EVEN MORE SURPRISING COVERS

A guest posting by Leon MacDuff

Recently on these pages, if pages they be, Adrian Mahon offered up a selection of surprising and interesting originals of well-known covers, signing off with “I’m sure you’ll have a few of your own!”. Challenge accepted…

Let’s start with a couple of very well known 80s hits. Yazz and the surely fictional Plastic Population (and her real-life pals in Coldcut) made this one into a huge house-pop success in 1987, but the original goes back to 1980 (and a bit of a throwback even then; from the sound alone, I would have guessed about 1974). I’ve always reckoned that Yazz’s reading feels like false hope, but Clay actually makes it believable.

mp3: Otis Clay: The Only Way Is Up

Like most people, I knew this next one from the 1982 smash by Odyssey. And like most people, I associated its author Lamont Dozier pretty much exclusively with being a songwriter for the sixties Motown production line. But post Motown he went on to issue a string of solo albums, and this future classic arrived on his 1978 offering, Peddlin’ Music On The Side. I do prefer the Odyssey version though:

mp3:  Lamont Dozier: Going Back To My Roots

Nowadays no Sam and Dave compilation would be complete without this song, but without Elvis Costello it might well have remained just a little-known throwaway B side to a single nobody bought:

mp3: Sam and Dave: I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down

Some songs come a long way from their originals. You definitely will know this one, but see how long it takes you to recognise it from the original 1948 version, in German…

mp3:  Horst Winter und die Swingsingers: Und jetzt ist es still

I always loved Dubstar‘s version of Not So Manic Now. A song with subject matter you don’t hear very often and full of words you would imagine had no business appearing in a pop song. I did notice the writing credit wasn’t for the regular band members, but it was a few years before I got to hear the original by fellow Novocastrians Brick Supply. It was the lead track on their 1994 release Somebody’s Intermezzo EP, which got some decent critical notices but basically went nowhere.

mp3: Brick Supply: Not So Manic Now

And finally, a bit of a mystery, and a bit of an investigation. For this one I’m going to share the cover as well, so from 1980 here is the debut single by It’s Immaterial, and from 1967 the original by The First Impression:

mp3:  It’s Immaterial: Young Man (Seeks Interesting Job)

mp3: The First Impression: Young Man Seeks An Interesting Job

It’s Immaterial are cult favourites of course, but weirdly, there’s practically nothing out there about The First Impression. What we do know is that they recorded two LPs for budget label Saga in 1967: the all-covers Beat Club, and the majority of an album called Swinging London which also included a scattering of Beatles covers by Russ Sainty (replaced on the second pressing with a handful of originals by The Good Earth, who subsequently morphed into Mungo Jerry). Young Man is from the Swinging London LP, the sleevenotes of which tell us only that The First Impression are “top discotheque favourites” (Beat Club is similarly unhelpful, offering no description beyond “top London beat group”) – and while some of the songs have appeared on subsequent compilations of 60s mod and psychedelia, the sleevenotes to those seem to just take Saga’s blurbs at their word and have nothing further to add.

Perhaps they were indeed a top London beat group, but even if they were, nothing about their one-and-two-thirds album discography suggests that they were engaged as anything other than a session band. Saga Records weren’t actually a “pop” label – their specialism was cheaply-recorded classical albums, plus bought-in jazz and folk LPs. And really, everything about “Beat Club” and “Swinging London” screams “cheap cash-in played by anonymous session musicians”. They can’t even manage to keep the name of the group consistent: while the back of the Swinging London LP, and the labels, credit The First Impression, the front names them as The First Impressions. My first impression is: oh dear.

So can we find out anything at all about this group? A line-up, for example? Apparently not. Or perhaps somebody’s shared memories of seeing this band playing at the time? Not that I can find. I was briefly led down a dead end by a suggestion that before recording for Saga, The First Impression were signed to Pye. But no, that was a group legitimately called The First Impressions, who in 1967 were recording their own original material for Parlophone, having changed their name in the meantime to The Legends. So I think we can rule them out.

The album credits someone called Britten as writer of the First Impression songs, maybe can we track him or her down? I was initially led astray by the Discogs entry for the It’s Immaterial single, where somebody’s linked the name Britten to Terry Britten. In 1967, Terry was playing in the Australian group The Twilights, and the following year he had one of his compositions recorded by Cliff Richard, opening up a successful career as a songwriter for others with hits including Devil Woman and Carrie for Cliff, and What’s Love Got To Do With It and We Don’t Need Another Hero for Tina Turner. That he also, even by accident, penned It’s Immaterial’s debut single would be an entertaining little factoid but alas, it’s not true – as I realised when I turned to a second line of enquiry.

Most of the First Impression tracks, including Young Man, credit Britten alone, but two bear a credit to Cumming / Britten – could I perhaps find this equally mysterious co-writer? That was easier: just a couple of minutes checking the various Cummings on Discogs (I didn’t bother clicking on Alan though, since while the theme song for The High Life may be a major earworm, 1967 was definitely going to be too early for him) and I was able to identify Britten’s collaborator as one David Cumming, a comedy scriptwriter with a sideline in songwriting who that same year not only supplied a B side to Kiki Dee, but even more interestingly, also released a single himself which was co-written by not Terry but John Britten. That’s our man! It looks very much like our tunesmiths are not people in a “top London beat group” – they are a producer of budget albums and a scriptwriter who both dabble in songwriting.

All of which means that honestly, I’m just not buying this “top discotheque favourites” line. I think Saga Records, looking to cash in on the mod scene, just put some session musicians in a studio and gave them a bunch of songs written to order by… well, hacks. But I still think “Young Man Seeks An Interesting Job” is a good one – even if it took It’s Immaterial to tease the quality out of it.

Leon