How to use this Page

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he looks at February of 1965. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

Forty-five years ago in February 1965, British pop music rattled recording sales charts with a second wave of performers who followed in the footsteps of the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, and more. Among the many new sounds broadcast either by the BBC or by the growing number of pirate radio stations that winter were recordings by the Who, Herman’s Hermits, and the Ivy League. Such was the nature of the British music and recording industries that a convenient myth emphasized the authenticity and self-sufficiency of these bands; however, reality held something rather more complicated.

Among the many that flocked to London to join the music revolution came two youngsters by bus from Birmingham who hoped to make their living as songwriters. To support themselves while they established publishing reputations, they found a niche as performers and session musicians in the booming recording industry. Terry Kennedy of the music publisher Southern Music renamed the young John Shakespeare and Ken Hawker as John Carter and Ken Lewis and eventually added Perry Ford (née Bryan Pugh) to create a song-writing and performing trio.

February saw the Who’s first single, “I Can’t Explain” slowly rise in the charts in a crisp Shel Talmy production (see last month’s blog); but the American artist-and-repertoire manager had needed to maximize the constraints of the three-track recording facilities at Pye Records. With limited ability to overdub vocals and the desire to keep the sound clean, he brought in Carter, Lewis, and Ford as backup singers so that guitarist-composer Pete Townsend could focus on his playing. Their high-falsetto, Beach-Boys-like vocals helped the Who and Shel Talmy create a touchstone of sixties-British-pop records.

Talmy represented only one of a growing number of independent artist-and-repertoire managers, a new echelon that financed, made, and sold their own recordings rather than take salaries from a record company. Mickie Most had established his importance the previous year with the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” and he now saw possibilities in the toothy grin and nasal voice of the young Peter Noone, renamed “Herman” in imitation of an American cartoon character. The recording reality of Herman’s Hermits found session musicians like Vic Flick (the guitarist whose distinctive sound appears in the early James Bond films) playing on their s

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he commemorate January 15th, a day two British bands released classic records. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

A year after the Beatles stormed into American charts, British record companies continued to release disks that redefined how we hear pop music. Out of the seemingly endless stream of British performers flooding the international media emerged two performing songwriters with distinctly British voices. In one of the ironies of the era, on Friday 15 January 1965, two British bands released records that would become classics and both had the same American producer. Shel Talmy had relocated from Los Angeles to London with an introduction and faked credentials (he passed off the Beach Boys “Surfin’ Safari” as his own production) just before the Beatles and other bands lit the fuse of the “beat boom.” He had what few other British artist-and-repertoire managers had at the time: a great ear for hit songs, knowledge of how to elicit and to capture the excitement of performances, and an attitude big enough to push his ideas through to completion.

The Kinks premiered a song that Ray Davies had written as the follow-up to their breakout hit of the previous summer, “You Really Got Me.” Shel Talmy, although in favor of eventually releasing “Tired of Waiting for You,” wanted something that more clearly established a Kinks sonic identity. Consequently, for October release, Talmy, Davies, and the Kinks turned out “All Day and All of the Night” whose power chords and distorted guitar functioned the way the industry expected classic follow-up hits to sound. In January when the band appeared on ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! to debut “Tired of Waiting” for Pye Records, the arpeggiated chords and nasal voice introduced listeners to a less aggressive and more melancholy Ray Davies. Instead of the hormonal lust of their previous two hits, “Tired of Waiting” spoke to an ambiguous ambivalence ambling about in that twenty-one-year-old heart. This would be the beginning of Davies finding his British voice. By the end of the year he would be skewering the well-respected men who rode trains into London’s City every morning.

Appearing on the same day, Brunswick Records unleashed the Who’s first single, “I Can’t Explain” for an expectant audience of London mods and to an unsuspecting world. Pete Townshend took the Rickenbacker electric twelve-string guitar that George Harrison had charmingly chimed on Beatles records over the previous year and turned it into a weapon. Shel Talmy allowed the band to play at club volume and compressed the sound so tightly that the guitar chords and drum hits project at the listener like spikes against a black background. Although Townshend would later complain about Talmy bringing in the Ivy League (John Carter, Ken Lewis, and Perry Ford) for backup vocals, the performances and the recording sound as crisp and cool as a mid-January night. Just as he had with “You Really Got Me” for the Kinks, Talmy