Mike Sheridan’s Lot (Roy Wood hanging out the back window)
Listen/Download – Mike Sheridan’s Lot – Take My Hand
Greetings all.
Welcome back to the Leg of Iron, in which we whip a little tuneage up into your earholes in the hopes that you might find it pleasing.
It was a blazingly hot and busy weekend, lots of furniture assembly and relocation so that the little ones might move into a room of their own. Aside from the fact that a bit of overzealous wire removal by yours truly knocked out our phone service, it was a success.
As I write this the boys sleep soundly on the other side of the wall.
The tune I bring you today is a great example of how ‘out of sight/out of mind’ things can get when you’re consuming music at a fast pace.
I first heard today’s selection 25 years ago, passed on to me on a mix tape by my man Mr Luther (one of the great musical prosthelytizers of our time). I dug the hell out of it then, but as is often the case, was unable to obtain my own vinyl copy, so sometime in the ensuing decades, when cassettes were either passed on to someone else or outright discarded, my only copy of Mike Sheridan’s Lot performing ‘Take My Hand’ was lost.
Until – that is – Mr Luther, now relocated securely in the digital age, was kind enough to make me a stack of mix CDs, which I promptly placed under the CD player in the car, and into rotation in my ears.
I’m about four songs into one of said discs when all of a sudden the pleasure centers of my tired brain are all snap-crackle-popping and I’m remembering how much I love this song, and all I can remember (not being able to grab the song list while driving) is that I recognize Roy Wood’s voice in the mix.
As soon as I got to the next red light, I grabbed the sleeve and see that the tune in question is (as previously mentioned) ‘Take My Hand’ by Mike Sheridan’s Lot, and proceed to replay the song at least five times until I reached my destination.
Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the interwebs to see if I could secure myself a copy, only to discover that the record in question is not only impossibly rare but probably as expensive as most impossibly rare things of a similar quality are.
However, I found out that the tune had been comped back in the day (1983) by the food people at Edsel, kind of the precursor to companies like Sundazed, i.e. they specialized in high quality reissues of 60s music aimed at the collector market, with lots of groovy pictures and liner notes.
I procured a copy of the 30 year old reissue of the 45 year old song, and here we are.
‘Take My Hand’* is a bit of spectacular UK Beat perfection. It is propulsive (slap on the headphones and dig that bass drum), filled with hooks, harmony vocals (part of which is the voice of the young Roy Wood) and just the tiniest bit of soul woven into the chorus and the bridge.
It’s one of those records that manages to include all the standard machinery of the Beat era, yet also has that something extra that indicated that something new was on the horizon. It’s not all that far removed from some of the more progressive stuff that was starting to surface around that time, yet still has an innocence to it.
That it should have been a huge hit is without question, but as is always the case in the 64-68 time period, there was so much high quality stuff out there it was inevitable that something good was going to fall by the wayside.
I hope you dig it, and I’ll be back later in the week.
Peace
Larry
*I vaguely recall some memory of this being a cover of another band’s song, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation
PS Head over to Funky16Corners for a remembrance of organist Gene Ludwig
8 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
This number will always be one of my fave beat group numbers, and always has been ever since mike Sin turned me onto this in the late 80′s. It always struck me odd that the Mike Sherdian LP was one of the only UK 60′s Edsel LP’s that I had that never came out on CD! The 45 was pretty hard to come by back when I found it in the 90′s along w/ the next one (a version of Jackie DeShannon’s “Don’t Turn Your Back On Me”) and they didn’t go away cheaply either. Glad you tracked the LP down.
awesome! Sounds like that dream duo that never happened: Paul Jones and Allan Clarke harmonizing and swapping leads.
Very astute Porky! I hadn’t thought of that but it’s right on.
1) The LP did in fact come out on CD, back in 2003. It’s long out of print, but copies are readily available from sites such as amazon.com and eBay.
2) “Take My Hand” is credited on the LP to “Stainton/Walker”. Could this be Robert Staunton and Robert Walker, who wrote some songs for several established soul acts, such as “Say You” (The Temptations), “Never Leave Your Baby’s Side” (Martha & The Vandellas) and “Hi Diddley Dee Dum Dum” (The Dells, UK cover by Jimmy James & The Vagabonds)? But I certainly don’t recall hearing a soul version of this song.
Boursin
I haven’t been able to find an original (or another) version of the song.My recollection is having read somewhere that it was a cover of another UK band, but perhaps the original was never actually recorded?
L
BIRMINGHAM BEAT (compiling all 7 singles by The Nightriders, including the preivously unrleased 3rd one), HAS been reissued on CD, only a couple years ago, but it happened about 6 months after I’d already transferred by LP to CD (which caused me to comment, “Too late, you idiots!”). That said, it was one of my earliest such transfers, before I figured out how to “remaster” and clean up vinyl, so while the disc was in VERY good shape, you can still hear surface noise, especially between songs.
Just doing some research on who originally wrote & recorded some of these after all these years, which is how I ran across this blog. If anyone would like a copy of my (unremastered) CD, send me an e-mail. It’s got 31 songs on it total, which includes the earliest stuff by The Move and The Idle Race. My own personal faves are right near the end– the LIVE versions of “Something Else” and It’ll Be Me”.
Hey Larry, You mighty heard some kid from Helmetta sing this tune with his band at the Court Tavern in the 80′s.
I think you may be right, Roy.