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IN WHICH… I COMPLIMENT COMPILATIONS

Several of the good folk I mentioned this project to and who were enthusiastic about it – for which many thanks – told me: ‘Whatever you do, you must mention K-Tel Records – they were the only LPs I could afford when I first became interested in music, and but for them I may have spent my money elsewhere and never got into vinyl.’ Former bank manager, John Gloak, was adamant: ‘I hope your vinyl book is going to mention K-Tel, a great name from the past.’ So here we are – K-Tel well and truly mentioned. And I’m pretty sure that will also please Dave Grohl who, in 2013, gave the keynote speech at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Texas. He praised K-Tel for exposing him to music early in his life, specifically, ‘Frankenstein’ by The Edgar Winter Group: Grohl told the crowd earnestly that the song’s inclusion on a 1975 K-Tel Records Blockbuster compilation – the first album he ever owned – was ‘the record that changed my life’. But, neither Gloak nor Grohl asked me to mention the label almost equally responsible for helping hard-up 1970s teenagers to keep their collection of big hits up to date – Arcade Records.

Arcade’s first release was 20 Fantastic Hits, released in 1972. It rapidly rose to the top of the UK LP chart, replacing the already up and running 20 Dynamic Hits, K-Tel’s first Number 1 album. In the UK, Arcade had three other Number 1 albums:

• 40 Golden Greats – Jim Reeves (1975)

• The Best of Roy Orbison – Roy Orbison (1976)

• 40 Greatest Hits – Elvis Presley (1977)

K-Tel was founded by a Canadian, Philip Kives, who, in 1962, used his own money and fast-talking demonstration style to create a new kind of TV advertisement. His first product was a Teflon-coated frying pan. In 1966, Kives released the company’s first compilation album, 25 Country Hits. Every copy was sold. The company released compilation albums combining material from a number of popular artists on to a single-theme album, using the tag line ‘20 Original Hits! 20 Original Stars!’ They negotiated directly with artists and labels for the rights to reproduce original recordings.

Eventually, the ‘big boys’ of the record world, including Richard Branson’s Virgin, decided to stop licensing their hits and began putting them out under their own branding – which is about the same time that the ongoing Now That’s What I Call Music… brand appeared in 1983. This survived to celebrate its 35th birthday in 2018, receiving an accolade from Saint Etienne group member Bob Stanley, whose own group had a track on Now… 33, their 1996 hit ‘He’s on the Phone’: ‘K-Tel was the only label that could give me and my limited pocket money any hope of keeping up with the kids at school whose dads bought them a hit single or two every Saturday.’ Motown launched ‘Motown Chartbusters’ line-ups, which ran to at least seven editions between 1967 and 72, including hits alongside less well-known cuts.

Let’s not forget, though, how some of us had already identified and dealt with the problem of making our own compilations, even before the likes of K-Tel and Arcade. We all had portable cassette tape recorders, and would just record the records we liked off the radio (usually but sometimes the TV) adding our own DJ commentaries, before and after, often specifically for current girl- and boyfriends. You could also create your own pirate radio shows by the simple expedient of playing your own records and adding your own chat before and after spinning the discs. I do remember going round to friend Les Wilkinson’s house, where we’d play cards and record our latest programmes before playing them to each other. Hours of innocent fun!

The compilation idea took on a slightly different guise – becoming ‘samplers’ – when labels wanted to get rock music, whose big names did not always court chart action, heard by a wider market. They lumped together big names with up and coming ones and sold the resulting collections at very attractive prices – 1969’s You Can All Join In from the Island label cost a mere 14/6d and featured tracks by Art, Free, Jethro Tull, Spooky Tooth, Traffic, Tramline and more. A lack of females, though. A year earlier CBS offered for, I think, 14/11d, The Rock Machine Turns You On which did so courtesy of The Byrds, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Moby Grape, Simon & Garfunkel, Spirit et al. Not many women represented on that album, either!

