Shindig! #174 – The Sorrows

Emerging from the half-rebuilt ruins of the post-war Midlands, THE SORROWS’ career encompassed encounters with Joe Meek, German club residencies, one-hit wonder success at home, mega success abroad, revolving door line-ups and a musical path that wound through rock ’n’ roll, beat, R&B and mod, before splintering into psych, prog and hard-rock. And the best of their handful of 45s still sound fresh and thrilling 60 years on.

SHAUN HAND gets sent to Coventry to investigate

In March 1966, [the] revised line-up embarked on a seven-week tour that zig-zagged an illogical path from Iceland to France, on to Germany, back to Scotland, and thence to Italy. ‘Take A Heart’ had been a hit as far afield as Japan, and the band recorded versions in German (‘Nimm mein Herz’) and Italian (‘Mi si spezza il cuore’), but it was the latter country that took the band to its collective heart.

“A Sliding Doors moment for us was our first gig in Biella, Italy, in June ’66,” remembers Lomas. “It was the opening show of Cantagiro #5, a massive, nationwide, annual stadium tour that ran for three weeks. Unbeknown to us, we were already ‘stars’, which was evident from the audience reaction we received at that show and throughout the tour. ‘Take My Heart’ had already been a massive Italian hit, and now our label asked us to promote our Italian-language version. Needless to say, we repeated the chart success of the record for a second time!”

But as Lomas was entering the frame and things were picking up abroad, so Don Fardon was exiting. Regardless of Italian enthusiasm, any momentum ‘Take A Heart’ had enjoyed at home – where the singer had a wife and baby daughter to support – had quickly vanished. Anyway, he wanted to change musical direction and go solo. As Whitcher also observes, “As with many bands, there were personality clashes.”

 Fardon returned to Coventry and factory work before being sought out by CBS, who put him in the studio with Percy ‘Theme From A Summer Place’ Faith for The Righteous Brothers-esque swooner ‘It’s Been Nice Loving You’ (co-written by Al Kooper). Unfortunately, Terry Juckes’s paranoia about the machinations of the music biz came true for Fardon when the single’s January ’67 launch was scuppered by Pye piping up to remind him he was still under contract to them. The song wouldn’t see official release for another two years, and Fardon would have to wait until ’70 to finally taste British chart success again (with his George Best tribute ‘Belfast Boy’ and most notably a re-release of another of his old singles, ‘Indian Reservation’).

Back in ’66, though, despite the lack of pop success in Blighty, things were getting musically exciting for The Sorrows. Even before Fardon quit, the follow-up 45s to ‘Take A Heart’, most notably the Dallon-penned ‘You’ve Got What I Want’, fizzed with the kind of frenetic energy that contemporary reviewers might have called “wild” and a “rave” – Fardon would later recall that no lesser authority on wild raving than Keith Moon thought Bruce Finlay “the best British drummer of our generation”. Today, their best work falls under the jurisdiction of “freakbeat”.

Like “yacht-rock”, freakbeat is a retrospective term, applied decades after the fact. But whereas yacht-rock successfully rebranded acres of long-derided AOR music, freakbeat has never been uncool. Tough, taut and hip, it bridged the wired energy of mod with the weirdness of the burgeoning psychedelic scene. It’s just that no one was thinking of it that way in ’66.

Of the many essential, and now rare, 45s from freakbeat’s brief late ’65-67 lifespan (see sidebar), The Sorrows’ four-single run – ‘You’ve Got What I Want’, ‘Let The Live Live’, ‘Let Me In’ and ‘Pink, Purple, Yellow And Red’ – stand up against anything you might care to throw at them from, say, The Creation or The Eyes. The drums, the rumbling bass, the increasingly distorted guitars. It’s all there.

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