Bobby Carter Five

Bobby Carter Five – ‘Cry On My Hands’ c/w ‘Your Major Surgery, Eileen’.

Released 19^th June 1968. Regal Zonophone  RG1278

 

 

Bobby Carter (descant recorder, penny whistle, vcls), Neil Handy (bass, baked beans), Michael Withnall (lead guitar), Henry Oliphant (Electric Organ), Mike Wyatt (rhythm guitar), Rupert Edison (drums).

 

‘Cry on my hands, fill them up like a cup

Wash my face in your misery

Splash your tears on my clothes

Soak my jeans with your woes

You’re not the girl for me’

When The Brillo Pads broke up in November 1966, Bobby Carter recruited five local Northamptonshire musicians to form Bobby Carter Five. Unusually for the time, the word ‘The’ was conspicuous by its absence as a prefix to the band name.

Remembers Bobby: “Whenever I rang up some venue trying to get us some gigs, they’d always say ‘So, it’s The Bobby Carter Five’ and I’d have to say ‘No – it’s just Bobby Carter Five!’  I bitterly regret not having had a ‘The’ on the front of our name. It was a terrible mistake and I’m sure it was the reason we didn’t have any hits”.

‘Cry On My Hands’ was the group’s ninth single and features some haunting descant recorder work from Carter, as well as an unidentifiable, low-frequency noise that frequently obliterates the other instruments and Carter’s ineptly multi-tracked, phased vocals. “That noise was Neil Handy fitting throughout the entire length of the song”, says producer Lauwrence (sic) Hemmings. “The boy had fits all day long”, he says. “And I thought it would give the song a bit of a psychedelic gimmick if he could have a fit in time with the song. He couldn’t manage the timing, but was still able to get something of a freak groove going. It was my zenith as a producer, frankly”.

Carter was not so impressed. “I’d written this really sensitive song and it’s got someone having a fit all over it! I couldn’t believe it! I’ve nothing against Neil – he still has fits like that to this day – but Hemmings was out of his mind. I played it to a girlfriend and she was appalled. She split up with me there and then and I’ve never had a girlfriend since. I’m reduced to living with a sixty year old ladyboy. It’s that bad! And while I’m here, I don’t know why it was called Bobby Carter Five in the first place, considering there were six of us in the group”.

Mike Wyatt, the group’s rhythm guitarist, was later implicated in The Shadow Murders, which took place in Leicester between January 1971 and April 1979, although he was never charged.

Sally Dripper

Sally Dripper

‘A Little Baby in My Tummy’ c/w ‘When God Opens the Womb’

Released 9^th June 1967. Felt Hat FH146767

Felt Hat records had specialised in religious recordings since the early nineteen fifties and Sally Dripper was their biggest star.

The label scored a massive hit in late 1966 with the album ‘Sing All Ye Merry Hearts for Yon Christmas Yuletide Time!’ -  a recording of a carol service in the famously deconsecrated church of St Peters in what was then Winchester, which was then in Surrey when it was part of Middlesex.

Apart from an early failure (‘Please Don’t Nail Him to the Cross!’ by The Archangels), their first serious foray into the pop market was this single by Sally Dripper. Dripper had been discovered singing hymns in a shop doorway on a depressing wet Sunday afternoon in Rotherham town centre by Sammy Crime, then a top record producer (‘If You Don’t Let Me Touch You, I’m Off!’ by The Mort d’Arthyrs was his most well-known recording).

“There was something about the quality of her voice that appealed to me”, says Crime, who has been Samantha Crime for the last twenty-two years. “I tried to pull her in that shop doorway, but she wasn’t having any of it. I liked that. She had spunk. She was a devout Christian and wanted to spread the Good News. She also had great low-slung bristols, which was what sold records in them days. I came on to her several more times, but it never worked. I was barking up the wrong low-slung booby tit-tree”.

A sworn enemy of promiscuity, pre-marital sex and the depiction of lewd images, Dripper wanted to make a record that instructed Christian children about the realities of Sex. She believed that it was solely for reproduction and that if God had wanted women to enjoy intercourse he would have given them some sort of ‘special pleasure bud’.

