THE IDLE RACE
 In
the history of 1960s British rock, Birmingham was a source of talent
virtually in the same league with Liverpool. Although the city never
produced a group as big as the Beatles, it was a seething cauldron of
musical activity and home to literally hundreds of groups whose
activities and memberships were in a constant state of ferment, yielding
acts such as the Move, the Moody Blues, and the Electric Light
Orchestra, whose influences extended well into the 1970s and beyond.
Perhaps the most important of the Birmingham groups that didn't make it
to the front rank was the Idle Race. The group occupies a strange focal
point in the history of the city's music and, between 1960s and 1970s
rock, as a link between Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders, the Move,
the Electric Light Orchestra, and the Steve Gibbons Band. The Idle Race
itself evolved out of one of the most promising of local early-'60s
Birmingham bands, Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders, who recorded for
EMI and later for Polydor and whose membership included a young Roy
Wood. After the latter's exit to join the Move in 1965 and Sheridan's
decision to stop performing regularly with the group, the other members
-- Dave Pritchard, Greg Masters, and Roger Spencer -- tried renaming
themselves the Nightriders for a time, initially with guitarist Johnny
Mann (formerly of Carl Wayne & the Vikings, whose front man also
passed into the Move).
Mann quit
after just a few weeks and was succeeded by Jeff Lynne. The reformed
Nightriders had Lynne on lead guitar
and backing vocals, Roger Spencer on drums, Greg Masters on bass,
and Dave Pritchard on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. By the end of 1966,
however, they'd begun evolving a new, more ornate sound, vaguely similar
to some of the experimental tracks that the Beatles were putting on
their albums, only more playful and straightforward; additionally, Lynne
had become the dominant musical personality in the band. In later years,
it would be called freak beat -- the British equivalent of psychedelic
punk (or, more correctly, garage punk) music in America -- and seem like
a coherent body of music, yielding thousands of cheerfully trippy
pop/rock singles, but in 1966, no one was exactly sure what the appeal
of this music was. A name change seemed in order to go with their new
sound, and the result, after flirting with the more poetic "Idyll
Race," was the Idle Race. The change of name didn't help them sell
records, however, and an early contract with Polydor, dating from their
days as the Nightriders, was soon terminated. Luckily, their one-time
band mate once removed Roy Wood helped get engineers Eddie Offord (who
went on to record Yes) and Gerald Chevin interested in the Idle Race,
and they agreed to record the Idle Race. the
remainder of 1970, but with no record contract, decided to call it a
day.
The
eventual result was a contract with the British arm of Liberty Records,
which was starting to record a fair number of promising U.K. artists,
including Tony McPhee and
the Groundhogs. An
initial attempt at a debut single for the label, with a cover of Wood's
"Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree," was aborted when the
Move's version turned up as a B-side of one of their hit singles
and began getting played. Lynne
suddenly moved into still greater prominence, when two of his songs
ended up on both sides of the single that was released, "Imposters
of Life's Magazine" b/w "Sitting in My Tree."
The
group was rewarded with a lot of press coverage but relatively small
sales. Three more singles followed over the next year, all featuring the
cheerful psychedelic sound that was the group's strong point. In October
of 1968, the group released its debut album, The
Birthday Party, which contained all six of their single tracks
from the preceding year. That long-player was too ambitious to achieve
mass success. A strange mix of cheerful psychedelic pop/rock juxtaposed
with the ambience of the English music hall and a vaguely suggested dark
side, The Birthday Party
was a far cry from the most easily absorbed psychedelia, and it was a
commercial failure. It did earn the group critical respect, however, not
only from top disc jockeys but also established music superstars --
including the Beatles --
and up-and-coming artists (Marc
Bolan among them) also declared their enthusiasm for the Idle
Race. Jeff Lynne was
offered the chance to replace Trevor Burton in the
Move, but he refused, preferring to remain with the Idle Race,
where he took on a still greater role in the shaping of the group's
sound, co-producing their next few singles. The band faced 1969 with a
great reputation in the press and a steady array of good gigs, but no
serious chart success to speak of.
