The Esoteric label finally gives the highly sought-after The New World's Fair album a proper remastering for this splendid reissue. The brainchild of science-fiction author Michael Moorcock, bassist Steve Gilmore, and guitarist Graham Charnock, Fair featured a host of guest players, among them members of Hawkwind and guitar hero Snowy White.
It was a concept album, of course, a trek through a dystopian fun fair, a metaphor for society itself. It's a set that promised much, but delivers surprisingly little, with the lyrics and themes nowhere near as profound as Moorcock's reputation would dictate or fans' memories might suggest. Sure the "Fair Dealer" peddles dreams and illusions, drugs and rides, the "Candy Floss Cowboy" swaggers across the fairground, a precedent setter for President Bush, a hollow idol headed for the Valhalla of the ironic "You're a Hero."
The teen-aged temptresses that haunt the fair are also headed for disaster on "Sixteen Year Old Doom," a rather heavy-handed retort to every rocker that ever celebrated a young girl's charms in song. Even more derivative is "In the Name of Rock and Roll," which lifted its downbeat theme from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Finally the fairground begins careening towards destruction on "The Last Merry Go Round," reaching its demise on "Dude's Dream (Rolling in the Ruins)."
However, the musicianship far surpasses the lyrical content, the album's saving grace. Musically, it's a heady concoction that stirs in a bit of glam, a few swirls of folk, a good dousing of R&B, and a dollop of metal. It's nowhere near as musically adventurous as one would expect from the cast, but surprisingly accessible and easily digestible. More of a fun fair then, than a rock your world exhibition.
Esoteric sweetens the pot with seven bonus tracks, including a pair of previously unreleased demos. "Dodgem Dude"'s demo also appears here for the first time, the song, while intended for the Fair, finally hit the shops as a 1980 limited-edition 45. That too is included, alongside "Starcruiser" and "The Brothel in Rossenstrasse," which inspired Moorcock's book of the same title.
by Jo-Ann Greene
Tracks
1. Candy Floss Cowboy - 1:20
2. Fair Dealer - 5:05
3. Octopus (Steve Gilmore) - 2:15
4. Sixteen Year Old Doom - 4:15
5. You're A Hero (Graham Charnock) - 3:10
6. Song For Marlene (Sam Shepard, Steve Gilmore) - 5:11
7. Come To The Fair (Graham Charnock) - 1:20
8. In The Name Of Rock And Roll (Graham Charnock) - 4:15
9. Ferris Wheel (Steve Gilmore) - 5:40
10.Last Merry Go Round - 2:11
11.Dude's Dream (Rolling In The Ruins) - 4:40
12.Dodgem Dude - 2:47
13.The Brothel In Rossenstrasse (Michael Moorcock, Peter Pavli) - 3:44
14.Starcruiser - 3:17
15.Candy Floss Cowboy - 4:27
16.Kings Of Speed - 2:52
17.You're A Hero - 4:09
18.Dodgem Dude - 2:59
All compositions by Michael Moorcock except where indicated
During their stint, Complex released two excellent albums pitched somewhere between psychedelic power pop and progressive rock. My favorite of the pair happens to be the British band’s second effort, The Way We Feel, which initially surfaced in 1971 on the Deroy Sound Studio imprint.
From the super sunny sensations of “Every Time I Hear That Song” to the hard and heavy jamming of the jazz influenced “We Don’t Exist,” the disc conveys an abundance of excitement and adventure.
Toe-tapping rhythms and nagging hooks are wired tight throughout cuts such as “The Way I Feel” and the paisley pinched “Lemon Pie Fair,” while “Moving Moor” is a brooding instrumental formed of classical music passages reflecting those of Procol Harum and the Moody Blues.
Beaming vocals, assisted by sweeping harmonies, expansive organ drills and stabbing guitar riffs are staples of Complex’s intricately crafted material. Although a hypnotic vibe holds the reins, the music maintains a lively and colorful exterior.