She had married young and a week later was pregnant with her first child (this was Rotherham, you have to remember). It was after her first birth that she took to singing hymns in shop doorways. ‘A Little Baby in My Tummy’ went straight to number one in the UK charts, knocking ‘Barrel of Girls’ by The Vaticans from the number one slot.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine a song with such explicit sexual lyrics getting as far as being recorded, let alone released, but Dripper’s demure, Christian image, combined with the light folk backing supplied by Sammy Crime (using Julian Coward from The Empire Daughters on acoustic guitar and kazoo), made the whole thing into something special that effortlessly bypassed the BBC censors.

“There was something in her voice that was definitely alluring and full of promise in a sort of deeply perverse way that I can’t quite put my finger on”, says Crime today. “Apparently, she had a pet stick insect which she burnt”.

As my husband Philip disflowers me upon our wedding night

His largeness revealing itself in the bedroom light

So with the help of Jesus we are soon conjoined as one,

And after thirty seconds, we make a little son.

A little baby in my tummy

Growing into a man

                                                         I will be its mummy

And feed it from my swollen, milk-filled udders

Whenever and wherever I can, oh Lordy.

The success of the single spawned an album filled with weird, ambiguous, religion-based perversity and, for those interested in such things, it’s just been released on CD by Universal, with four bonus tracks, one of them the previously unavailable B-side of the single and another three songs which were not included in the final track listing.

Side One

1. Your Pleasure, My Pain

2. Guilty Looks across the Old Breakfast Table

3. Vigorously Impregnated On Whit Sunday

4. When a Husband’s Hands Feel Cold

5. Satan Made You Suggest That

6. Shame on You for Suggesting That

Side Two

1. Thoughts of Shame

2. Impaled On Your Manhood Again

3. Satan Makes Love to Me Once More

4. Cold Hands in the Dead of Night

5. Punished for Enjoying a Woman’s Love

6. I Dread Your Touch

Bonus Tracks

7. When God Opens the Womb

8. Heavy with Milk (But My Body Still Has Needs)

9. Chastised By Whip, Cane and Tawse

10. Speedily Impregnated on Michaelmas Eve

As a postscript, internet blooger (sic) Harry Chymaes regards this album as ‘Easily the most erotic piece of popular music recorded in the last seventy years. Nothing can touch it.’

Tim Hollyhill's Cadence

Tim Hollyhill’s Cadence

“Enter The Coracle” c/w “Fear Of Trombones”

VIRGIN VS7007

Tim Hollyhill (Guitar, Farfundtarf Mood Organ, Steam Lute, Dulcimer, Pedal Steel Guitar, Flagelot Bag, Angry Gongs, Harpsichette)

It began as a simple experiment with a two-track tape recorder and a Farfundtarf Mood Organ and ended in bitter acrimony.

“If it had not been for the fact he was such a c**t it could have all been so different”. Hilary Tombleson has never been one to mince words and her crude assessment of former partner Tim Hollyhill comes as no shock to most music fans.

“Musical differences had nothing to do with it, he’s just quite simply the biggest c**t on the planet”, says Tombleson, Vicar of St. Peter’s in Winchester, which is in Hampshire which is in Essex, for the past ten years.

We sought a second opinion from producer Gary Gentle who worked with Hollyhill at Trout Tickle studios. He had this to say: “Little Tim? So talented. But a c**t of Titanic proportions”.

Former session musician Guff McFlaherty, king of the pedal steel, concurs: “My livelihood depends on keeping my mouth shut and getting on with the job, but he’s a massive c**t”.

Back to Tombleson: “Imagine a c**t the size of, say, a dwarf star. No, imagine a c**t the size of a galaxy, something in the region of 40,00 parsecs in diameter. Try to visualize that. That’s how big a c**t he was”.

This certainly colours any potentially positive impression of the pastoral folk pop to be found on ‘Enter The Coracle’. Luckily it is an awful, twee piece of work, so it’s easy to empathise with the views expressed above.

