At the beginning of this year, I reviewed Patterns on the Window, which chronicled the year 1974 in terms of British prog, pop rock and pub rock. While I was disappointed that very little of the compilation could be deemed ‘progressive pop’ (as the subtitle would have you believe), I was nevertheless grateful that it sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to flamenco-prog band Carmen and an interview with two of the founding members of the group.
I had believed the Patterns on the Window set was made to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the songs it contained, but the new edition, Lazy Days, is issued just shy of 2025, so perhaps it was just a coincidence. Lazy Days is the sixth instalment of Grapefruit’s ‘progressive pop’ compilations (they started with 1970 back in August 2019 but had ‘psychedelic’ instalments before that); taking ‘progressive pop’ here to mean ‘music that Grapefruit label manager and compiler David Wells happens to like’, I embarked on the 3CD odyssey in hopes that I might fall down some other satisfying rabbit holes along the way.
The compilation starts well with the hard-rockin’ Bad Company’s Good Lovin’ Gone Bad as well as the arty yet catchy Imagine Me, Imagine You by Fox (whom I instantly recognised from the 1974 collection). There’s a dearth of good material for the bulk of the first disc, but the tedium is punctuated by ELO’s earworm Evil Woman. I always thought of this song as being earlier in their catalogue, so it’s surprising to be reminded that it came out as late as 1975.
I was a passenger on a long drive for most of my initial listen to this set, and I tried to multitask by listening to the recordings and reading the PDF booklet on my phone, a task made more complicated by the fact that the labels always send the PDFs in printing order rather than reading order, so that the pages are not consecutive. The last few tracks on this first CD I ended up listening to twice as I was not able to read the notes at the same time the first time around. It was this small accident that let me down another huge rabbit hole.
I already noticed it was a very different sort of track indeed the first time I heard it, but my second listen to A Whole Pot of Jelly (For a Little Slice of Toast) really made me pay attention. The singer, Pete Wingfield, could achieve a pitch the Bee Gees could only dream of and was making a bizarre yet hilarious comparison between sex and breakfast. I wasn’t aware that Brits even called it ‘jelly’, but perhaps this was another American pastiche like his more well-known doo-wop hit Eighteen with a Bullet. Both songs were creative and witty, and I needed to find out more.
Wingfield’s sole LP, Breakfast Special, turned out to be a delight, full of more wordplay and well-written pop songs with that delicious mid-70s production value. One of the songs – Please – has a lyric about the singer’s partner having an affair with a laundromat; the rhyming couplet is “My shirts don’t have to be as clean as that”. Wells’s notes in the Lazy Days booklet hinted at a ‘lost’ second album from Wingfield for the Island label, and a 2003 interview online with Wingfield showed that he still had the master tapes, but nobody was interested in reissuing them. A sudden desperation came over me to hear those tapes and I considered letting someone at Cherry Red know that these were available.
Then, I was dumbfounded at the discovery that Cherry Red had actually made these recordings available in 2008 with the release Eighteen with a Bullet – The Island Recordings. Unfortunately for me, the CD was completely out of stock and not available from any reputable seller. Nor was it available on any streaming service. The music was out there somewhere in the world and I had no way to get ahold of it. I started to feel like I was actually in the 70s, when there were far fewer ways to play music that you wanted to hear, and music could just come and go like that.
I contacted Cherry Red to see if they could furnish me with some MP3s in lieu of the CD itself; they said they didn’t have them. I asked the interviewer from 2003 if he had any access to this music or to Wingfield himself; he did not. I scoured the internet to see if there was a way to contact Pete Wingfield, but there didn’t even seem to be any evidence that he was still alive. He has no social media that I can find, no website. There’s no evidence that he’s dead either; who is checking on Pete Wingfield and making sure he’s still alive? If he dies, who will disseminate that information so that Wikipedia can be updated? These are questions I want to know the answer to.
Fortunately, however, I was able to secure the audio files of Wingfield’s lost second album from another fan. I’m glad to report that it is also delightful and witty, but also retreads the water from the first album, and one can’t expect it would have propelled his career much further if Breakfast Special was not a hit with buyers. Still, it’s a sad state of affairs that I had to resort to scouring the internet for obscure music files when this music should have been on Spotify or somewhere easy to locate in the first place.
Right after A Whole Pot of Jelly (For a Little Slice of Toast), the first disc finishes with Babe Ruth’s powerful interpretation of the minor 1968 soul hit Private Number. Their version beefs up the intro with synthesisers, power chords and drum rolls before accentuating the verse and chorus with mellotron touches. The proggy 70s timbre of the song makes it utterly infectious and the epic arrangement makes the low-stakes lyrics (wanting a woman’s phone number) feel like a life-or-death predicament.
