The Bumdrops

The Bumdrops – ‘Time Is Best When It’s There’ c/w ‘Dance, Lucy, Dance!’

Released February 30th 1967 Columbia DB 9754

Arthur ‘Spanker’ Watkins (psaltery, vcls), Lucas North (organetto, rackett), Cleophas Edmond (pipe and tabor, backing vocals), Toby Octavias (zink, claves), Geoff ‘Suzie’ Flittermouse (lizard, bladder pipe).

Durham band The Crackpots originally recorded ‘Time Is Best When It’s There’ in late 1965. It was released on the Pye International label and soon sunk without trace, the band splitting up shortly afterwards. 

One of the few people who actually bought the record, though, was Cleophas Edmond, then a sixteen year old schoolboy in Durham, who became obsessed with the song’s strange chorus lyrics:

"Time is best when it’s there, baby

When it’s not there it’s a drag

Sometimes it isn’t there at all

Just like you when you smoke a fag".

"I couldn’t imagine what this song could be about!" says Edmond today, while serving in his fish and chip shop in Rhyl, North Wales. "It wasn’t so much the bit about the girl smoking the fag, but the whole idea that time could not be there. I found that rather creepy and wanted to put those lyrics in a more appropriate setting than the Carmen Miranda influenced calypso rhumba style of The Crackpots original, great and danceable though it was, if you like that sort of thing".

Taking as his starting point the actual sound of time, which he imagined to be the heavily overdubbed sound of many people whispering from various religious texts, the track soon explodes into a cacophony of medieval instruments, with Lucas North’s organetto to the fore. Immediately, one is transported back to the eleventh century, possibly observing a band of drunken troubadours prancing down a filthy, excrement-covered lane in what was then the north of England (now St Albans). After a full eleven minutes (yes; this was the longest single ever made at the time*), we hear Arthur ‘Spanker’ Watkins’ ugly croak of a voice capture the perfect mood for those uncanny lyrics.

‘Mummy! What are you and daddy doing that makes so much noise?
Can you not see that I am playing with boys?
Another birthday party ruined by your screaming and grunts
I’m sick sick to death of your sexual stunts.’

Cleophas had excised the other three verses and Watkins just repeated the first one again in their place. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ he says ‘It was Toby Octavias’s idea. He though it would be interesting. He later had a major nervous breakdown.’

Described by Beverly Staines from Record Mirror as ‘the ultimate flop’, it didn’t make the charts, but was the inspiration for a whole concept album by North’s later band The Inaniloquent. The b-side, ‘Dance, Lucy, Dance!’, later re-released as an a-side, fell afoul of the BBC’s then ban on songs featuring the word ‘knees’.

*clocking in at an incredible 24’ 22” – unheard of for a single at the time and only surpassed by ‘Uruguayan Pissing Tree’ by Zoe & The Underdogs (112’ 71”).