Shindig! #169 – The Times
He was the Odd Man Out who helped Patrick McGoohan Escape before finding himself Up Against It, but what made ED BALL’s restless pop heart tick? From ‘O’ LEVEL to TEENAGE FILMSTARS and THE TIMES, BEN GRAHAM charts this young mod’s unforgettable journey.
“I grew up 100 yards from Anita Pallenberg, Brian Jones and Keith Richards, 200 yards from Syd Barrett and the infamous 101 Cromwell Road, and 50 yards from Mervyn Peake (Auntie Veronica was friends with his daughter Claire). A bohemian atmosphere, you get me?”
On the one hand, The Times seems to have been a continuation of the Teenage Filmstars, with the same essential personnel and a similar sound; on the other hand, Edward Ball abandoned recording the Teenage Filmstars’ debut album to begin working as The Times, suggesting that he saw it as a clean break rather than a progression. These tracks, recorded live in one take in November 1980 in a vocal studio next to Mount Pleasant sorting office, were eventually released in ’86 as Go! With The Times, retconned as The Times’ unreleased debut album. Opening with a hard-mod cover of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’, the album also features exuberant covers of Generation X’s ‘Your Generation’ and the theme from The Man From UNCLE. But there are great original songs too, like the Who-esque ‘Pinstripes’ and nods to the worlds of art and fashion in ‘Dressing Up For The Cameras’, ‘The Joke’s On Zandra’ and ‘My Andy Warhol Poster’. The aborted album also included ‘Red With Purple Flashes’, a clear homage to ’60s band The Creation, who Ball had discovered through the sleeve of The Jam’s All Mod Cons. Backed by ‘Biff! Bang! Pow!’, another Creation tribute (though not a cover of their ’66 song of the same name), the song was re-recorded by The Times for their debut single, and the joint first release (with ‘Painting By Numbers’ by The Gifted Children, AKA The Television Personalities) on Dan and Ed’s new record label Whaam!
“It was our vision of Track Records, a label that didn’t appear to have any shit artists on it,” Ball later said of Whaam! “Back in ’81, no-one was even contemplating the sort of visions we were having on a daily basis, Whaam! being the sort of dream that only Dan and I could have conceived at that time. We spent time perfecting it too, releasing two splendid singles that Shel Talmy would’ve been proud to have produced, complete with pop art sleeves and beautiful full colour Whaam! logo. We then proceeded to instil some life into an ailing mod/psychedelic scene by deejaying and action painting at all the trendy clubs.”
The Times received further attention from said scene when their new version of ‘I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape’ was included on WEA’s seminal survey of the neo-psychedelic movement A Splash Of Colour. With Mike Read playing the track to millions of listeners on the Radio One Breakfast Show, Warners considered releasing it as a single but were apparently concerned by the song’s intro being a blatant steal of ‘Keep On Running’ by The Spencer Davis Group (something that Island Records, who owned the copyright, had also noticed) and so dropped the idea.
Of course, Ed was hardly stealing the riff in the hope of passing it off as his own work: listeners were meant to notice the lift, which added extra layers of meaning to the song (as well as giving an instant ’60s feel, Ball and McGoohan must “keep on running” if they are to escape from The Village). Effectively, it fulfilled the same role as samples would on later records, and as with many sampling cases, a settlement was reached, with Jackie Edwards, the song’s original writer, receiving a co-writing credit on the A Splash Of Colour version of ‘Patrick McGoohan’.
A third version of ‘Patrick McGoohan’ appeared on The Times’ first album on Whaam!, Pop Goes Art! Released in the summer of ’82, and with Dan Treacy helping out on slashing mod guitar, the album swung from the urgent, melodic psych of ‘My Picture Gallery’ to the heartfelt whimsy of ‘It’s Time’ and the yearning ‘If Now Is The Answer’. Elsewhere, ‘Looking At The World Through Dark Shades’ and ‘The Sun Never Sets’ incorporated elements of moody synth-pop, while ‘Easy As Pie’ was a dark satire on the pop business and ‘Miss London’ a personification of the city Ball loved.
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