The second disc features the highest concentration of ‘prog’ in its first half but starts with the rocking anthem Fox on the Run by Sweet. We pass by the crazy but intriguing sounds of Sparks and Jet before the dulcet sounds of Robert Wyatt’s familiar voice crooning in Spanish introduce the progressive section on Phil Manzanera’s magnificent Frontera, ostensibly straightforward but containing some delightful polyrhythms. This is followed by Share It by Canterbury scene kings Hatfield and the North; I was astonished to find out this was not a single, because it certainly sounds like one compared to the rest of The Rotters’ Club, an album that included the mind-blowing twenty-minute Mumps suite. Continuing in the Canterbury vein, we hear what Caravan were getting up to in 1975 with their single Stuck in a Hole from the Cunning Stunts album. It’s a decent record but doesn’t compare to their earlier masterpieces, and is rather representative of the decline of the golden era of prog by the mid-70s.
A couple of familiar names were a pleasant surprise to me. The Scottish poet Ivor Cutler, whose unmistakable accent graced the end of Robert Wyatt’s masterpiece Rock Bottom, has some of his surreal poetry featured here. Also present from Scotland are Pilot whose brilliant song Magic made them one-hit wonders in 1974; their chosen song here is Heard It All Before, which contains a lot of the bright-eyed optimism of their previous hit but none of the energy and flair that made Magic such a stand-out song.
There’s even a mention of Eurovision in this set: in 1975 the United Kingdom sent the Shadows to represent us in Stockholm with the ho-hum ballad Let Me Be the One that feels like a Temu version of Paul McCartney. David Wells notes that it came in second place, losing to the ‘execrable’ (as he calls it) Ding-a-dong by Dutch group Teach-In. I happen to disagree with Wells on this one; Ding-a-dong is classic Eurovision and one of the most enduring songs from the contest of that era. Surprisingly, however, it isn’t my favourite song from that edition of the contest. A Reddit post about whether soul music had ever made its Eurovision led me to discover the German 1975 entry Ein Lied kann eine Brücke sein by Joy Fleming which has fast stormed its way into my heart, but was unfairly voted 17th out of 19 places that year. The Shadows are represented on this set not by their Eurovision song but instead by Run Billy Run, another track that could be deemed ‘execrable’, a tasteless imitation of their Beatle idol.
As on Patterns on the Window, Stackridge are featured here too; I was excited as 1975 was the year of my favourite album of theirs, Extravaganza. Unfortunately, however, Wells decided to pick one of the songs I was least interested in on that album, Highbury Incident. Oh well(s). I was more interested in Titles, the song that followed. Unlike the Shadows’ pale imitation of the Beatles, Barclay James Harvest’s shrine to the fab four is extremely creative, using exclusively Beatles song titles, lyrics and themes to make something that’s actually rather compelling, almost drawing a tear from me at how beautiful it is. BJH is a band I’ve tended to overlook but perhaps this will be the impetus to give them another try.
Disc Three includes the single version (a term so dreaded by prog fans) of Minstrel in the Gallery by Jethro Tull. It seems to be little more than the second half of the full song, so not too much clever editing would have gone into making it. Two songs later, the name Kestrel didn’t initially register with me, but the opening chords to Take It Away made my ears perk up with recognition. I can’t remember why I bought this album when Esoteric reissued it a decade ago, but it quickly worked its way onto my playlist and stayed there for a while. The Newcastle quintet play an intriguing and occasionally frustrating blend of prog, art and pop rock that seems to split the difference, hedging their bets by catering to many. One suspects their self-titled album would have been better if it had gone all in on the prog, or gone all in on the pop rock. Nevertheless, there’s something charming about the group’s style and the music will be in your head for a while if you ever decide to check it out. Esoteric’s reissue at the time came with a second CD of bonus tracks including studio outtakes that are also sadly nowhere to be found online.
Another two songs later, we hit the Winkies and their worryingly-titled Trust in Dick which features the lyric ‘jerk your tears away’. When you see the Hipgnosis-designed artwork for the band’s sole album which features a crotch shot of men wearing Speedos, it becomes evident that there was nothing very double about the entendre in the first place. A better song about sex comes in the form of La maison de l’amour by the short-lived and very obscure Son-of-a-Gun who only released two singles. Part hard rock, part sea shanty, it’s the most upbeat song about a brothel I’ve ever heard and is fun even repeat listens. There’s something very funny about the repeated repetition of ‘l’amour’ and words that rhyme with it: door, before, toujours, etc. It’s a song I want to introduce other people to, so thanks for that, David!
The compilation ends portentously with Peter Hammill’s Birthday Special, his initial appearance as Rikki Nadir before Nadir’s Big Chance, which some claim to be the first-ever punk rock album, ironically penned by one of the most intellectual and important members of the progressive rock scene. Its presence here signifies that punk was just around the corner to stamp out prog for good, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of it on Grapefruit’s next compilation. Perhaps they’ll stop calling it ‘progressive pop sounds’ as well unless they aim to do some really hard digging; I imagine ‘punk/disco sounds’ would be more fitting.
