Mark Of The Covenant

Mark of the Covenant

‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’ c/w ‘Mummy, Not The Shears’.
Released 16th July 1968. Regal Zonophone RZA 93356.

Mark Steele had spent most of his life in mental institutions of one sort or another and was signed to Regal Zonophone the day after he was released from The Feltham High Security Bedlam Zoo House For The Very Deranged.

Zonophone’s A&R man, Sussan (sic) Taylore had seen the trend for weird, psychedelic lyrics become ‘trendie’ (sic) after The Trembling Hands hit number forty-one in the pop charts with ‘Hide In The Attic’. He decided to get his own casualty to cash in and get promoted.

"I was on the lookout for people who had been recently released from the Loony Bin. I know it isn’t very fashionable to call them Loony Bins now but that’s what they were called then", he says today. "And they still are today, as far as I’m concerned. Loony Bins, Loony Bins, Loony Bins. Where the mad and demented are housed. I reckoned that all that psychedelic nonsense came from there 'cause it sounded like it had been written by a madman, so I wanted to get one of my own".

Rushed into the studio on a stretcher, Steele was given half an hour to write both sides of his debut platter. He came up with ‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’ in two minutes seven seconds, using a cheap Biro.

This was a place where:

Gooseberries squeak and quack and tingle
With pingle wringle fingle wingle

Accompanied by Morgan Rapsfield and Roddy Ginseng from The Acrobats, the resulting recording was a delightful mesh of Japanese traditional folk and squealing feedback. Says Ginseng: "Mark had no melody, so I pinched this melody from a traditional Japanese folk song and it seemed to fit. The original words were something about hedgehogs, so we jettisoned them and replaced them with Mark’s unhinged, toxic, but ‘trendie’ (sic) view of the world. I thought it would be number one in the hit parade for sure, but nobody bought it. Not one copy".

There were rumours (and still are) that an album had been made by this wayward genius, but this was not true, according to Taylore. "There were rumours that an album had been made, but this was not true. There still are rumours that an album had been made, in fact. Who are we talking about?"

There was no album but there was a single. It was called ‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’. The b-side, ‘Mummy, Not The Shears’, was covered by Niblet O’Connor (formerly of The Shyt) on his fifth solo album ‘Gonk Crazy!’.