Commercial aspirations interact nicely with an experimental bent, resulting in the kind of record that would satisfy both top 40 listeners and followers of underground rock. A masterpiece of its genre sadly heard by few due to an extremely limited pressing, The Way We Feel is much deserving of a reissue. So kudos to the Wooden Hill label for recognizing the band’s worth back in 1999, and allowing their music to be enjoyed by a wider net of folks.
by Beverly Paterson
Tracks
1. Every Time I Hear That Song - 2:47
2. Am I - 4:10
3. We Don't Exist - 5:55
4. Lemon Pie Fair - 3:19
5. The Way I Feel - 3:22
6. Moving Moor (Steve Coe) - 4:48
7. Jeananette - 4:32
8. Hey Girl You've Got Style - 3:02
9. If You Are My Love (Steve Coe) - 6:42 -
10.Moving Moor (Steve Coe) - 4:49
11.The Way I Feel - 3:17
All songs by Bob Mitchell, Steve Coe except where indicated
You’ve read about Mick Jagger’s most recent feat of paternity — in December he signed for baby number eight, with mother number five — so you’ve seen the name Marsha Hunt: a news story can’t inventory Jagger’s children without it. Hunt is the mother of Jagger’s first child, Karis, who was born in November of 1970, having gestated for a period roughly as long as her parents harbored affection for each other.
In articles I’ve read over the years, Hunt has always presented as self-possessed and disinterested in dwelling on her stratospherically famous onetime paramour. Still, because her name is forever reproductively linked with his, it’s been hard not to draw the conclusion that having Mick Jagger’s baby amounted to a career move. Recently, I tested this idea by tracking down and reading Hunt’s two out-of-print memoirs — 1986’s Real Life and 2005’s Undefeated — and I’ve reached a new conclusion: for Hunt, having Mick Jagger’s baby was probably a career dampener.
In 1966, the Philadelphia-born Hunt’s restless spirit lured her from her studies at Berkeley to London, then fully swinging; she never again called the United States home. “American politics and its class system, better known as racism, had shaped and limited my life and future in ways that I couldn’t know or fully comprehend until I was outside it,” she writes in Undefeated. “When I arrived in London…my nationality became my identity, and the Negro label took a back seat.”
Not that being an American black woman in London at that time didn’t have a certain cachet: “Motown was the sound of the day, and anybody looking and talking vaguely like a Supreme was considered gorgeous,” Hunt writes. In 1968 she landed a modest role in the London production of the Broadway smash Hair; six months later, she signed a record contract.
In Hair, Hunt sang a Supremes parody called “White Boys” backed by two West Indian women, and the white boys did come calling. Hunt briefly romanced Marc Bolan, when Tyrannosaurus Rex was just becoming T. Rex, and, nudged by her producer, recorded a couple of his songs. After scoring a minor hit with her debut single, Dr. John’s “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” she was contacted on Jagger’s behalf to find out if she would pose in a slutty getup for a publicity photo for the Rolling Stones’ forthcoming single, “Honky Tonk Women.”
Jagger had picked the wrong beautiful black woman. Hunt writes in Real Life, “The last thing we needed was for me to denigrate us by dressing up like a whore among a band of white renegades, which was an underlying element of the Stones’ image.” Hunt’s no to Jagger’s people inspired a phone call from Jagger, who paid her a visit that evening. She writes of their ensuing relationship in levelheaded terms — “We were not so much lovers as friends. There were no silly cat-and-mouse games” — and indicates that she wanted nothing in particular from him: “I needed my own independence and didn’t expect him to relinquish his.” She wasn’t even a Stones fan.
Meanwhile, Jagger was sufficiently besotted with Hunt to write “Brown Sugar” about her. She suspected he appreciated that she wasn’t into drugs, unlike his for-the-most-part girlfriend, the angelically opiated Marianne Faithfull. Hunt didn’t get too caught up in Jagger’s world: “I always feared that my association with him would crowd out my own identity. I never wanted to be known as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend.”
Well, she tried. But make no mistake: it was Jagger who proposed that they have a baby together. Hunt’s inkling concerning his motivation sounds just right, especially given subsequent media accounts of the long-standing Jagger-Richards rivalry: “Marianne had miscarried the baby that they would have had around the time that Keith Richard’s [sic] son Marlon was born. It was understandable that he considered having a second try.”