Overall, it’s another delightful set from Grapefruit. There was no huge revelation to me like with Carmen, but it gave me a few musical avenues to travel down for a couple of weeks, and it was nice to be reminded of some music I had completely forgotten about. Wells’s notes – while sometimes a little difficult to read because of trying to fit so much detail in such a small space – are nevertheless informative and occasionally entertaining. I appreciated that he would group certain bands together so that the notes would make sense when read one after the other. Like with Patterns on the Window, you’d be advised to look somewhere else if you’re expecting a more ‘progressive’ affair like the compilation’s subtitle suggests, but if you’re open-minded and looking for a trip back to mid-70s Britain, you can hardly go wrong with Lazy Days.
TRACK LISTING
Disc One
01. Bad Company – Good Lovin’ Gone Bad (3:39)
02. Fox – Imagine Me, Imagine You (3:40)
03. Stealers Wheel – Right or Wrong (4:46)
04. Slade – In for a Penny (3:37)
05. Thin Lizzy – Wild One (4:21)
06. Nazareth – My White Bicycle (3:28)
07. Moonrider – Riding for a Fall (4:03)
08. The Kinks – Everybody’s a Star (Starmaker) (3:01)
09. Stray – Precious Love (3:41)
10. Be Bop Deluxe – Jean Cocteau (2:54)
11. Roxy Music – Both Ends Burning (5:18)
12. Justin Hayward & John Lodge – Blue Guitar (3:40)
13. 10cc – Good News (3:51)
14. Electric Light Orchestra – Evil Woman (4:17)
15. Alan Hull – Dan the Plan (4:23)
16. Ronnie Lane – Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (2:11)
17. Richard & Linda Thompson – I’ll Regret It All in the Morning (3:38)
18. Al Stewart – Carol (4:34)
19. Ace – Ain’t Gonna Stand for This No More (Single Version) (3:18)
20. Pete Wingfield – A Whole Pot of Jelly (For a Little Slice of Toast) (3:01)
21. Babe Ruth – Private Number (3:47)
Time – 78:59
Disc Two
01. Sweet – Fox on the Run (Single Version) (3:22)
02. David Essex – Won’t Get Burned Again (3:44)
03. Sparks – In the Future (2:16)
04. Jet – Nothing to Do With Us (4:53)
05. Bryan Ferry – You Go to My Head (2:44)
06. Phil Manzanera – Frontera (4:06)
07. Hatfield and the North – Share It (3:06)
08. Caravan – Stuck in a Hole (3:11)
09. Ivor Cutler – Go and Sit Upon the Grass (2:11)
10. Tom Newman – Sad Sing (2:24)
11. The Shadows – Run Billy Run (3:28)
12. Pilot – Heard It All Before (3:18)
13. Stackridge – Highbury Incident (Rainy July Morning) (4:03)
14. Barclay James Harvest – Titles (3:53)
15. Speedy Keen – Someone to Love (3:57)
16. Kursaal Flyers – Hit Records (2:44)
17. Method – Lonely Eyes (3:13)
18. Clive John – Summer Song (5:25)
19. Heavy Metal Kids – Blue Eyed Boy (3:09)
20. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Delilah (Live) (5:05)
21. Streetwalkers – Raingame (3:04)
22. Sutherland Brothers & Quiver – Arms of Mary (2:39)
23. The Brinsleys – There’s a Cloud in My Heart (3:06)
Time – 78:51
Disc Three
01. Ian Hunter – Once Bitten, Twice Shy (Single Edit) (3:55)
02. Mick Ronson – Play Don’t Worry (3:13)
03. Mott – By Tonight (3:47)
04. Brian Protheroe – Running Through the City (3:50)
05. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Spirits in the Night (Single Edit) (3:19)
06. Jethro Tull – Minstrel in the Gallery (Single Edit) (4:17)
07. John Miles – Highfly (3:50)
08. Kestrel – Take It Away (4:10)
09. Pretty Things – Sad Eye (4:31)
10. The Winkies – Trust in Dick (3:41)
11. Peter Skellern – Hard Times (3:52)
12. The Neutrons – L’hippie nationale (3:34)
13. Steve Harley/Cockney Rebel – Mr. Raffles (Man It Was Mean) (4:35)
14. Son-of-a-Gun – La maison de l’amour (3:21)
15. John Entwistle’s Ox – Mad Dog (Single Mix) (3:57)
16. Hawkwind – Kings of Speed (3:34)
17. Agnes Strange – Odd Man Out (3:55)
18. UFO – Shoot Shoot (3:38)
19. Oddsocks – Lazy Day (3:44)
20. Dr. Feelgood – Back in the Night (3:21)
21. Peter Hammill – Birthday Special (3:36)
Time – 79:29
Total Time – 237:18
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Grapefruit | Cherry Red Records
Catalogue#: CRSEG3BOX154
Date of Release: 6th December 2024
LINKS
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