I’m not tired and it’s so late – moving fast everything looks great!

A chance comment on Twitter has led me down a bit of a rabbit hole this last couple of weeks and resulted in me staging an audacious foray up into our top room, where all my CDs and records are currently languishing, somewhat neglected.

The converted top room has been pretty much out of bounds the last few months because the Pandemic has washed The Boy and his charming girlfriend up there once more while they are between flats. I’d recently spruced it up after he’d moved out some years ago, bought a decent amp & speakers and installed all my music up there in the style to which it deserved to be accustomed. Needs must and all that, and it’s all still up there, Miss Havisham-style, the occasional commando raid notwithstanding.

This time, one of the CDs I liberated was the Keith West-inspired Tomorrow album which turns out to be pretty much as I remembered, lots of cheery British psyche, all backwards guitars scampering back and forth in the headphones mixed with knowing, laddish vocals, more than a few moments of dreadful English “whimsy” and a few respectable stabs at innovative new forms. I guess it goes the way of a lot of British psyche ultimately, paving the way for the horrors of po-faced seventies prog and epic rock.

The other album I’ve been listening to a lot of this week is the ever-rewarding and already blogged SF Sorrow, and I’m sure the sharper-minded of you (and that’s all of you, right?) will have worked out where I’m going with this…

Mid-sixties UK being the hopeful hodgepodge of imagination and ambition that it was, there was room for all manner of types: earnest but dull music students got high with genuine rogues and weirdos – thankfully, for every Steve Howe, there was a Twink…

Twink

I’ve mentioned John “Twink” Alder before (this post about the Pretty Things) and shared the footage of him on French TV,  “interpreting” SF Sorrow, painted smile fixed icily across his face (presumably in the certainty of the fearsome clumping he was going to get from Phil May once they were offstage).

You could be forgiven for not realising, however, that Twink was, nominally at least, the occupier of the Pretties drum-stool (indeed he proudly maintained a band tradition of loopy drummers) but he also played on the Tomorrow record, as well as drumming for the In Crowd, the Pink Fairies and the Birds, also forming a band with Syd Barrett (think on that…) and jamming with Hawkwind (even auditioning for them, unsuccessfully, as a guitarist!).

Here’s a recording of the Pretties playing Hyde Park which features Twink and includes a Byrds’ cover a couple of Electric Banana tracks and a cover of “White Bicycle” which does not quite have the zany charm of the Tomorrow version, but is still quite a listen:

There’s also some footage of Twink playing bongos and drums with the Pink Fairies which is quite fun. To be honest, the Fairies are a pretty hard listen at times, and you’d do as well to turn Larry Wallis down and enjoy a few minutes of Twink, spliff in mouth, pounding away on his kit.

(The other drummer is Russell Hunter as you’re asking…)

One of the other projects, the frenetically networking Twink also did was his own Think Pink album that he released not long after SF Sorrow. He has referred to the two records as being comparable classics, which is generous, to say the least. Think Pink is … well… patchy – a mixture of feral psychedelia and more horrible whimsy (Tolkien and Lear have a lot to answer for…) It does, however, contain the wonderful “Ten Thousand Words in a Cardboard Box” which I’ll leave you to track down, if you don’t already know it.

Instead, here’s a clip of a recording Twink made in 1977. It’d be fair to say that most of the sixties musicians found the transition into the fire-sale that was Punk a tricky old business. Most of them pretended it had never happened, some feigned amnesia about their pasts, but a few, like Twink and many of his grimy Pink Fairies / Hawkwind drinking mates found it less of a leap.

Here’s a recording of another Twink band, The Rings, playing at the 100 Club

It’s a decent, heartfelt slice of nervy discontent that stands up pretty well against some of the stupider efforts of his contemporaries and which features Twink as a front man rather than drummer. I’d love to think he broke out the grease paint and reprised his acclaimed SF Sorrow performances but according to Sounds he spent most of the set at the back of the stage, trying to avoid being spat on (those curls…), and shortly after left because of “musical differences”.

Wikipedia claims that Twink also had an acting career, appearing in an adaptation of David Copperfield (this I can imagine) and episodes of Allo Allo (I’m trying hard not to imagine this…)

To be honest, the list of bands, stand-ins and gigs Twink was involved in is seemingly endless. And in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to clear this up, here’s quite an endearing interview with the man to finish with:

(“Yeah I played with Jimi Hendrix twice, shall I tell you about that?”):

“Twink, is this love?”

Sometimes they don’t tell the truth…

Not really listening to a whole lot of new music at the moment – funds a bit tight, gigs still a bit iffy, a fair amount of work from home still, so not driving around so much. It’s all a bit of a barren landscape, truth be told.

But… I am still minded to spend the odd afternoon excavating a gluttonous decade’s downloading, having accrued unrealistic amounts of music. And amongst other things, I’ve spent a bit of time rediscovering this criminally underrated collection from NowAgain Records – Forge Your Own Chains

Smiling Faces Sometimes

(This might get a bit YouTube-heavy…)

This track, recorded in 1971 by a group of US Army players moonlighting from their military duties, called East of Underground, is probably my favourite. It’s got such a tight, disciplined feel to it, powered by the remarkable drumming of one George Daniels, who possibly only got the gig because he claimed to have worked with James Brown. I love me a wristy drummer, over-confident and bristling with ambition, and this guy could well have learned his trade under the hire ‘em, fine ‘em, fire ‘em tutelage of the Best. I also love the relaxed, sloppy feel of the rhythm guitar and the fact that the band appeared to have at least three great Mayfield-inspired vocalists, whose withering, salty tenors greatly enhance the weary paranoia of the lyrics – jealousy, misery, envy indeed (or…  Bobby Blackmon, Larry Watson, and Austin Webb, to the their friends).

I like a bit of soul music as much as the next man, but I’m strictly an amateur and don’t go much further than the sixties. Turns out that “Smiling Faces Sometimes” is a Temptations song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, recorded in 1971 but almost immediately handed it over to label mates (and Whitfield’s psychedelic playthings) The Undisputed Truth who made it into a hit the same year.

It’s a pretty good version but not as good as East of Underground’s. What it lacks in class, however, it more than makes up in brass:

(So many questions…)

It’s a mystery to me though why the Temptations’ own version has never forced its way into my consciousness. Buried away in the 1971 album, Sky’s The Limit, it’s 12 minutes of brisk but unhurried brilliance, bathed in near-constant, hypnotic wah-wah, rich strings and an unlikely oboe. Kick off your shoes… you don’t have anywhere better to be…

There’s not quite the bitter, restlessness of the East of Underground version but neither does it have the hothouse early bloom of the Undisputed Truth’s outing.

It grows, it develops, it rises… What a song!

Beware!