The Mighty Lord General Sir Captain Prince Charles

‘How Many Fingers, Darlin’?’ c/w ‘She Like Me Big Bamboo’
Released 22nd January 1959. Caribou Records 100A

Hailing from Tobago, The Mighty Lord General Sir Captain Prince Charles (real name: Herbert de Lorean Basquiat), was the most famous of the many calypso singers who dominated the UK singles charts in the late 1950s. His first two singles ‘She Squeeze She Melons When I Come Home From Work’ and ‘She Grind She Hips Against Me Banana’ only made the top twenty, but it was ‘How Many Fingers’, Darlin’?’ that really put de Lorean Basquiat on the pop map.

At the time, calypso was viewed as a rather jocular, innocent musical form. A 1957 hit ‘She Wear She Dress With Nothin’ Underneath’ by King Duke Arthur and his Mighty Stalin Invaders reached number three in the charts, despite its lyrics: ‘She tell I to keep me rocket in me pocket/I wail and gnash I teeth/ For this is Saturday night, my friend/ So she wear she dress with nothin’ underneath’.

‘How Many Fingers, Darlin’?’, with a raucous backing featuring pounding steel drums and a ragged horn section, was a popular radio hit and soon reached number one in the charts, knocking ‘My Best Slippers’ by Geoffrey Nutt & The Mayfair Girls from the top spot.

Before long, de Lorean Basquiat was invited to perform in front of The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace and reportedly turned in a spectacular performance (backed by the Roaring King Nelson Girl Butterfly Dancers and The Mighty Lord General Sir Captain Prince Charles Mighty Spitfire Macbeth Orchestra and Power Melody Dance Band).

The music apparently inspired Princess Margaret to lewdly act out the lyrics of ‘She Squeeze She Melons…’ before she had to be heavily sedated and committed to a private royal asylum for three years.

Just to give an idea of what the Princess’s performance might have entailed, it’s worth quoting some of the lyrics to this classic song:

I like she saltfish in the morning
I like she saltfish in the night
I like she grind she sweet papaya
On me sugar cane hard an’ tight

I like she lick the sweet banana
I like she lick the old beef jerk
Most of all I like she squeeze she melons
When I come home from work

Still performing regularly, despite being in his late seventies, de Lorean Basquiat recently put the finishing touches to his seventy-third calypso album ‘Tribute to Mr David Niven’, which features a re-working of ‘How Many Fingers, Darlin’?’, featuring a previously omitted verse, which de Lorean Basquiat himself deemed too tasteless to be included in the original waxing. Can’t wait!

Evan Harris

‘A Slight Tickle (Excerpt)’
Cromothone Records CROM 4
Evan Haris (Hockling), Edgar DeFries (Guitar, Bass, Drums, Piano, Autoharp)
One of the weirdest singles to be released in the early Seventies was ‘A Slight Tickle (Excerpt)’ by engineer turned warbler, Evan Harris. Harris had worked on many complex sessions in the Nineteen Sixties, including getting Humpet Harmony’s customised Hammond organ onto tape.

“It wasn’t like a conventional Hammond”, remembers Harris. “This one was made of straw bales covered in lamb fat”. Humpet had asked Hammond to come up with a lighter version of their famous keyboard and this was the solution.

For his first venture as a singer, Evan chose the unusual route of hocking up phlegm. “I didn’t have much of a singing voice and smoked sixty fags a day”, remembers Harris. “I had a track that Edgar DeFries recorded before he joined Egg Thermometer and I thought up a melody to go over the top”.

It was studio producer Nigel Mermaid who heard Harris coughing up some chesty phlegm into a wastepaper basket and thought the sound “original and quite catchy”.

The single combines an airy, slightly progressive tune, reminiscent of Calked Chimney’s ‘Tool Management In Airdrie’, with the echoey and phased regurgitation of trapped phlegm. There’s no doubt that it was a novelty at the time and its slightly intellectual approach guaranteed it a hearing amongst the hippy set. Listening to it today, without the benefit of mind-altering drugs, it sounds really, really bad.

The Frown

’24 Flowers A Day’ c/w ‘The Japanese Bollock Tree’

Released 12th October 1966. Decca F148694.

Jimmy Parrott (guitar, vcls), Harry ‘Guv’ Welchman (bass), Crombie Thistle (drums, percussion), Chair ‘Sad Face’ Kray (organ), Baps McGovern (saxophone)

Originally a typical mod band (their singles ‘Reversed Into A Van’ and ‘Where’s Me Pills?!?!?!?’ were favourites in ‘Tinkles’ club in Hersham), The Frown underwent a radical change of style in late ’66 after the whole band discovered the joys of sniffing dry-cleaning fluid.

