THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
975) The Churchill’s* — “Song from the Sea”
From the classic album by “Israel’s own psych-rock pioneers” (Jesse Rifkin, http://www.furious.com/perfect/churchills.html) comes this haunting song. “Swim with me in darkness, underneath the dark sky, bits of tears are falling, now I know you can cry.” Yes.
Jesse Rifkin tells us:
[T]he Churchills – Israel’s own psych-rock pioneers . . . . story began in Israel in 1965, when Mickey Gavriellov noticed Haim Romano playing a mandolin for a small group of friends. Gavriellov, who wanted to be in a band, started following Romano around with his guitar, trying desperately to get noticed. Gavriellov soon started playing bass with guitarist Yitzchak Klepter, drummer Ami Treibich, and vocalist Selvin Lifshitz. . . . [T]he band soon added Romano on lead guitar. The group soon became known as Churchill’s Hermits (in tribute to Herman’s Hermits), and eventually just the Churchills. . . . Huxley had come to Israel from England in 1967 as a member of one of the various touring incarnations of the Tornadoes . . . . When the Tornadoes finished their tour in Israel, the bassist and drummer decided to return to England, but Huxley and the band’s keyboardist decided to stay. After playing in a few groups in Israel, Huxley came across the Churchills. “The band would play two sets . . . . one of pop covers and one of American soul music, on which they were joined by [Canadian singer] Stan Solomon.” At the time, Solomon was singing in a band called the Saints. Huxley and Solomon became friends very quickly, and soon moved in with each other. In 1968 Lifshitz and Klepter were drafted into the Israeli army. Solomon was almost immediately asked to become the band’s new lead singer, and he in turn recommended Huxley as Klepter’s replacement. The change was dramatic. “Stan and I had the other members of the band over to our apartment,” Huxley said, “where we smoked a bunch of hash, which there was a lot of in Israel at that time… We introduced them to the Doors, Vanilla Fudge, and Hendrix – that kind of music, and they just freaked out! They totally loved it!” . . . This unique mix of Eastern and Western music became very popular in Israel, no doubt helped by the fact that, thanks to Huxley and Solomon, the Churchills became the first Israeli rock band to play original material. . . . The band soon released its first single, “Too Much in Love to Hear,” a Huxley original, backed with Solomon’s “Talk to Me.” Not long after the single was released, the band ventured to Denmark, where they spent four months opening for Deep Purple. . . . When the band returned to Israel, they were asked to create a soundtrack for the film A Woman’s Case, a bizarre movie about an advertising executive who falls for and later plots to kill a lesbian fashion model. The songs Huxley, Solomon and Gavriellov wrote for the movie became the basis for the band’s 1968 self-titled debut album. . . . In 1969, Stan Solomon left the band and returned home. “Stan’s father was one of the richest men in Canada,” Huxley explained. “He wanted Stan to come back and join the family business, which was a clothing business. . . . “[Stan’s quitting] was a crisis,” said Gavriellov. . . . In early 1970, Huxley briefly went back to England to get married. When he returned, the other band members informed him that while he was gone, they had added a new lead singer – Danny Shoshan, formerly of the Lions of Judea. “In my opinion,” said Huxley, “Danny Shoshan became the other Stan Solomon. He and I started writing together like I had with Stan. But Danny sang with a very ballsy voice, so we started doing harder stuff because we could.”
http://www.furious.com/perfect/churchills.html
Richard Klin adds:
The 1960s, for much of the world, were synonymous with social ferment and rebellion. Not so in Israel. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of the Six-Day War, followed by the War of Attrition with Egypt, followed still by the Yom Kippur War in 1973. . . . [T]here was no Israeli equivalent of mass student uprisings, no Haight-Ashbury. . . . [But there] sprang a complete anomaly: The Churchills – a trippy, psychedelic band that emerged not from California, London, or other high temples of grooviness, but from the environs of Tel Aviv. The Churchills began as a standard Israeli cover band. At the same time, a revamped version of the Tornados, the British band that gave the world “Telstar,” toured Israel. The Tornados disbanded after that tour and one of its members, Robb Huxley, “decided to stay in Israel as I had met and become friends with Canadian Stan Solomon, who was the [Churchills] singer…and then began our arduous task to change the music of the band and hopefully turn the Israeli audience on to a different style of music.” . . . The Israeli audiences “took us as being a bunch of crazy musicians,” [Huxley] remembers, “who played ‘noise’ and were all ‘soaked’ in LSD.” . . . Yet the Churchills . . . doggedly plugged away. In 1968 came their eponymous album, Churchill’s—the errant apostrophe a forgivable offense in a Hebrew-speaking world. The album was a psychedelic, expressive classic, with songs ranging from the bombastic to the plaintive. The fact that Churchill’s . . . existed at all was odds-defying. . . . The album’s sonic palette is heavily inflected with strong doses of the jangly, drone-like tones of the Mediterranean and Middle East . . . . The band joined forces with Arik Einstein, one of the founding fathers of Israeli rock. They connected with other Israeli musicians who were forming a homegrown, nascent rock scene. . . . In Israel, the sort of music the Churchills championed was a marginalized, often scorned, form of expression. Yet it did find its way into public consciousness. The musicians and their fans coalesced. The Churchills are part of a wonderful, scattered lineage found in culture’s nooks and crannies.
https://www.jewishviews.com/israeli-gears/
Well, were they popular in Israel or were they not?
* The band’s name “was simply a reference to founding member Yitzhak Klepter’s schoolboy nickname, inspired by his round, plump appearance that apparently conjured up images of the British prime minister”. (Richard klin https://www.jewishviews.com/israeli-gears/)
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