Shindig! #168 – The Marmalade

Hated by John Peel, kings of clubland and regular visitors to the Top 10, THE MARMALADE were out to prove themselves at the dawn of the ’70s. They entered the decade with a million-seller in America, but when chief songsmith Junior Campbell jumped ship, the band lost direction and purpose.

HUW THOMAS explores how Glasgow’s finest made progressive music their preserve

Decca debut Reflections Of The Marmalade was a self-produced, self-composed statement. Opener ‘Super Clean Jean’, a Joe Cocker-style R&B knees-up, sets the tone for a tight 35-minute demonstration of all of the band’s strengths; there’s commercial, brassy-pop in ‘Some Other Guy’ but there’s also the Moodys-like ‘And Yours Is A Piece Of Mine’ and the astonishing ‘Kaleidoscope’, a shimmering, alliterative gem featuring what sounds like a clavioline, reminiscent more of modern neo-psych than anything of its time. The closing track ‘Life Is’ sums up the new adult, cerebral Marmalade perfectly with its jolly chorus of, “What are we living for, if not to die?” The music weeklies were charmed; Disc, who’d previously had little time for an outfit they called “the last of the great teeny-boppers”, wrote “if The Marmalade carry on like this, there’ll be no stopping them”. A wistful new single to accompany the album, the acoustic ‘Rainbow’, made #3 in the UK and continued the critical acclaim. Like ‘Reflections’, there was a deep melancholy at the heart of ‘Rainbow’, a trademark of Junior Campbell’s writing. “It’s worked out very well,” Campbell beamed to The Evening Sentinel. “Teeny bopper music doesn’t have the drawing power it had two years ago. The fans have now switched to groups like Ten Years After.”

Emboldened, The Marmalade returned to the studio at the end of 1970 to cut their next single. ‘My Little One’, Dean Ford’s tribute to his newborn daughter, was the ultimate A-side but the sessions also produced ‘Can You Help Me’, an eight-minute opus that balances the band’s trademark harmonies atop spiky progressive architecture. Campbell, a fine left-handed guitarist, lets loose in a way he hadn’t since ‘I See The Rain’ and Dean Ford, always impassioned, never sounded so rabid. The track resembles the opener to some chimeric Vertigo swirl that nobody owns on Discogs. The Marmalade never got the chance to release it, however; Junior Campbell announced he was leaving the band in March ’71. Publicly, he stated there was “nothing left” for the band to do. Privately, he was sick of life on the road and the royalties from ‘Reflections’ had changed his priorities. He’d had the opportunity to work with other artists as part of the Decca deal, producing fellow Glasgow band Dream Police and creating the swelling string arrangements for Miller Anderson’s album Bright City, and now he was ready to launch a solo career with the label. “It was getting to be a pain in the arse,” he admitted to Record Mirror in ’71. “I worked on Tremeloes arrangements, did some things for Matthews Southern Comfort, but I was also getting a lot of rubbish and for the return I’m getting I decided it would be better writing songs myself – me being a Scotsman!”

Take out a 60-day trial with Qobuz today only through Shindig! to enjoy their vast catalogue, our monthly bespoke playlists, and this very album.

To read the full article you can order Shindig! #168 here