For Hunt, having a baby meshed with the day’s starry-eyed delusion that achieving happiness was a simple matter of letting the sunshine in: “I didn’t really expect it to change my life in any way. I was making money and had a lovely home. My prospects were excellent, and I was sure they’d continue to be so.” She and Jagger wouldn’t live together. As for his role in their child’s life: “We were supposed to be the sophisticated embodiment of an alternative social ideal — parenthood shared between loving friends living separate lives.” That’s hippiespeak for, “Mick and I made no financial arrangements regarding the support of our shared offspring.”
After Karis was born, Hunt scooped up pretty much any job that bounced her way, and not just music gigs: she modeled, acted in the dodgy English horror movie Dracula A.D. 1972, and did a soft drink commercial in Germany. The last was embarrassing, yes, but better than selling her story to the tabloids, and better than asking Jagger for a loan, as she had to do more than once.
Hunt made money on the road, and in 1972, while she and her backing band were on a German tour on which she had brought along Karis and a nanny, the toddler spilled hot tea all over herself. Hunt insisted on an immediate return to England, where she felt that Karis would get better medical care. This meant canceled gigs, which meant less income and less exposure to potential new fans. Hunt asked Jagger to spring for half of Karis’s hospital bill; the money never arrived. Despite the “sordid connotations” of a paternity suit, Hunt went for it: “After two years, I had to stop pretending that he would assume his duty.”
When the story went public, Hunt found herself something of a social pariah: “I went from being tagged ‘the girl from Hair’ to ‘the girl who sued Mick Jagger.’” She writes that she sensed a chill in the air when she interacted with shop people and the parents of Karis’s classmates. Hunt hadn’t tried to hitch a ride on a rock star, but if she had, her reputation would have scarcely emerged more sullied.
The paternity suit wasn’t resolved until 1979, when Jagger was told to provide Hunt with an annual settlement for Karis as well as a trust so that the girl wouldn’t be destitute if her mother suddenly dropped dead. Hunt personally received no money — fine by her — but everyone thought she had made off with a mint.
At the time the suit was resolved, Hunt was staying in Los Angeles, trying to find a distributor for a record she had made in Germany; to keep financially afloat she did housekeeping for friends while Karis was at school. When nothing happened in L.A., Hunt quit the music business, having promised herself that this would be her last go, since, as she wrote in perhaps the least diva-ish sentence in the entire world, “Music was only acceptable as a career if it could provide us with an income.”
Hunt redirected her creative energies to acting and writing. She has since published well-received novels centered on the African-American experience and an absorbing book about rescuing her long-presumed-dead grandmother from a U.S. nursing home. But the standout is Real Life. It’s flawed — it loses its bearings toward the end — but it’s an uncommonly clear-sighted account of the music scene of the 1960s and 1970s as witnessed by an inside-outsider disinclined to do anything that was expected of her. The book also reinforces an idea that I’ve long found to be true: a story about almost making it is usually more interesting than a success story.
At the end of Real Life, Hunt refers to her “charmed life,” but a reader may reasonably wonder, How so? Among Hunt’s disappointments: she blew a couple of film auditions, including one for Sidney Poitier, maybe because she was holding the script in one hand and Karis in her other arm; record contracts came and went or were not quite signed (“Managers and record-company people that I spoke to weren’t at all prepared in 1980 to accept that a [black] woman could find a market doing rock, which was considered white music”); and Richard Branson yanked funding for a musical she wrote because the London press said mean things about the dress rehearsal.
The “charmed” part of Hunt’s life, then, is presumably having had Karis, who surely, like every kid, couldn’t help but divert her parent’s attention from her work, deprive her of sleep now and then, interrupt her creative bursts, and so on. What stymied Hunt’s musical ambitions may have been not just a tarnished reputation and the business’s assumptions about black female singers but the fact that Karis was never not the first thing on Hunt’s — and only Hunt’s — mind.
A pulsebeat in Undefeated, which chronicles Hunt’s experience with breast cancer, is her anxiety about completing a book she’s been writing about Jimi Hendrix, who had been, like her, a black American in Britain in the late 1960s. She tells the reader that she doesn’t have a publisher, and at this writing I can find no evidence online that she has found one. If her Hendrix book comes out, may it get more column inches than news of the next Jagger baby.
Uk group with the curious name recorded at the beginning in 1972 a disc folk-rock namesake of a psico-progressive packing, 9:30 Fly. All the songs are dominated from the harmony of the voices of Michael and his wife Barbara Wainwright.