Their
hope was that a second, more accessible LP might succeed. The resulting
album, produced by Lynne late in the winter of 1969, was The Idle Race.
The group's second album was almost a mainstream psychedelic pop record
compared to its predecessor, but it still failed to capture the public's
interest. In the wake of The Idle Race album's failure and their
continued struggle for success, Lynne finally jumped ship at the start
of 1970 in favour of joining the
Move. Partly as a result of their common origins and shared group
genealogy, the two bands are often compared to each other and their
sounds are thought of as similar, but the
Move had enjoyed relatively easy success and, indeed, sold
hundreds of thousands of records in England (even enjoying a number one
hit at the time of their first effort to lure Lynne, late in 1968) and
rated a review in Rolling Stone, where the Idle Race weren't on anyone's
radar screen in America.
 Additionally,
the Move were a very diverse band, equally adept at giving their own
interpretations of American soul or folk-rock as psychedelia, though by
the time Lynne joined, he and Wood were on the same page, looking for a
bigger and unique sound. Under Woods
and Lynne's leadership,
the band eventually transformed itself into the
Electric Light Orchestra. The Idle Race continued, reduced to the
original ex-Nightriders core of Pritchard,
Masters, and Spencer,
with guitarist/singer Mike Hopkins and singer/harmonica player Richie
Walker. This version of the group had little in common with its earlier
incarnation -- they enjoyed belated international success with covers of
Mungo Jerry's hit
"In the Summertime" and Hotlegs"Neanderthal
Man," but these were a far cry from Lynne's original songs, and the
group seemed to lack a central focus to its work.
Pritchard
exited, followed by Walker, Spencer, and Hopkins, while Greg Masters
kept the group going for a time with a new line-up that included
guitarist/singer Steve Gibbons,
before he finally left in 1972. One of his successors was none other
than Move alumnus Trevor Burton -- by that time, however, the name
"the Idle Race" seemed irrelevant as well as outdated, and he
acknowledged this reality by becoming the Steve Gibbons Band. Most
people, in speaking of the Idle Race, are referring to the group as it
existed during the years 1966-1969 with Lynne in the line-up. That
group's output got a new lease on life during the mid-'70s in the wake
of the success of the Electric
Light Orchestra. In 1974, Canada's Daffodil Records compiled the
major part of the group's 1960s output onto a two-LP set called
Imposters of Life's Magazine, which was a choice import for years and
highly prized -- as were original Idle Race albums -- by fans of Lynne's
'70s work. Finally, in 1996, Premier Records released Back to a Story, a
two-CD set of the complete official recordings of the Idle Race in its
various configurations and line-ups. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
DISCOGRAPHY
Albums
The Birthday Party (October
1968) Idle Race (November 1969) Time Is (1971)
Singles
Here We Go 'Round the Lemon Tree/My Father's Son (not issued in UK
but issued in Europe and US) 1967 The Imposters tf Life's
Magazine/Sitting tn My Tree (Liberty LBF 15026) October 1967 The
Skeleton and the Roundabout/Knocking Nails Into My House (Liberty LBF
15054) February 1968 The End of the Road/Morning Sunshine (Liberty LBF
15101) June 1968 I Like My Toys/Birthday (Liberty LBF 15129) 1968
*Unissued* Days of Broken Arrows/Worn Red Carpet (Liberty LBF 15218)
April 1969 Come With Me/Reminds Me of You (Liberty LBF 15242) July 1969
In the Summertime/Told You Twice (not issued in UK or US but issued in
other countries) 1969 Neanderthal Man/Victim of Circumstance (not issued
in UK or US but issued in Canada) 1970 Dancing Flower/Bitter Green
(Regal Zonophone RZ 3036) 1971 |