Liberty’s 1969 Gutbucket and Son of Gutbucket featured Bonzo Dog Band, Captain Beefheart, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Groundhogs, High Tide, Idle Race, Johnny Winter, etc. Well, at least Jo-Ann Kelly got on the latter, alongside Tony McPhee. In 1970, it was the turn of The Vertigo Annual, which boasted Black Sabbath, Colosseum, Dr Strangely Strange, Juicy Lucy, May Blitz, and Rod Stewart. Affinity were on this and they included Linda Hoyle in their ranks. Rock was certainly very much a male preserve – at least, according to the compilation compilers.

Soul music got in on the act via the excellent 1968 Atlantic compilation, This Is Soul, introducing us to the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, and Carla Thomas. Trojan’s Hot Shots of Reggae from 1970 featured Ken Boothe, The Gaylads, Maytals, Melodians, Pioneers. The front cover image was a lady holding two six guns, photographed from what today might have been considered an ‘upskirting’ angle, albeit she was wearing jeans. Perhaps looking back at these compilations does unexpectedly divulge quite a lot about the times in which they appeared…

Another label also achieved notoriety amongst impecunious collectors. Nine-year-old Sean Magee, later to become a good friend as a racing writer, eagerly anticipated the tenth-birthday present he’d been longing for, a copy of the first pop song ever to make an impression on the young man. This was ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat’, the Columbia label hit record from November 1959, by The Avons. The record had stormed the charts and Sean, having heard it regularly on the radio, was overjoyed when he received his copy. He ripped the present from its wrapping, and the record from its yellow sleeve, and rushed to the record player to play the disc, anticipating the tuneful delights to come as he put the needle down, only to be dumbfounded to hear the right words, but sung in the wrong way. ‘It just wasn’t what I had expected. The words sounded the same, but the way they were being sung was just different from the radio version I had lodged in my brain. I was devastated.’

Even now, Sean is still haunted by the memories of this let-down. It wasn’t until 1968 when he heard a song called ‘Postcard’ by a trendy psychedelic group, and realised that this had now become one of his favourite tracks, that he was able to banish the traumas of the ‘Seven Little Girls’ disappointment to the deep recesses of his mind, which is where they stayed for almost 50 years, until the day he rang me: ‘Have you ever heard of a song called “Postcard”? I only heard it once and I loved it, but I can’t remember who sang it. I thought you’d be sure to know.’ I did, and promptly not only sang it to him over the phone, but rushed to my laptop and called it up on YouTube for him to listen to, whilst putting him out of his misery by telling him the group was called Blossom Toes.

Slowly, as I told him about how I was writing this book and cajoled him into revealing what had been the first record he’d ever owned, the deep hurt, buried and covered up for years began to edge back towards the surface of his mind. What could have happened? He has convinced himself that his parents had bought him an alternative version of the big hit – recorded by one of the many copyist groups of session musicians who in those days were called in at short notice by cunning record companies jealous of rival successes, who would rush out their own versions of these songs, selling them at a price which undercut the real thing. In 1954, Woolworths’ stores began to stock versions of hit records on their own (yellow) Embassy label, selling at 4/6d (22.5p), while the genuine hits cost 6/8d (33.5p).

Opinion was strongly divided. Some people loved them and some people absolutely hated them. The decision to record really good cover versions of songs on the hit parade, and get them on the shelves at a much lower price, was controversial. Occasionally the Woolworth song outsold – and was considered better – than the real thing. A few Woolworth artistes switched sides and became stars in their own right.

Was this why Sean had been so disappointed? Had his parents inadvertently bought him the Woolies’ ‘Seven Little Girls’ instead of The Avons’ hit? They may well have done but there may be an alternative explanation. Because, as The Avons swanned around in the Top 10, eventually reaching Number 3, down in the lower reaches, scraping its way to Number 25, was the same song, sung by someone called Paul Evans, and released on the London label. Another impostor? Not really – he was the guy who wrote the song, so he was probably entitled to feel pretty miffed himself that some Limey guys had stolen his thunder by scoring a bigger hit version of the song in the UK… even though his own original spent eleven weeks in the US charts, reaching Number 9, while The Avons failed to crack the US chart at all.

There is a cheering PS to Sean’s story, as he told me in May 2019: ‘I have recently found my father’s state-of-the-art Hacker record player, which amazingly, after being dormant for around 60 years, started first time, and played “Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat” without hesitation.’