In November the group act together with Velvet Underground in Malver Winter Gardens. Shortly after the Fly vanished without any trace. So this record on the highly collectable Ember label is nowadays a dificult to find rarity.
Tracks
1. Life And Times - 05:11
2. Summerdays - 05:46
3. September - 02:39
4. Unhinged - 06:29
5. Mr. 509 - 07:21
6. Brooklyn Thoughts - 03:39
7. Time of War - 08:37
8. Songs For L.A. - 4:02
9. September (First Mix) - 2:50
All works written by Michael Wainwright
Bonus Tracks 8-9
9:30 Fly
*Michael Wainwright – Lead Vocals
*Barbara Wainwright – Vocals, Electric Piano
*Lyn Oakey - Guitar
*Gary Charman - Bass
*Mike Clark - Drums
War was great—funky, bluesy, jazzy and meditative; their hits were jams edited into pop sensations. Their sound was unique: a thick stew of stone funk, deep bass lines, African percussion, jazz-R&B organ, Latin rhythms, free-form jazz and previously untested combinations, like harmonica and saxophone. Their vocals were earthy—sometimes weary, sometimes happy—with gospel-soul licks and group chants. By late 1972, when work began on the album The World Is A Ghetto, their grooves were already in the air. “Spill The Wine,” a collaboration with British blues-rock star Eric Burdon, had been a smash. Then came tours, two albums, and the hit “Slippin’ Into Darkness.”
The time was right. Self-contained groups, from Earth, Wind & Fire to multi-racial jam band the Allman Brothers, and personally expressive black singer-songwriters from Stevie Wonder to Bill Withers, were on the rise. Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye were experimenting, shaking loose of formula. War—seven guys from Compton and Long Beach in Southern California: Thomas “Papa Dee” Allen, on percussion; Harold Brown, drums; B.B. Dickerson, bass; Lonnie Jordan, keyboards; Charles Miller, saxophones; Lee Oskar, born in Denmark but living in L.A., harmonica; and Howard Scott, guitar—was in the middle of the mix.
The Ghetto album was the result of spirited rehearsals in Long Beach followed by two solid weeks of jam sessions at Crystal Industries studio in Los Angeles. Papa Dee provided the central theme—ghetto life has no boundaries, illustrated on the cover by a Rolls Royce with a flat tire. With no boundaries in the studio, the band drew on their many roots: their bittersweet title song, infused with jazz, fell together on take 36. “The Cisco Kid,” the album’s eventual pop centerpiece, was inspired by Scott’s fond memories of a popular television character, and solidified the band’s growing Chicano following. “Where Was You At” evolved from a syncopated New Orleans drum line, thanks to Brown’s recollections of their early Southwest tours. (“No jazz on this session,” he calls out on one take.) The immersive, spacey “Four Cornered Room” was inspired by Dickerson’s first experiments with hashish. “Beetles In A Bog,” from Oskar, is a jazz march.
“City, Country, City” is the album’s longest jam, a beautiful, virtuosic performance spotlighting among others Miller’s flowing sax. Its cinematic feel owes a debt to its origin: as score for the Paramount film The Legend Of Nigger Charley, at a time when their peers Isaac Hayes, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Womack and Marvin Gaye were creating movie soundtracks. “[The studio] wasn’t giving us enough credit and money, so we took the song back,” Jordan told writer Barry Alfonso. “The movie didn’t make it that big, but our record did.” (John Bennings was the film’s eventual composer; Lloyd Price sang the theme song.) “They just cooked,” said Jerry Goldstein, the group’s longtime produc¬er who had been through the music business wars with Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. “Then we’d carve out a 35- to 40-minute album from the jams.”
Some of the LP’s ideas were not so much discarded as considered too long for the vinyl era. The chugging “Freight Train Jam” is a band tour-de-force in the vein of “City, Country, City.” “58 Blues” is more down-home. “War Is Coming” is a scalding rock-blues, a slower, early version of a funk jam the group would release five years later on Platinum Jazz. Each is included in this 40th anniver¬sary expanded edition.
