Real Pretty

I'd like to start focusing on groups who never quite made it to the top but still had an impact on music, particularly English groups who somehow seemed to miss the gold rush that was the British Invasion. The first one I'll focus on are The Pretty Things, who have been together since 1963 and just officially retired this year. Formed in the shadow of the Rolling Stones, they had early hits, a crazy drummer, created one of the best psychedelic albums ever, followed that up with Rolling Stone Magazine Album of the Year in 1970, were signed to Led Zeppelin's label, and later regained ownership of all their masters. Yet 99% of American know nothing about them.

Dick Taylor, original lead guitarist and long-time member, formed a band with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1961. When new kid Brian Jones tried to force Dick over to bass, he left, grabbing Phil May from the year behind Mick Jagger at the same secondary school and forming his own band. Phil and Dick have mostly been the mainstays of the band as it moved through the decades. They were, from the very beginning, a rougher and nastier version of the Stones.

When drummer Viv Prince finally joined the band in 1964, they were off and running, scoring two early hits with 'Rosalyn' and 'Don't Bring Me Down'. But things dried up and no tour of America materialized. An even bigger problem was Viv Prince, who set the template for insane drummers, both in performance and in personality, that Keith Moon later made famous. Viv's behavior got so out of hand in New Zealand that he got the band expelled from the country.

The band sounded sloppy and loose with Viv behind the drums, at their best incredibly exciting, at their worse like five guys in search of an arrangement. The Pretty Things have always remained an very popular band in France, Germany and Holland, and this has kept them employed to this day. But the first of many personnel changes came when Viv was ousted from the group. He had picked a fight with the heavyweight boxing champion of Europe and things did not go well for him.

Skip Alan proved to be an excellent replacement, and the band soldiered on, creating some great singles like 'Midnight to Six Man' and 'Buzz the Jerk' that unfortunately didn't sell. Here's a sample of their early sound on the controversial 'LSD', possibly the first drug song released by a rock group.

Their label forced them to record a terrible album, 'Emotions', that lacked any of the elements that made them exciting, instead sounding like a bad imitation of the Beach Boys. It was loaded with orchestral overdubs. Avoid at all costs. Then they dropped them when it didn't sell.

More personnel turnovers were for the better, as they picked up a new bass player, Wally Waller, who was also an excellent singer and songwriter, as well as keyboard player Jon Povey. Then they dived straight into psychedelia head first when signed to EMI, recording in Abbey Road studios next to the Beatles and Pink Floyd, sharing Norman Smith with the Floyd as their producer. After two great singles they produced the classic album 'SF Sorrow', a rock opera released a year before the Who's 'Tommy'. Not that it helped them, as despite the incredible quality of the album, it failed to sell. Maybe it was the horrible miming

The next clip gives a better idea of how good the album really was. This is the point where psychedelic music turns slowly progressive, and the album ranks with the best ever done. "SF Sorrow' should have been a breakthrough, but it became instead the start of slowly diminishing returns.

This is where the story gets really weird. The Pretty Things, desperate for money, recorded a couple of albums for the DeWolfe music for use in films (if you paid the stiff licensing fee) as well as showing up in a couple of horrible low budget films. The music was still great, but it wasn't getting released under their own name. They even did a vanity album for a French friend called Phillippe DeBarge. Again, the quality of this stuff was way better than it should have been. Most of it was released decades later under the 'Electric Banana' moniker.

They were signed to Motown Records for their white group subsidiary (I can''t make stuff up this weird, it's true) called Rare Earth. Motown never even tried to sell them in America, even though their next album was selected as Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, when things like that really mattered. Dick Taylor left to get into production, doing the first ever Hawkwind album. Wally Waller left about a year later. They were still a great live band, though.

The 1970s saw the band coasting a bit, seeming to go from record company advance to record company advance, which was common practice in those flush days. They eventually signed to Swan Song at Jimmy Page's request and released two albums. They also started touring America, but it was too late. By 1976, the band split up.

The surprise was that they got together again and released a new album in 1980, a punk rock blast that reunited Dick Taylor and Wally Waller with the group. Everybody had a day job now except Phil May, who had married into the English aristocracy. While the album was pretty good, it didn't stop the band from dissolving once again. But Phil and Dick formed a bond and continued to work together on a number of projects over the years.

They managed a German version of the band and released an album in 1987, but the best thing that happened was finally getting reasonable management in 1988 in the name of the very determined Mark St. John, who stuck with them and guided them for the next thirty years. It took a while and it needed some help from Peter Grant, the dreaded heavyweight manager of Led Zeppelin, but the band went to court and sued everybody, getting all the rights to their old music, if not any actual money.

There was a reunion of the 'SF Sorrow' version of the band and a new single and album, as well as a live stream performance of the rock opera with David Gilmour guesting on guitar in 1997. For the last twenty years, the Pretty Things did manage to achieve some degree of success in Europe and even touring the US a couple of times. Phil May, Dick Taylor, Skip Alan, Wally Waller and Jon Povey kept it together until old age and illness starting picking off members one at a time, requiring retirement and replacement.

Phil and Dick kept it together, but finally in April of this year declared an official retirement. The music business wasn't there any more; live venues didn't exist any more and music sales were unfeasibly low. It's the end of an era when a band that could survive all the insanity of the 1960s and 1970s could not make a living in our Brave New World. I prefer to remember the good old days, and sign off this post with a clip from the German television show Beat Club, the Pretty Things doing 'Sickle Clowns' in 1971.