BLOSSOM TOES: WE ARE EVER SO CLEAN (1967)
1) Look At Me I'm You; 2) I'll
Be Late For Tea; 3) Remarkable Saga Of The Frozen Dog; 4) Telegram Tuesday; 5)
Love Is; 6) What's It For; 7) People Of The Royal Parks; 8) What On Earth; 9)
Mrs. Murphy's Budgerigar; 10) I Will Bring You This And That; 11) Mister
Watchmaker; 12) When The Alarm Clock Rings; 13) The Intrepid Balloonist's
Handbook Vol. 1; 14) You; 15) Track For Speedy Freaks Or Instant LP Digest.
How many times have we heard the term «Sgt. Pepper rip-off» applied to album
so-and-so, only to put it on and understand that «being influenced by Sgt. Pepper»
or even «being recorded in the era of Sgt.
Pepper» would be a more honorable definition? The truth is that real «rip-offs» of Sgt. Pepper, as a rule, have not survived — be it the Stones, the
Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Bee Gees, Procol Harum, or any other band of any
notoriety that we still remember as having produced LPs in 1967, each of them
had their own voice, with Sgt. Pepper
spurring them on to flash it rather than just serving as a role model that had
to be imitated throughout.
From that point of view, I've always been
interested in actually hearing a «genuine» Sgt.
Pepper rip-off — just for curiosity's sake: were there really any bands
who'd slobber so much at the sanctuary of the Beatles to try and mime to all of
their production techniques and melodic language elements? If there were any such albums, they must have
quickly sunk to the bottom of the ridicule pit, not least because originality
and stylistic autonomy were far more valued in 1967 than they are today. Yet
out of everything that I have heard so far, it is this quirky debut album by
the Blossom Toes that arguably comes closest to winning first prize.
Indeed, the Blossom Toes came together in early
1967, just as the Beatles were putting the final touches on Sgt. Pepper, and were immediately
assigned to Giorgio Gomelsky's appropriately titled «Marmalade Records» label.
The LP that the band recorded was announced in Melody Maker as «Giorgio Gomelsky's Lonely Hearts Club Band» — and
for once, the label was perfectly accurate: not because the album was as good
as Sgt. Pepper, but because it
basically used Sgt. Pepper (and a bit
of Revolver) as its blueprint.
The two main songwriters in the band were Brian
Godding and Jim Cregan, both of them singing and playing guitars, with some
additional writing contributions from drummer Kevin Westlake and maestro
Gomelsky himself (only bass player Brian Belshaw is left as the poor schmuck
with no songwriting royalties whatsoever). To be fair, Godding and Cregan are
not exactly gene-by-gene projections of Lennon and McCartney. Lyrically and
atmospherically, they also take a lot of clues from the Kinks — in fact, We Are Ever So Clean, with its local
imagery and whimsical ideas that are part-time redcoat marching music and
part-time Mary Poppins, is such a quintessentially British album that its lack
of popularity outside the UK is quite easy to explain (a similar story later
happened to The Cheerful Insanity Of
Giles, Giles & Fripp).
It is in their electic approach to things and
in their «anything-goes» approach to arrangements that the Sgt. Pepper idolatry really shows up. Backward tapes?
Eastern-tinged vocal harmonies? Piccolo trumpet solos? Echo, fuzz, overkill
overdubbing? The general feel of a freaky circus show? It's all here, even
including a frenetic one-minute «recapitulation», at the exact same time, of
all of the album's themes at the end. Yes, the lads are clever enough so as not
to steal anything outright (the only time I caught them redhanded was during
the call-and-response psychedelic harmonies at the fade-out of ʽWhat On Earthʼ
— that trick is lifted directly from ʽShe Said She Saidʼ), but on the whole,
there is no mistake: We Are Ever So
Clean is a self-conscious, amusingly arrogant attempt to outplay the
Beatles at their own game by raising the stakes in such departments as
«extravagance», «absurdity», «eccentricity», and «vaudeville».
