Tracks from the 60's that were not BIG hits but you rated.



Out of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organisation and that British blues jazz thing.
One of my favourite bands. Saw them at the Mecca a couple of times.

 
Back the mid-sixties as a very impressionable bairn from Seaham I was a mate of the 'manager' of a local, very young blues/soul band and was invited to watch them practice upstairs in a working men's club.

They were auditioning a potential new singer - this bloke was tall, blond, thin as a rake, dressed in a long black leather coat - a cross between David Bowie and Long John Baldry. To me, at that time, he was an impossibly cool character and I'd have given him the job there and then on looks alone. Turns out he could sing a bit as well.

Afterwards he told us that he'd just come back from that there London and had brought a bag of singles back with him - the sort of obscure stuff that was being played in the clubs down there. We sat around an old Dansette record player and he worked his way through this bag of singles. I'd not heard a single tune he played - or band for that matter - and I was mightily impressed. It turned out to be my initiation into a world of non-chart music.

This was one of the singles he played and as a new convert to 'underground' music, for the life of me I couldn't fathom why Wild Thing by the Troggs was a massive hit yet this fantastic tune never rose above abject obscurity.

Listening to it now, 5 decades later and it's patently obvious why it bombed.

It's two and a half minutes of very ordinary sub-Animal's, Hammond organ driven dirge, but at the time it was the coolest tune I'd ever heard.

I've absolutely no idea what the bizarre and extremely gay video is all about mind.

 
Out of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Graham Bond Organisation and that British blues jazz thing.
One of my favourite bands. Saw them at the Mecca a couple of times.


Originally Jon Hiseman's Colosseum if I remember correctly?

I would have been in the same Mecca audience.

Happy days.

Splendidly obscure and very, very sixties. The live version went on for days - which I thought was brilliant at the time.

 
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