Uh Huh, It was the Manfreds...

This week forty years ago, I was listening a lot to an LP I’d been given at Christmas. Of course, it wasn’t anything contemporary: I didn’t hear much in the modern pop charts that appealed to me, and was more interested in acquiring some of the music I’d listened to in the previous decade. By even the most objective analysis, the music of the 1960s had been more original, more interesting and more exciting than anything that 1977 had to offer.

Most of the music on the album in question was a decade old, and in the case of certain tracks, I don’t think I can have heard them much, if at all, since their original appearance in the charts of the late 60s. The album was called Mannerisms, and was a budget-priced collection of ‘A’ and ‘B’-sides from the second incarnation of the band Manfred Mann.

The Manfreds had first enjoyed chart success with the self-composed theme to the TV series Ready, Steady, Go (5-4-3-2-1), and followed it up with several more top ten hits, with vocalist Paul Jones fronting the band. By 1966, Jones was increasingly focusing on his acting career, and took the decision to quit, at which time ex-public schoolboy Mike D’Abo was drafted in from Harrow school alumni A Band of Angels. D’Abo was a songwriter as well as a singer (his best-known compositions being Handbags and Gladrags and Build Me Up, Buttercup), but this cut no ice with the Manfreds, whose policy was to source songs for their single releases from outside the band. Founder members Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg were first and foremost jazz-blues players, for whom the business of making pop singles was simply a means to an end. Drawing on the best work of contemporary songwriters paid off, and the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman scored a first chart hit for the new D’Abo-fronted band lineup. Dylan would pay dividends again in 1968, when the Manfred’s' cover of The Mighty Quinn got to number one, well before most people had even heard Dylan’s version.

This is where I come in... more or less. I’d been aware of the earlier Manfred Mann from their chart singles Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Pretty Flamingo, but the first of the D’Abo era singles had escaped my attention (I seemed to have missed a lot of chart records during 1966, an absence which is partially explained by the clash on television between Thunderbirds and Top of the Pops). The Mighty Quinn, however, I knew very well, and was bought the single at around the time of its reaching the top of the charts in late February 1968 – the school half-term holiday, as I recollect. Unusually, the single came from a chemist’s shop: John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield was a large-ish dispensing chemists who also happened to have a record department – I can picture it to this day: down a few steps from the entrace, and into a small, semi-subterranean domain of picture sleeves on walls, and a few racks of LPs. Singles were displayed in a rack on the counter.

I remember feeling quite pleased at owning the record that was number one in the charts that week. The Mighty Quinn was only the second pop single I’d ever been bought, and the first (Herman’s Hermits’ I’m Into Something Good) had also made number one. The song itself was somewhat baffling lyrically, with its tale of an Eskimo, whom I pictured paddling in his kyak towards a city square where people were feeding pigeons in the trees (much later, I learned that the song’s titular character was supposedly inspired by Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of an Eskimo in the 1960 movie The Savage Innocents, hence the name...)

Something we always did whenever a single came into our house was to play the B-side. In some cases, the flips ended up getting more play than their A-sides. Mighty Quinn presented a extremely unusual recording on its reverse side, a parody along the lines of the as yet unreleased Beatles novelty You Know My Name (Look up the Number). By Request – Edwin Garvey was a Mike D’Abo composition and may well have started life as a serious ballad. But the Manfreds chose to send it up in a tongue-in cheek fashion, with one of the band doing a full-on Noel Coward impression, while the other members played in the style of a slightly inept light cabaret outfit. I’m not sure that I understood it entirely, but it was clearly not intended to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it got played, probably a lot more than it deserved...

The Manfreds followed up Quinn’s success in the summer of 1968 with the single My Name is Jack, a song which, if anything, I liked better than its predecessor (although on this occasion I had to make do with hearing it on the radio). It came to embody the first sunny weeks of that year’s school summer holiday, and to this day the opening flute passage evokes a Pavlovian image of deck chairs in the back garden. Once again, I found myself wondering what it was all about. The singer informed us that he lived ‘in the back of the Greta Garbo Home... for Wayward Boys and Girls.’ All of which begged some form of explanation. I don’t think I found out who Greta Garbo really was until much later, and at the age of seven must have imagined that she was just a kindly philanthropic old lady. And what, I desired to know, were ‘wayward boys and girls’? Presumably the characters in the song could serve as a clue. One of them was ‘Carl over there with his funny old hair’ whom I felt I recognised from my class at school, one of whom was a boy called Carl who had notably fluffy curly hair... but wayward? Who knows how he turned out...

