The mid 70s was a good place to begin exploring the music of the 1960s. Pop was in the doldrums – glam rock had sunk into rock and roll revivalism, and the charts were easy pickings for any bunch of session musicians who fancied a crack at number one. On the album scene, heavy and progressive rock ruled – and I've always hated heavy rock.
It was in the spring of 1974 that I began to look back at the music of the past decade, beginning with The Beatles. I knew most of their singles, but didn’t own any of their records. This was soon set to rights with the acquisition of the 1966 compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. Over the next twelve months, my brother and myself would gradually acquire their entire back catalogue, with the curious omission of the ‘White Album’ and the more understandable absence of Yellow Submarine (after all, who wanted half an album of George Martin intrumentals?)
Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show had introduced me to the music of The Shadows, a band whom I knew primarily for their 1975 Eurovision appearance, and I didn’t need much encouragement to begin exploring their back catalogue in greater detail. Fortunately, almost all of their original albums were still readily obtainable. But when it came to bands like The Hollies, it was a different matter altogether.
Skimming through the record section in our local branch of W.H. Smith, I turned up numerous Hollies LPs – but they were almost all recent releases in naff sleeves. The only item of any vintage was the late 60s collection Hollies Greatest, with a sleeve showing the band’s somewhat risible attempt to look psychedelic. They looked as if they’d got dressed in the dark, donning random items from a jumble sale. I would soon come to realise that ‘psychedelic’ and The Hollies were uneasy bedfellows… but I wasn't about to let their image deter me from delving into their back catalogue...
A school friend owned a double LP of their hits, which served as my introduction to chart singles like “We’re Through” (the band’s first self-composed ‘A’ side), “Yes I Will” and “Bus Stop.” The same friend owned a vintage LP that he’d discovered in a local junk shop. Dating from summer 1966, Would You Believe was a very listenable collection of well-chosen cover versions and intriguing original numbers. Revisiting it this week, I realised that it’s a contender for the band’s best album. The playing is tight, Ron Richards’ production work excellent, and the always superb vocals are backed up by some fine instrumentation. Lead guitarist Tony Hicks had recently acquired a Vox Phantom electric 12-string guitar, and its jangling tones are all over the album. Elsewhere, he plays a Gibson ES-345, a guitar with a 6-way tone control that he seems to have kept set permanently on position number three. When, years later, I acquired the same model, I immediately recognised position three as the ‘Tony Hicks sound’.
Graham Nash’s influence was beginning to make inroads into the band’s songwriting, as was the influence of Bob Dylan – the second cut on side one is the decidedly Dylanesque “Hard, Hard Year”. Nash gets to sing lead vocals on a couple of his self-composed songs “I’ve Got a Way of My Own” and “Fifi the Flea.” The latter really shouldn’t work at all, being a sentimental/whimsical tale of unrequited love between two fleas in a flea circus – but somehow, Nash managed to pull it off after Allan Clarke refused to sing it.
The cover versions were amongst the best in the Hollies’ catalogue, including a reading of Paul Simon’s “I am a Rock” that if anything surpasses the original. For me, on first hearing this album way back in the mid 70s, the track that really stood out was “Don’t You Even Care (What’s Gonna Happen to Me?)” a song by Clint Ballard Jnr. who had previously supplied the band with their number one hit “I’m Alive.” The song sounds as if it had been intended as a follow-up single, with a great arrangement and stunning harmonies – surely the Hollies' hit that never was.
This album really convinced me that The Hollies were a band I should be taking more seriously – but tracking down their original album releases would prove to be a challenge, demanding of both time and money. The best I could manage at the time was a borrowed pre-recorded cassette of their 1967 album Evolution. Both title and cover design hinted that change was afoot – suddenly, The Hollies had gone a bit weird...
Back in the 1990s, the music magazine Mojo used to run a column called ‘Lance Corporal Nutmeg’, which investigated albums that had, in its own words, ‘missed being Sergeant Pepper by a country mile.’ One of the albums they featured was Evolution – and they weren’t kind to it. Evolution had the extreme bad luck to be released on the same day as Sergeant Pepper, and for all its endearing qualities, it really couldn’t hold a candle to what the Fab Four had been cooking up in the studio next door. The psychedelic Hollies sounded as daft as they looked on that greatest hits sleeve. Luckily, Evolution still leaned heavily on the pacey, harmonised pop that had become the band’s trademark, but where it deviated from the norm the results were mixed to say the least. “Heading for a Fall” included the drone of bagpipes (!) and “Water on the Brain” featured a tuba solo (!!) ‘Twee nonsense’ was how Mojo described the harpsichord-led “Ye Olde Toffee Shoppe”, which was as gruesome as its ‘olde worlde’ title suggests. But the worst cut by a long, long way – and arguably the worst recording in the band’s entire catalogue – was Allan Clarke’s “Lullaby to Tim”. It would have been mildly innocuous had it not been for the inexplicable decision to feed Graham Nash’s vocal through a Leslie speaker with the tremolo effect set to maximum. He comes out sounding like a gargling Dalek.
