This is a very typical USian mid-60s sound. I certainly hear echoes of the Monkees.

The sentiments of the song are a rewriting of Return to Sender though.

Another Deram release, this time DM 120. It was a top thirty hit only.

It has that baroque sound characteristic of mid 60s British pop though.

I saw in the Guardian during the week that Barry Mason died last month.

Songs to his credit include Delilah, The Last Waltz and Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes.

Many of his songs were written in collaboration with Les Reed whose Death I noted here.

Earlier than those songs he had written this hit for The Fortunes.

The video is clearly the recording played over TV footage.

John Barry Mason: 12/7/1935 – 16/4/ 2021. So it goes.

I’ve always liked the drum fills on this, the Foundations’ first hit.

Their lead singer on the Top of the Pops appearance couldn’t quite reach the high note on ‘Baby’. (Yes; acts did used to sing live on TOTP sometimes.) He’d left by the time of Build Me Up Buttercup, now forever known to me as the xylophone song.

That TOTP performance is here.

The source of that “glorious age of Camelot” quote I linked to in Tuesday’s review post of Lavie Tidhar’s “King Arthur” book By Force Alone.

The song is from The Moody Blues album On the Threshold of a Dream released in April 1969. A languid, ethereal, atmospheric track. Quite unlike the book I might add.

This was most people’s introduction to the voice of Linda Ronstadt as she was the lead singer in the Stone Poneys. The song had been released before by the Greenbriar Boys but wasn’t a hit. (Nor was the Stone Poneys’ version a hit in the UK.)

Its writer though was Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. He offered the song to them but the show’s producers turned it down. He recorded it himself in 1972 and his version has a much more ‘country’ feel.

The first big hit on the Deram label (DM 109, see my previous post here) was this song by The Move, which reached no. 2 in the UK. The song’s writer Roy Wood borrowed extensively from his musical hero Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture for this. While normal lead singer Carl Wayne takes the verses, the song features Ace Kefford singing the “chorus” with Roy Wood and Trevor Burton adding their voices to the harmonies. Wood first contributed a lead singer role in the bridge of the follow-up single I Can Hear the Grass Grow on which Kefford also sang the middle eight.

Trevor Peacock, who was best known as an actor (particularly as Jim Trott in The Vicar of Dibley, died earlier this week.

However he was also a songwriter, with several hits to his credit in the early 1960s, though they were performed and sung by other people. Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter was a no 1 in the US for Herman’s Hermits, though it wasn’t released as a single in the UK.

This one was a No 3 in the UK. It is a very “early 1960s” sound, from a tiny bit before my time.

Trevor Edward Peacock: 19/5/1931 – 8/3/2021. So it goes.

I heard on the radio news on Sunday that Hilton Valentine, guitar player in the Animals, one of the signature mid-1960s British bands, has died.

The group’s arrangement of an old folk song, to which Valentine made no mean contribution with his guitar arpeggio introduction, was their breakthrough single, reaching no 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. (As I recall, though, the record label attributed the song to Trad: arr Price.)

Hilton Stewart Paterson Valentine: 21/5/ 1943 – 29/1/2021. So it goes.

That he committed a murder is the main fact that ought to be remembered about Phil Spector, who died last weekend.

His death would not have made the headlines, however – murderers are not usually accorded such notice – had he not, as a record producer, been the main architect of the sound of mid-60s US pop music with his ‘wall of sound.’ A sound characterised by heavy drums, layered vocals, strings and highlighted percussion. As typified in the song below, recorded by The Ronettes.

Spector’s life was always likely to come to some sort of horrific event. He had a disturbed childhood, subjected to bullying by his mother and schoolmates and further traumatised by his father’s suicide. His behaviour in adulthood could be described euphemistically as erratic or, more emphatically, as demented. He treated his second wife, Ronnie, abominably and had a history of pulling guns on people in the recording studio. He was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Without him the Sixties would have sounded very different.

Harvey Phillip (Phil) Spector: 26/12/1939 – 16/1/2021. So it goes.

Let us not forget his victim, whose young life he ended tragically abruptly.

Lana Clarkson: 5/4/1962 – 3/2/2003. So it goes.