Although “The Cisco Kid” became a huge crossover hit, selling one million copies its first day of release, an edited version of “The World Is A Ghetto” was the album’s first single, and a bigger hit on the R&B/Soul singles chart. The audience was hungry for a messenger, according to Jordan. “Someone had to be the teacher or the preacher back then,” he further relayed to Alfonso. “We chose to be that.” Oskar thought the move was less intentional. “As far as being political and making heavy statements go, I think people were looking for that,” he said. “They wanted to believe that something they liked was meaningful. The music was the main thing.”
War continued as a force through the 1970s, following this album with Deliver The Word, which includes the hit “Gypsy Man”; a double-live LP; the smashes “Why Can’t We Be Friends” and “Low Rider”; the disco hit “Galaxy”; and the soundtrack to Youngblood. Yet The World Is A Ghetto, the best-selling album of 1973, was the group’s only No. 1 Pop album. George Benson’s 1977 up-tempo version of the title song was one of many covers; nearly 20 years later the Texas rap group Geto Boys interpolated the original. “The Cisco Kid” has become a kind of perennial. “City, Country, City” is the go-to track to convert skeptics who’ve only heard the hits.
War is still great.
by Harry Weinger
Tracks
1. The Cisco Kid - 4:35
2. Where Was You At - 3:25
3. City, Country, City - 13:18
4. Four Cornered Room - 8:30
5. The World Is A Ghetto - 10:10
6. Beetles In The Bog - 3:51
7. Freight Train Jam 5:41
8. 58 Blues 5:29
9. War Is Coming (Blues Version) - 6:15
10.The World Is A Ghetto (Rehearsal Take) - 8:06
All songs by Howard Scott, B.B. Dickerson, Lonnie Jordan, Harold Brown, Papa Dee Allen, Charles Miller, Lee Oskar.
Bonus tracks 7-10
War
*Lonnie Jordan - Organ, Piano, Timbales, Percussion, Vocals
*Howard Scott - Guitar, Percussion, Vocals
*B.B. Dickerson - Bass, Percussion, Vocals
*Harold Brown - Drums, Percussion, Vocals
*Papa Dee Allen - Congas, Bongos, Percussion, Vocals
*Charles Miller - Clarinet, Alto, Tenor, Baritone Saxophones, Percussion, Vocals
Originally released in 1972, their debut isn't quite as ripping as the totally off-the-hook On The Wings, but it's got plenty of wailing kick ass guitar work nonetheless. Unlike On The Wings there's only one guitar in the mix, but when he gets cooking with the bands' driving rhythm section backing him up he really takes off. There's also some more laid-back, rural psych moments on here, but mostly hard boogie-blues-acid-rock numbers harking back to Cream and Hendrix, assuredly big heroes of Socrates Drank The Conium. They've got something to say through their music as well, as titles like "It's A Disgusting World" and "Underground" indicate, although the band's lasting message might not really be one of radical politics but something more basic: rock on!
Tracks
1. Live In The Country - 3:43
2. Something In The Air (D. Wood) - 3:21
3. Bad Conditions - 3:59
4. It's A Disgusting World (Elias Boukouvalas) - 6:52
5. Close The Door And Lay Down - 3:12
6. Blind Illusion - 3:33
7. Hoo Yeah! - 3:36
8. Underground (D. Wood) - 4:40
9. Starvation - 3:45
All songs by Yannis Spathas and Antonis Tourkogiorgis except where noted
Socrates Drank The Conium
*Antonis Tourkogiorgis – Bass, vocals
*Yannis Spathas – Lead Guitar
*Elias Boukouvalas – Drums
Coming on like Hawkwind’s ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’ with tone generators and bleeping underground noises, ‘All Ends Up’ crashes in with a massive Phil Spector-type buzzsaw guitar rhythm undercut by more splatter-clatter drumfills from Steve Clayton, before setting off on a super-paranoid tale of The Man and how to avoid him. Suggestions for not getting ripped off: don’t remotely engage The Man, don’t even step into the portals of his office, don’t believe his words whatever they are, and you’ll be safe. Ish. Funnily enough, I know from experience what they mean and they were right, though staying in Rochdale and doing an LP every few years throughout the coming 70s and 80s on a tiny independent label does seem like a pretty bleak alternative to me. Whatever, ‘All Ends Up’ has that insanely claustrophobic and hugely over-dubbed sound that (experience tells me) you can only get from working in studios with huge limitations. Excellent indeed, and really one of the best ways to achieve high rock’n’roll magnificence.
