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.