Says Harry ‘Guv’ Welchman today: “We were all desperate to blow our minds to fragments like all the other bands, but we simply couldn’t find any drugs in Godalming, where we were all from. This meant we had to make do with dangerous solvents and the like. I believe we were the first group to inhale rat poison and lick sandpaper. In fact, Crombie Thistle nearly OD’d at his mother’s house when combining rat poison inhalation with bleach pessaries.

Welchman confirms other members of the band also used dangerous substances. “Jimmy Parrott did varnish...varnish and rust remover combined, with a side order of nail polish. This was on top of the dry cleaning stuff. But the gear Jimmy really swore by was butane and petrol mixed up together and sniffed from an old handbag. That really did it for Jimmy. One of his girlfriends died after eating a toilet block covered in penetrating oil”.

‘24 Flowers A Day’ was written by Parrott after a marathon Airfix glue session, a substance which he inhaled from a large carrier bag which no-one was allowed to touch. Parrot was known to scream if anyone came near it. In an interview about the song with Guys & Chicks magazine in January 1967, Parrot claimed: “Suddenly I knew the answer to everything and formed a new structure for the universe and stars within. This, and other things are reflected in the lyrics of our new waxing, when it will be released”.

At this point, the single had already been out for over three months, a fact which Parrott seemed blissfully unaware of. For those of you who are interested, the first verse of ’24 Flowers A Day’ ran as follows:

’24 Flowers a day, seven leeks in a week
Three hundred and sixty-five smiles in a year
A dog with a gigantic beak’

The single was a surprise number one only two weeks after its release. “We bribed all the pirate DJs with hopes of money’”, says Welchman. “That record was all that the hovercraft pirate station Radio Crispian ever played and, man, we all listened to it all day, hearing our own record. It was great! We cracked open the Winchester of carbon tetrachloride that night, I can tell you!”

A follow-up single, ‘Drop a Love Bomb on My Head’, fared less well and the band soon split up. They reformed in 1972, and then split up again. They reformed once more in 1983, but split up two weeks later. “Those reformations were Jimmy’s idea”, says Welchman. “He thought it was still 1966, basically. Time sort of stood still for him and although, say, seventeen years had passed, for him it was only two hours. I’m not really sure how it worked. You’d have to ask Jimmy, but he’s been asleep since ’97”.

Sax player Baps McGovern later joined The Buxom Wenches, while organist Chair ‘Sad Face’ Kray changed his name to Robin Kray and went on to become a renowned character actor, usually playing ageing, predatory homosexuals. “That sad face of his really paid dividends”, says Welchman.

Piers Shelley And The Inverts

‘Smoke My Hair’ c/w ‘The Dripping In My Head’
Released 7th January 1967. Regal Zonophone RZ 3032.

Piers Shelley (vcls, tambourine), Carl Connery (bass guitar), Stuart Morgan (flugelhorn), Flotral McGinnis (drums).




‘You smoke everything that’s going
Like you haven’t got a care
You smoke bananas in your pyjamas
So baby, won’t you smoke my hair’

Hailing from the Swansea area of South Wales, Piers Shelley (real name William Corbet) and The Inverts paid their dues by playing miner’s clubs, where they were regularly booed offstage by appalled and drunken audiences.

One of the many reasons for this was that the band sported a flugelhorn player instead of a guitarist. Says flugelhorn player Stuart Morgan today: “I don’t know why they asked me to join, really. Blame Piers Shelley. He told me I’d meet loads of girls if I joined. In fact, I didn’t get any. There was a strict blow-off girl hierarchy and I was at the bottom of it, even below the roadies... and Piers’ mates and family”.

Nevertheless, the out-of-time flugelhorn line on ‘Smoke My Hair’ is what makes the record. An inept mix (by discredited producer Arthur ‘Lummy’ Watkins) made sure that the drums and bass guitar were trebly and inaudible, leaving Shelley’s trembling vocals and Morgan’s flugelhorn to the fore. It’s a painful listening experience, yet one that influenced many subsequent Welsh psychedelic bands, such as The Unusuals, whose single ‘I Fear Retrospect’ also featured the flugelhorn and a child’s toy piano.

The single stiffed at number 49 in the charts (though it did make number 72 in Italy three years later with the vocals removed) and the band broke up, bassist Carl Connery joining The Bumdrops (led by Belgian tambourinist Rudy Snouters, later a famous terrorist).

Shelley blamed Morgan’s flugelhorn for the single’s lack of success and never spoke to him again. To Morgan, however, this chart failure was a relief: “To me, the whole record industry was like some horrific, predatory disco in some degenerate, dirty sex basement down the docks, with swarthy, foreign criminal people acting as waiters and slaves, deconsecrated nuns, special keys to forbidden rooms, the undead, retired teachers, corrupted animals, toothless women playing saxophones and suitcases full of money. I went into one club and everything was painted green. I’m glad ‘Smoke My Hair’ wasn’t a hit. If it had been, we’d all be looking like Dorian Gray’s portrait by now, like most other beat group members do”.