It’s almost six years since The Pretty Things played their final show, with storied guests David Gilmour and Van Morrison on hand, and three since the death of frontman Phil May. Incredibly a full sixty have passed since ‘Rosalyn’ announced their appearance in the midst of the glorious mid-60s pop explosion.
Since then they’ve always been a band for people who ‘knew’; they started off more raucous, and ‘down and dirty’ than the Stones, then they more or less invented freakbeat, released the first rock opera in S.F.Sorrow, got signed by Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label, and essentially carried on their merry way down the decades and against the odds while they could all still stand.
Well into the 2010s they still delivered; not in the stadiums they should have been playing but fortunately for us happy few in the back rooms of pubs and similar small venues. Aside from that Indigo farewell I can recall cracking shows at the Half Moon, the Lunar Festival, and the Garage.
The crew from Gare du Nord Records have marked this sixtieth anniversary with a 10” vinyl release dubbed House Of Four featuring a quartet of Pretties’ covers. It’s a very nice mixture of tunes from across the 60s, and by no means the most obvious; the busy Andy Lewis digs into The Electric Banana sessions – 1967 pop-psych library music for de Wolfe – for ‘Walking Down The Street’, and Papernut Cambridge, with Ian Button on vocals (and probably nearly everything else), take on the lysergic rollercoaster that is ‘Defecting Grey’.
Meanwhile Gallic popster Popincourt and anglophile Austrian Robert Rotifer revisit the pair of under-appreciated collections, Get the Picture (1965) and Emotions (1967), for respectively the folk-pop ‘You Don’t Believe Me’ and the Kinks-like ‘House Of Ten’. With guitarist Dick Taylor’s imprimatur: “That’s a great compliment to the band” House of Four is available in a limited run of 300 copies as a 10” 45rpm EP (and digitally), with an added postcard featuring the dolls’ house cover motif lovingly drawn by Robert Rotifer.
Furthermore they’re launching it with a show at The Betsey Trotwood this coming Friday (6th Sept) where all four contributors will be playing separately and together. Absurdly it’s free to get in, though do give them a decent contribution to cover costs and maybe buy the record too.
House Of Ten is available by mail-order here, while stocks last.
Bucketfull Of Brains 