For all its 1967 trappings, Evolution was still, at its core, a great mid-60s pop album – but The Hollies were only halfway up their ascent of Mount Psychedelia, the summit of which would be attained with the album Butterfly, released a mere five months later. Back in the 70s and 80s, this album was hard to find, and for a long time, I didn’t even know it existed. I finally tracked down an original copy at a vintage record store on Birmingham’s Summer Row. The front cover was clearly influenced by the late 60s mania for Edwardiana, while the rear sleeve was a shot from the same photo session that provided the greatest hits cover, with the band in their carnaby street togs.
Before I got as far as Butterfly, I had to backtrack somewhat. I’d still not heard the band’s 1966 collection For Certain Because… notable for being The Hollies’ first album to consist entirely of self-composed material. It’s been described as the Mancunians’ take on Rubber Soul, and that’s not a bad summary. Nine of its twelve tracks are straightforward jangle pop, and it’s clear that the Clarke-Hicks-Nash songwriting team had upped its game, as there isn’t a bad one among them. Tony Hicks’ distinctive echoing banjo that had featured on the single “Stop, Stop, Stop” can be heard on two other cuts, and is a musical signature that no other band ever attempted. New arrival Bernie Calvert adds echoing electric piano to the song “Pay You Back With Interest” (a single in some territories) which also features Bobby Elliott on tubular bells, chiming in with Tony Hicks’ twelve-string.
Beyond these standard pop productions, the band took its first steps into the realm of orchestrated production, signalling the way towards future efforts like “King Midas in Reverse” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” The results are a mixed bag – “High Classed”, opening side two, aims at a kind of New Orleans style, while “What Went Wrong” pomps up an otherwise average song with histrionic brass and timpani. “Crusader” clearly displays the influence of Graham Nash, and again hints at a future musical direction – albeit one he would follow alongside David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that I finally netted Butterfly. Of all the Hollies albums I’d discovered to date, this one was perhaps the most disappointing. ‘Self indulgent piffle’ was Mojo's opinion of tracks like the sitar-drenched “Maker” at the time of the album’s CD reissue some years later. The trouble with psychedelia was that it tended to encourage bands into one of two camps – serious or whimsical. The Hollies aimed for the former with tracks like the Nash-influenced “Try It” and “Elevated Observations?” but landed in out and out whimsy with songs like “Wishyouawish” and Tony Hicks’ “Pegasus”. On first play, I hated most of Butterfly. The overtly psychedelic tracks just sounded derivative, and elsewhere the band were veering dangerously close to cabaret, a direction they would pursue more vigorously in 1968.
After the comparative failure of Nash’s ambitious, orchestrated single “King Midas in Reverse”, The Hollies reassessed their position and decided that they should return to straightforward, commercial pop. The result was the single “Jennifer Eccles” and another substantial hit. But Graham Nash still haboured ambitions to be taken seriously as an artist. When he offered up his breezy, pot-fuelled travelogue “Marrakesh Express”, the band were having none of it, opting to cut an album of Bob Dylan covers instead. Thus ended their ‘classic’ era, with Nash departing for America to team up with Crosby and Stills.
With Nash gone, the band still cut some fine singles: but songs like “Sorry Suzanne” were more suited to acts like Herman’s Hermits, and clearly labelled The Hollies as a family-friendly cabaret turn. My own personal exploration of their back catalogue ended with Butterfly, although I later chanced upon the 1969 album Hollies Sing Hollies when it emerged as a CD reissue and found it to be a decent if slightly bland collection of self-composed material.
Ironically, it was their post-Nash 1969 hit “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother” that had properly introduced me to The Hollies. I’d heard some of their singles prior to this, but had never quite put a name to the band. I missed out on hearing their subsequent singles until 1974’s comeback hit “The Air That I Breathe”, by which time Allan Clarke had left, tried to make it as a solo artist, and rejoined. By now, The Hollies felt very much like golden oldies, but I was impressed with Tony Hicks’ guitar work on the track. As a budding player myself, I was far more influenced by players like Hicks than any of the era’s rock gods. His work was always tasteful, interesting and to the point.
A 1988 CD collection, Rarities, gathered together some of the more obscure odds and ends from the Hollies' back catalogue, including their one and only movie theme "After the Fox", that saw the band, accompanied by vocal interjections from Peter Sellers, perform what must surely be Burt Bacharach's worst ever composition... it certainly contains one the most perverse chord changes in the history of popular music. Judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4k91aGn_U
By the 1990s, the old Hollies albums were beginning to resurface as reissues, initially on vinyl, then latterly as CDs. To begin with, EMI licensed the albums to independent labels like BGO, but eventually put out a decent set of reissues that offered up both mono and stereo versions of the original albums on a single CD (it’s a pity they’ve never done the same thing for The Beatles). Alongside these, comprehensive collections like The Hollies at Abbey Road made every A and B-side available on CD, together with unreleased tracks and a few alternate takes.
I sometimes feel sorry for bands like The Hollies: they set out in an era of uncomplicated beat music and quickly mastered their art. Then along came The Beatles and the game changed. It was no longer enough to put out radio-friendly commercial pop – you had to demonstrate your credentials as a serious artist, and that meant making ‘statements’ in the form of albums. Yet there has never been anything wrong with a commercial, hook-driven, well-performed pop single, and few bands could do that better than The Hollies. If, like me, you choose to explore their albums, don’t look for artistic statements or cerebral concepts – you won’t find any. What you will find are some great collections of songs that could easily have been singles. And the beauty of those CD reissues is that you can skip over the embarrassing bits...
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