Saturday, 15 September 2012
Here's another example of the quantum leap many bands managed in the early to mid-sixties.
If you're not one of Hughesy's baby boomer peers, of course, there'll be another instance of rolling the eyes and muttering something about people banging on about the sixties and how everything was much better then.
Actually, I'm not suggesting better. It's more a case of different and an environment that can't be duplicated, no matter how much you might be inclined to try.
Consider the transformation of the Beatles from Love Me Do (written as far back as 1958) and She Loves You (Yeah, yeah, yeah) to Tomorrow Never Knows. You were probably expecting me to say Sgt Pepper's, but Tomorrow Never Knows, according to Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head was one of the first tracks cut for Revolver in early April 1966, less than three years after She Loves You (1 July 1963).
That's a hell of a jump, and one that you'll find replicated in many of the other acts that emerged in the sam time span.
Now, I haven't trawled all the way back to the first Small Faces (twelve tracks, five covers, very much from the looks of it in the pop R&B mould), issued on Decca in May 1966 and recorded three months earlier, but I do have the Decca odds and ends exercise From the Beginning (fourteen tracks, six covers) and the jump from there to here is substantial. Not quite as substantial as the one from here to Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, but substantial none the less.
Fourteen tracks, all original though there are a couple of finished versions of tracks that appeared on From the Beginning, playing time (in the original format) around half an hour.