McFlaherty describes the session: “Hollyhill had double tracked the Farfundtarf with some wah wah Dulcimer, Cory Normansell played flagelot bag, Francis Drummond from Amethyst Arcade was on steam lute, Paul Hollywood laid down some angry gongs and Sam Bent (Bob Bent’s brother) from Golden Cartwheel freaked out on harpsichette. Behind Hollyhill’s back we called the track ‘Enter The C**t’.”

None of the musicians received a credit. Hollyhill claimed he played all the instruments on this ode to an ancient craft himself. After the session he fired everyone on the spot, even though most of those involved were self-employed session men.

Hollyhill went on to make a considerable fortune in the music business and can count absolutely no-one as a friend; a situation he is entirely happy with. Living in a gold painted villa on the island of Martinique, Hollyhill spends his days shouting at lawyers and shooting trespassers.

The last word goes to his longest serving manager, Lorne Brimmer: “C**t”.

Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy

Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy

“Hunny Buns” c/w “Disco Demon”

SISTEM RECORDS  SIST 34

Released November 6^th 1975

Stan Trent (Vocals, Guitar, Maracas, Afro Comb), Harvey Kent (Keyboards, Accounts), Bob Bent (Marimas, Baristas, Cochineal), Stanmore Palsy (Bass, Chest Hair)

Stan Trent, Harvey Kent, Bob Bent and Stanmore Palsy emerged from the flaming Prog wreckage of Birmingham’s Tit Monocle to form a white funk outfit centred mainly around the extremely extravagant white man afro of Stan Trent.

Turning their back on complex time signatures, concept albums and an appallingly mediocre cash flow, the foursome fired Tit Monocle flautist Greg Happy and jumped aboard the Disco bandwagon.

“The Disco bandwagon was gathering pace”, recalls Harvey Kent. “It had definitely shifted up a gear from second to third and was doing about 35 miles per hour in a 40 zone. It hadn’t yet slipped into fifth and joined the motorway at Junction 12a, but it was doing a respectable speed and we felt that, if we ran fast enough, we might just be able to get on board”.

Whereas Tit Monocle had specialized in lengthy pieces about Faeries, Daemons, Time Travel and Alternative Universes, the new band opted for songs about girls with big arses onto which they could pour honey all night long.

“It was purely an artistic decision”, says Kent. “We felt we had explored the outer reaches of Space to the full: there was simply no more universe to write about, what with it being a finite space trapped in a small bottle on the mantelpiece of a Martian cephalopod called Ben. Instead, our muse took us in the direction of well endowed black women who liked to have foodstuffs dripped onto them”.

Their first single “Hunny Buns” laid the foundations for what was to come:

Ooh, baby, you a woman and me a funky man

Yessa, baby, you knows I gots me’s a funky plan

Gonna grab me a pot of funky jam

An’ spread it all over, yeah, your sexy hams

After years of touring with Tit Monocle to little effect, this white Disco band suddenly hit it big, selling close to 350,000 copies. “It was 349,343 according to my audit”, remembers Kent. “With the profits I was able to pay off the HP loan on my Moog Sideboard. That debt had been worrying me for some time”.

Less happy was Greg Happy, the sacked flute player. “I wasn’t happy”, says Happy. “I played my lips off for Tit Monocle and there I was, on the Prog scrapheap, watching them ride off into the sunset on the Disco bandwagon. Well, it wasn’t so much a sunset as a dual carriageway; the A456 from Bromsgrove I seem to recall”.

However, Happy had his moment of schadenfreude when disaster struck Trent, Kent, Bent and Palsy. “The B-side of Hunny Bunny hinted at the band’s previous life in Prog. It was about summoning an incubus in a graveyard so that they could dance and have sex with a Disco Demon. The chorus involved an incantation from an ancient book of sorcery, over a thumping 4/4 beat. From what I understand, a demon was indeed summoned during a gig at Lancaster Polytechnic and Stanmore Palsy died of fright”.

Susan McDaniels - 'Harpsichords Of Yesterday' c/w ‘I Love To Cut Your Hair, Bobby’.

