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”.