Although the epic eight minutes of ‘Little Girl in Yellow’ kicks off like the heads’ answer to Jake Thackaray (complete with a fey acoustic northern-accented tale of fairies and goblins) it’s soon blasting into a grim reaper scythe-wielding territory of 6/4 electric guitar rhythms and we could be in the middle of one of those epic Krautrock LPs by Kalakackra or their ilk. Is this the best piece of music on the entire record? Probably! Massive solo guitars undermine everything but the rhythm of the hi-hats and the sound gets more heavy rock than any heavy rock band on a major label ever could or ever did. Think of the ever-changing sound on Speed, Glue & Shinki LPs or even 1969’s somewhat similar Saint Stephen LP, wherein everything temporarily disappears down a shock corridor before emerging blinking and bleary-eyed in the cold light of day. This is a severely psychedelic mixing desk freakout in the best Dieter Dierks-stylee, and could only have increased in massiveness by lasting for the whole of the side.
Unfortunately, this otherwise monstrous and mind manifesting LP finishes disappointingly, without style or consideration of any kind, first with the acoustic drivel of ‘The Watcher’ (‘he knows that willingness in others is a blessing’? Even in 1972, oh puh-leaze!) followed swiftly by the cod electric blues of ‘Ravenscroft’s 13-Bar Boogie’. The first mentioned could have been on THE WAY WE LIVE and is trite shite indeed, whereas the final track at least has the charm of being acceptably generic boogie of The Yardbirds’ ‘Nazz is Blue’ variety. However, as this Album of the Month only achieves its place because of the sad death of Tractor’s mentor John Peel, let’s offer up a bit of compassion and state this – when six of the eight tracks are as good as those offered within these grooves, it would take someone more churlish than I to (in these circumstances) give the final two under-achieving tracks a merciless kicking. Instead, let’s just blank them out and pretend the whole LP is a riot from beginning to end, and hope that M’Lud John ‘Ravenscroft’ Peel is currently spinning his favourite vinyl for the angels and devils of both heaven and hell as we speak. Because we have kenned John Peel all these past years, and we have listened, learned and been changed forever. Hey John Peel, wherever you are, we salute ye! U-Know!
Ali Haimatoglu, one in the former Munich music scene established and well accepted drummer has been instructed in 1973 by the owner of a cinema chain to assemble a band. Quick the core-group was fixed, it have been people with already long years of musical experience
- Sebastian Leitner, guitar, born on 17.01.1953 in Freilassing, played in various amateurbandssince 1967 and at least in the Austrian professional band Lazarus Round.
- Harald Kaltenecker, Keyboard, born 10.01.1950 in Munich, has been in numerous bands.amongst others in the ..International Beat & Soul Group" RIGHT TRACKS and at last with the Munich band Dream.
- Vincent Trost (died 2006), bass, born on 27.06.1942 in Stuttgart, was the most experienced musician, not only due to his age. Early 70's he did :,small time" with his own band The German Four across Germany and the border countries.
- Gerd Hoch (died 1995), vocals, born on 16.02.1951 in Freiburg, the man with the raspvoice, who stamped the Bullfrog-sound especially.
Ali Haimatoglu himself has been the first drummer of the band, but didn't stick to the band very long. His followers have been first Seppl Niemayer (went later to Octopus), then Bruno Perosa. Also he lived together with the other bandmembers in a musical-flat-share, the legendary ,,Dampfmolkerei" of the 300 people location Burkhards.
With this cast they went 1976 to Conny's, the studio of Conny Plank. He was exalted of the demos and recommended them immediately to Sky Records in Hamburg. A record deal has been signed and the first album recorded.
Due to the fact that in the already two bands with the name Bulldogg (US) and Bulldogg Breed (UK) did exist, therefore their record label recommended the name Bullfrog. Under this name the first album appeared in Autumn 1976, the album cover was created by the Japanese painter ant artist Aoi Fujimoto.
