Looking Into ...

 

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 13^th 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.