The good news is that the music really sounds as unpredictable, crazy,
and all over the place as that description suggests. The bad news is that the
album has no real substance: it is daring and risky, but what exactly is being gained by these risks remains unclear.
Song after song, the Blossom Toes are challenging our imagination, and I don't
know about yours, but mine rather quickly gets stumped and disconcerted. Where
the Beatles and the Kinks, even at
their worst, were sort of goal-oriented and evocative, songs like ʽI'll Be Late
For Teaʼ, even despite having the word tea
in the title, are, instead, rather befuddling. "Look at me I'm you! Look
at me I'm you!" goes the pounding chorus to the lead-in track, but it's
not as if the decisiveness of that declaration were particularly convincing:
not only am I perfectly sure that I am not
any of the lead singers in the Blossom Toes, but I even have a hard time
finding out what the Blossom Toes are as such.
Which is not to say that We Are Ever So Clean is not bizarrely fascinating in much the same
way in which, say, the Animal Collective have re-defined «bizarre fascination» in
the 21st century. If anything, there is simply so much going on here that, by
probabilistic reasoning, the brain is bound
to explode in a flash of white lightning sooner or later. Maybe it is not very
likely to happen on catchy kiddie anthems like ʽRemarkable Saga Of The Frozen
Dogʼ, but it just might come to pass on the weirdly orchestrated psychedelic
love ballad ʽLove Isʼ, or on ʽPeople Of The Royal Parksʼ, which starts off like
your average Kinks or Small Faces-style British march and then threatens to
fall apart in a different manner every thirty seconds, or on the accordeon-led mini-saga
of ʽIntrepid Balloonist's Handbookʼ, or anywhere else, in fact.
Unfortunately, neither Godding nor Cregan
happened to have the true melodic genius of a Lennon, or a McCartney, or a Ray
Davies, and ultimately, these songs may be «stunning», but they are not very
memorable, except where the songwriters are relying on music hall clichés,
usually the same ones that had already been exploited much better by said
McCartney or said Ray Davies (or would
be exploited — truth be told, I will take the simplistic melodic potential of a
single ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ over all the intricacies of We Are Ever So Clean). Or, if we wish
to avoid mentioning the word «genius», it may simply be so that Godding and
Cregan are only focused on being eccentric and whimsical, rather than trying to
pack some deep, genuine emotion into the psychedelic box. Sgt. Pepper, after all, puts you, the listener, on a distant
fantasy planet; the Blossom Toes hit much closer to their UK homeland, but
reduce it to a rather clownish perspective. We Are Ever So Clean attempts to be a little bit of everything, but
in the end, is neither too deep, nor too funny, nor too beautiful, nor too
evocative.
A thumbs up all the same, because I heartily
recommend getting acquainted with this quaint little artefact — first, you
might see something in it that I do not, and second, the workmanship is
admirable per se, whether it contains substance or does not. Just the very
sound that they get going, all of those layers of instrumentation, it actually feels
very «modern»: dozens of 21st century retro-oriented indie-pop bands continue
to milk this baroque whimsy tit, except that these bands aren't actually living
in the middle of it, whereas the Blossom Toes are «the real authentic thing»
from one of the greatest years in the history of popular music. At the very
least, it was enough to warrant a recent CD reissue with a heapload of bonus
tracks (outtakes, B-sides, live and BBC performances etc.), even including a
live rendition of Bob Dylan's ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ from early 1968 or so
— by which time, so it seems, the roots-rock revolution was already catching up
with the band.
If I had a band I'd call it "The Baroque Whimsy Tits"!
ReplyDeleteBlossom Toes actually split in 1969, then morphed into a new act called B.B. Blunder!
DeleteBrian Godding told me management forced the flower power image on the band,told them to write trippy material. They didn't care for it but went along. And what psychedelic album HAS substance? Sgt. Pepper? They're great albums but they're not about substance. They're about creative artifice.
ReplyDelete