The first Bullfrog release was very successful and appeared parallel ti the German publication also at the US Company Annuit Coeptis. Amongst excellent groups Bullfrog now belonged to the most promising newcomer bands of the German Rock scene. This has lso be proven during their live gigs, which were not only acoustic but also optic a class of it’s own.
from CD Liner-notes
Tracks
1. Movin' On - 4:09
2. Bad Game - 3:34
3. I Came From The Sky - 4:45
4. I'm Comin' Home - 6:34
5. Get Away - 10:41
6. Desert Man - 11:35
All songs by Sebastian Leitner,Gerd Hoch
Mickey Jupp (born March, 1944) is a singer, pianist and composer, who grew up in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. The seaside resort was home to funfairs, clubs, pubs and Teddy Boys during the 1950s and porved a fertile breeding ground for English style rock’n’roll. Mickey began performing in 1963 with The Orioles, a pionneering British R&B group. Their line up include Dougie Sheldrake (guitar) Ada Baggerly (bass) and Tony Diamond (drums). They built up a fanatical following at Southern Clubs such as The Shades and The Cricketers, playing standards like “Brand New Cadillac” and “Money”. They toured with The Hollies, The Tremoloes, and Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, but were unable to secure a record contract. The final version of The Orioles included Mo Witham and Bob Scanling (guitars), John Bobin (bass) and Bob Clouter (drums) wwho replaced Tony Diamon in 1964.
The Orioles broke up in 1965 after ‘Juppy”, as he was invariably called, endured some personnal problems (he served a term of imprisonment). He returned to Southend three years later and put together his next band Legend, a musical project that eventually comprised mostly formet members of The Orioles.
The first version of Legend, formed in 1968, comprised Mickey Jupp (vocals, piano, guitar) together with Chris East (vocal, harmonica, 12 string guitar, Steve Geere (string bass and vovals) and Nigel Dunbar (drums). This line up recorded an eponymous tittled album “Legend” for Bell Records in one eight hour session that featured acoustic blues songs like ““National Gas”” and “”Twenty Carat Rocker””.
They followed that with one gig at Staines, Middlesex and broke up just before the album's release, the album stills sounds fresh today.
by Chris Welch
Tracks
1. National Gas - 3:00
2. Heather On The Hill - 2:13
3. Tombstone - 2:14
4. Come Back Baby - 2:07
5. City - 2:12
6. Good Boy/Groovette - 3:19
7. Wouldnt You - 2:31
8. Doncaster By-Pass - 2:45
9. Twenty Carat Rocker - 1:59
10.Bartenders Blues - 2:54
11.Good Money - 2:32
12.Shinding - 2:25
13.National Gas - 3:04
14.Heather On The Hill - 2:29
15.Tombstone - 2:08
16.Come Back Baby - 2:07
17.City - 2:18
18.Good Boy/Groovette - 3:14
19.Wouldnt You - 2:31
20.Doncaster By-Pass - 2:46
21.Twenty Carat Rocker - 1:56
22.Bartenders Blues - 2:54
23.Good Money - 2:31
24.Shinding - 2:34
25.National Gas (Single A-Side Mix) - 3:05
26.Wouldn't You (Single B-Side Mix) - 2:31
27.Georgia George (Part 1 Single A-Side) - 2:12
28.July (Single B-Side) - 2:52
29.Foxfield Junction (Bonus Track) - 2:55
All Compositions by Mickey Jupp
Tracks 13-24 Mono Versons
Michael William Deasy (born February 4, 1941) is an American rock and jazz guitarist. As a session musician -member of The Wrecking Crew-, he played on numerous hit singles and albums recorded in Los Angeles in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Mike Deasy looks plenty country on the cover of this Capitol Records set -- but he comes across in a way that's more rock overall -- yet still touched with plenty of the southern roots that were showing up in the hipper currents of the American underground at the time! You might think of this record as being in that great late Byrds/early Eagles moment when an artist could freely mix together elements of Los Angeles and Nashville, but without coming across like some sort of commercial crook or pretender -- and Deasy is definitely his own man in the setting -- handling plenty of guitars, mandolin, banjo, and other stringed instruments alongside his vocals -- but also getting some warm west coast backing in the process. Titles include "Beauty", "If You Pick Her Too Hard", "The Peace Song", "Flutterby", "Letters To My Head", and "Little Water".