Released March 1^st 1967. PYE 5K22946

  

‘As my tears fall on my mother’s wedding gown

I smell the letter that you painted brown

And late at night as my sobbing soaks my tray

I dream of the harpsichords of yesterday

Harpsichords of yesterday are here today

Harpsichords of yesterday tomorrow

My lord, please let me borrow

From the Bank of Sorrow’

Susan McDaniels was hailed as 'Halesowen's answer to Marianne Faithful' even before the latter had made a record. 

Unfortunately, this proved too much for Susan to live up to and she vanished, under mysterious circumstances, when she was only seventeen years old. Her third single ('The Lilies On The Pond' being the first), 'I Watch The Children Play' was a posthumous near-hit and would have reached number 83 in the charts if the charts had gone that far at the time.     

'Harpsichords Of Yesterday' is notable for the presence of Terry Quick’s Baroque ‘n’ Roll as the backing group, their harpsichord-strong line-up ideal for the atmospheric, poignant lyrics. Her former manager Brian Gold does not, however, controversially, have happy memories of the session. “The day that Terry Quick’s Baroque ‘n’ Roll walked into the studio was the day that Susan's death warrant was signed”, he remembers. “After three hours attempting to get their harpsichords into the studio, they got completely drunk and laughingly plied Susan with 99% pure cocaine. After finishing the session, she complained of feeling unwell and was later found driving a number 68 bus on its way to Croydon.”

The bus conductor, fearing trouble, asked Susan to vacate the driver’s seat. In the ensuing scuffle, the conductor’s cap was dislodged, a criminal offence at the time. Susan ran crying into the night, never to be seen again. Until an hour later, when she was spotted eating a fried egg sandwich at an all night café. After she left the café, she was never seen again. No, really.

Her parents, now in their nineties, still hold poorly attended 'Susan McDaniels Days' at their home in Aston, where fans are able to buy Susan memorabilia, reel-to-reel tape copies of her unreleased album 'Pictures In The Clouds' and photographs of fried egg sandwiches. ‘Harpsichords Of Yesterday' is a fitting epitaph to what was, what could have been and what would never be.

The Shabbymen

The Shabbymen  

‘I’m Looking, She’s Cooking’ c/w ‘(Gimme More) Coupons’

Truncheon Records  Whack004. Released October 5^th 1975

Otter Buntley (Vocals), The Whizz (Guitar), Charlie Nuts (Bass), Chaps M’Chops (Drums), Pete Laskie (Harmonica),

Back in the old days, before the smoking ban, people loved being indoors smoking and drinking and listening to live music. The perfect place for all three? A pub. Kings of the pub rock scene? The Shabbymen.

Remembers drummer Chaps M’Chops: “Every street in Britain had a pub filled with smoke, cheap beer and the sound of rock music. We could all smoke and drink to our heart’s content, go home smelling like burnt tramps, and then cough our lungs up onto a late night tray of chips, peas and gravy. It was fucking magic.”

Coming from a small island in the Tyne estuary, every member of The Shabbymen was a hardcore smoker by the age of seven. “During school playtime we’d pile into the assembly hall, play skiffle and smoke sixty or seventy fags before the bell rang. You could buy cigs in the tuck shop. Everyone smoked, even my dog”.

Rehearsing hard for three years and about 67,000 cigarettes, when the band finally reached London pub gig goers didn’t know what hit them. “There’d be a wall of smoke. Then the music would kick in. Otter and The Whizz would stare at the crowd, each with three fags on the go. People freaked out”.

In their nicotine stained suits The Shabbymen blazed a smoky trail across the music scene. Their first album “Coughin’ Dodger” was sponsored by Imperial Tobacco and featured the definitive Shabbymen track ‘I’m Looking, She’s Cooking’.

Standing on the front porch, light another fag

Gotta get a move on, take another drag

The lights are goin’ down, the cooker’s getting hot

I love the way you bake your pie, babe you got me hot

I’m lookin’, She’s cookin’

I’m bakin’, she’s shakin’

I’m thrillin’, she’s grillin’

She rattles my pans

And shakes up my glands