This is one of those songs which started out in the US and was recorded by a British band who had the bigger hit in the UK albeit this time with an altered lyric. Unusually the hit US version by The American Breed, which I think I prefer, also reached the UK charts. In the video below (set to the recording I would suggest, but with added screams) they were obviously hamming up the miming.

For some reason this song came into my head this week.

Good enough reason to feature it here as a typical example of The Monkees’ ability to bang out a good tune. (Or or their handlers’ ability to pick one.)

I had a comment this week on the post I made about my absolute favourite 1960s single, Rupert’s People’s Reflections of Charles Brown, to the effect that airplay for it had actually preceded the release of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale but a hiatus in its own resulted in “Reflections” losing out.

In my post I noted a previous version from which “Reflections” had been adapted. The comment reminded me to try to source that single again. And I have succeeded.

So here is Charles Brown as by Sweet Feeling, a much more psychedelic effort than “Reflections”.

The song was actually the B-side of All So Long Ago, which I append here:-

I’ve not used much Tamla Motown in this category but the driving beat of this song could almost sum up that label’s output in the mid-60s.

A track by Mark Wirtz – he of the Teenage Opera – released as by The Mood Mosaic.

It seems this was used as the theme music for a German TV show called Musikladen among others.

How sixties does this sound?

This is something of an oddity but yet is entirely consistent with Roy Wood’s oeuvre.

Very unMove-like and far too restrained for Wizzard – which he had formed at around the same time as this – it could still be an outtake from The Electric Light Orchestra, the band’s
eponymous first album, which did contain quite a lot of acoustic plucked strings in its arrangements.

We discovered that Honfleur was the birthplace of composer Erik Satie.

It was his 150^th anniversary so the house had been bedecked accordingly:-

Birthplace plaque:-

The local music school is named in his honour though I see from the lettering above the central windows that it was (once) a Nursery School:-

There’s almost an Art Deco feel to this building. Canopy, long windows beside it, “jazzy” iron work on the gates:-

Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 is a lovely piece of music. I also like the animation which accompanies it here.

This is perhaps the most abiding legacy of the Allman Brothers band, whose member, Gregg, died earlier this week.

I might have included it in this series before if it had not had the (mis)fortune to have become the theme tune to Top Gear. Still that’s not the Allmans’ fault and it was chosen long before the programme was hi-jacked by the play-to-the-lowest-common-denominator tendency.

Gregory LeNoir “Gregg” Allman: 8/12/1947- 27/5/2017. So it goes.

This almost forgotten song (it hardly gets any retrospective airplay) was oddly, given the perennial appeal of I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, Wizzard’s only no 1 hit apart from See My Baby Jive.

In some senses it’s not strange that posterity has deemed this less memorable. It’s slower in tempo and arguably too long.

This song was the inspiration for a character in one of the short stories I had published in the late lamented Spectrum SF. I didn’t actually spell that out though.