and
influences.
He recalls listening
to the Capital Radio DJ Roger Scott who used to have a show on Friday evenings
called Cruisin’. Usually Roger played old doo-wop and rockabilly, and
all that, but in early December 1976 he broadcast a couple of shows of “the
original American punk rockers”, very much the type of thing that had been on Nuggets:
the sounds of the mid-60s garage bands which I assume Roger knew
about first hand from his time in the States.
I only started
listening to Roger religiously in 1977, so missed the fun. For the young Robert
Manton, however, these shows were a revelation: The Seeds, Question Mark etc.,
Electric Prunes, Music Machine, Shadows of Knight, Outsiders, and all that. The
second show featured the garage bands that had hits in some form or another,
like the Young Rascals, McCoys, and the 13th Floor Elevators. Oddly,
if you hunt around online, those old Cruisin’ punk shows (and 70-odd
others!) can
be heard right now via an exceptional family-run site
devoted to Roger. The commercials on the shows now seem like eerie echoes of a
different age.
What I hadn’t
realised was that these shows were put together by Roger with his producer James
Hamilton. James is, to put it mildly, a legendary figure, and is probably best
known for his inimitable ‘disco’ columns in Record Mirror and attendant obsession
with beats-per-minute calculations, unconsciously creating a new kind of poetry
in his terse reviews. He also had a track record that goes back to DJing at The
Scene and includes compiling the Doctor Soul LP for Sue/Island in the UK.
He would also adopt the name Doctor Soul professionally. And so on to his
regular ‘60s soul nights at Le Beat Route in Greek Street in the early 1980s, at
a time when the venue was the epicentre of London’s club culture.
The only other person
I have come across who listened to those American punk shows was Rob Symmons of
Subway Sect, and there is a kind of perfection to that. In the Spring 2024
edition of Ugly Things Rob talks in glorious detail of the road to the
100 Club Punk Festival and how pre-punk he went to great lengths to get hold of
the original blasts of mod-era beat-noise by the likes of the Downliners Sect,
The Creation, Yardbirds, and so on, while redefining that era’s look: adopting
the desert boots, slim jeans, button-downs, v-necks, thus bravely fighting
against the long hair and flares orthodoxy: the same path Robert Manton and his
compadres would take a few years later.
Long ago, and perhaps
optimistically, I claimed: “Simon Stebbing's slashing guitar work interplay
with Rob Manton's deadpan downbeat persona adds weight to any theories you
would care to advance about the Purple Hearts being the missing link between
Subway Sect and the Wolfhounds.” At the time I knew about the Romford links and
the Stebbing family connections between those two great groups of the 1980s,
Purple Hearts and Wolfhounds, but I had no idea until recently, when stumbling
across an interview with David Callahan (on Malcolm Wyatt’s WyattWrites
site) that pre-Wolfhounds he and Paul
Clark were in a garage band called The Changelings with the moonlighting Purple
Hearts Bob Manton and Simon Stebbing (who apparently were playing rhythm guitar
and drums respectively and counter-intuitively), mainly playing covers, often
at The Garage, Mike Spenser’s legendary club in the basement of Hammersmith’s
Clarendon Hotel.
It’s amazing what you
learn. And how things fit together. Like how George Smiley visits The Clarendon
in Call For The Dead, as a Mr Savage, waiting downstairs in what was
then the dining room. There is even a Changelings (or Change Lings) track,
‘Shelter from the Rain’, on a Cherry Red ‘garage and trash’ box set. The song is
actually astonishingly good, and a right old racket that can’t decide whether
to be The Fall’s ‘Before the Moon Falls’ or The Eyes’ ‘When the Night Falls’, so
chooses to be both, if you don’t take life too literally, with I presume
Callahan doing a very snappy Mark Perry turn on the mic. Incidentally, do I
remember reading that the Wolfhounds used to cover The Other Half’s ‘Mr
Pharmacist’ live before The Fall swooped? I do know they recorded an awesomely
abrasive cover of The Kinks’ ‘I’m Not
Like Everybody Else’.
Anyway, thinking back
to the mid-80s, it seems so odd how we all missed a trick. It is easy now to
imagine the Purple Hearts having a connection to some of the early Creation
acts, as Lois Wilson suggests in her booklet notes, specifically the Jasmine
Minks, Primal Scream, and Biff Bang Pow! At the very least the Hearts could
have had some great conversations with the more enlightened and cooler parts of
the Creation community about Love, Big Star, 13th Floor Elevators, Byrds,
Buffalo Springfield, Seeds, whatever, and could have happily swapped some lovingly-compiled
psychedelic punk and folk rock cassette compilations while comparing notes
about sharp schmutter. It’s a real shame no one urged them to get involved, and
so escape from their “given roles”. But
in those days we didn’t know a lot.
Hi, Kev. Great to have you posting again. I always love it when you dive deep into the magical world of Kent Records; you invariably mention loads of songs/collections I’ve still to hear, despite 45 years of obsessively searching the secondhand soul racks. Back in 1990, you wrote me a list of your favourite Kent LPs, one of which was Floorshakers. I was delighted to pick up a copy recently and it’s absolutely fantastic all the way through! So a very belated thanks for your tip. Now I guess I’m going to spend another 40+ years tracking down Leapers, Creepers … sigh.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that Duncan. Made me laugh! And if you are the Duncan I am thinking of I still have some of the tapes you did for me way back when, including Kent's It's Torture etc. which I never did get around to buying!
DeleteYes, the very same. I can remember vividly spotting the It’s Torture LP in the secondhand racks of Nottingham’s much missed Selectadisc Records. And the absolute thrill of hearing the title track for the first time. What a song.
DeletePop-ish Frenzy is an odd one for me. As much as I want to like it (and there is undoubtedly a lot to like about it), it's never really gelled with me. Heard it long after the fact (after the Stone Roses) so maybe it was the timing, I don't know. I recall the first time I played it and finding the one-two, one-two drumming on Friends Again really grating... if only that hadn't been the first track. First impressions and all that. I give it a spin it every 5 years or so, usually coinciding with reading about it, hoping for a belated epiphany... maybe one day. I'll always have and cherish Beat That! though.
ReplyDeleteKent is a rabbit hole I've never properly entered it may surprise you, not out of scepticism but due to fearing possible financial consequences of my customary desire to seek out originals. I might hit you up for a primer at some point though.
Lovely to have these posts again!
Echoing others comments about how great it is to read new things from you. As ever sending me scurrying off towards YouTube and/or Ebay. Fantastic stuff.
ReplyDeleteThanks Andrew. Lovely to hear from you. Hope all's well.
DeleteThanks Kevin, yes all OK here. Now I'm on the lookout for a copy of 'Ugly Things'.
DeleteI got mine (issue 65) via Juno on ebay. It is far from cheap, but less expensive than ordering it from the States, and the 12-pages on Subway Sect are brilliant with plenty of never been seen before photos. I treated myself!
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