My Name is Jack felt like a transitional song, its presence in the charts marking, for me, the move up from infants to junior school. It had dropped out of the top 20 by early August, and somehow its disappearance from the airwaves felt like the first hint of summer coming to an end...

The Manfreds were back in the charts at the end of the year with Fox On the Run, yet another recording that now feels infused with the essence of those times... the days just after Christmas... lumps of half-melted snow lying in the gardens... the Christmas decorations coming down. Not all songs from the era have this weirdly evocative quality, but the Manfreds always managed it somehow. They did it again in May of 1969 with their swansong, Murray and Calendar’s Ragamuffin Man, which always conjurs up a memory of seeing the band miming it on The Basil Brush Show, and a rainy Saturday train journey into Birmingham in pursuit of Lego...

I can’t say that I had such a thing as a favourite band growing up. I simply heard and absorbed the music that surrounded me. I liked The Beatles, but would not own a single one of their records until 1974. I liked anything with melody and attractive production values, which is probably what drew me to Manfred Mann and Herman’s Hermits. I never cared for The Kinks, whose records seemed to give off a kind of sneering cynicism, or indeed The Rolling Stones. As for The Who, I came to them very late indeed, their chart offerings failing to make the playlist of Stewpot’s Junior Choice. As a rule, any song that I liked a lot, I had bought for me: Glenn Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, and Zager & Evans’ In The Year 2525. But I seldom liked more than one song from any given artist. So my response to the late chart career of Manfred Mann leads me to the conclusion that, at least for a couple of years, 1968-69, they were probably my favourite band. I only owned one of their singles, but I liked all the others that I heard, and that’s something that can’t be said for many other artists of the time.

The Mannerisms collection found room for a number of chart misses and B-sides, which only served to confirm my opinion of the band. Mike Hugg’s composition Up the Junction had formed the title track of the 1968 Brit-flick starring Dennis Waterman and Suzie Kendall, and discovering it ten years later it sounded revelatory and sophisticated with its compound chords (a technique which Hugg also used on the single B-side Funniest Gig). For me, it was the standout track on the LP, and a friend of mine, to whom I played it enthusiastically, agreed. We immediately began to speculate about the movie and what it must be like.

Then – literally within a week – what should turn up on late Friday night but the very thing we’d been hoping for: Up the Junction was broadcast by ATV in the Midlands on January 13, 1978. It felt almost too much of a coincidence that this ten-year-old movie, which we’d literally just heard about, should be delivered into our lap as it were. And it wasn’t the first time that I’d be on the receiving end of such a happy coincidence...

These days, Manfred Mann are somewhat overlooked. One seldom hears any of their late-60s chart hits played on the radio, aside from the ubiquitous Mighty Quinn, and they’re rarely accorded the kind of serious critical analysis that is perhaps too often applied to their contemporaries. In retrospect, the decision to concentrate on covers as opposed to original compositions seems to have worked against them, cover versions being perceived (by rock critics at least) as having less integrity than self-penned compositions. Nevertheless, the Manfreds stamped their own identity on their singles: Mighty Quinn had been a raw and rambling Dylan demo, widely circulated amongst publishers, but not generally available until its inclusion on The Basement Tapes many years later. The Manfreds completely retooled the song, with a bang-on contemporary production job that confirmed the band’s genius as interpreters of other writers’ material. An even more radical re-imagining was applied to Randy Newman’s orchestral ballad So Long, Dad, which in the hands of Mann and Hugg became a kind of pub piano singalong, in a style that was briefly popular around the fag end of 1967. Listening to it now, it sounds like a guaranteed smash hit, yet it failed to enter the UK charts at all.

If you listen to only one piece of old pop music in these first weeks of the new year, take a leaf out of my 1978 diary and revisit the Mike D’Abo era of Manfred Mann. In those few short years from 1966-69, they left us with some of the most perfectly-realised pop songs of their era. Just one word of advice – give Edwin Garvey a wide berth. Nothing good has ever come of that name...