July — “A Bird Lived”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — February 19, 2024

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,117) July — “A Bird Lived”

Classic British pop psych from July (see #937) gently propositioning an English “bird”. It comes from “one of the most sought-after British psychedelic sixties albums” (Vernon Joynson, The Tapestry of Delights Revisited), “[v]ery good psychedelia, for the most part, but a bit dated in places and heavily influenced by much of the music coming from the direction of San Francisco at that time”. (Steven McDonald, https://www.allmusic.com/album/july-mw0000370474)

Tom Newman, the band’s singer, hated it! He told David Wells that:

“We were spotted by a DJ named Pat Campbell, who pointed us out to the head of Major Minor, Phil Solomon. We secured an album deal, and the whole session was done in one weekend. We used two four-track machines and bounced tracks from one to another, the same way Sgt Pepper was made. I was already making up tape loops by then, fifty foot long, going right round the room, so I got very interested in multi-track facilities. . . . I sang like a complete prick — a quivery, frightened little jerk. It’s totally obvious to me why our LP didn’t impress anyone. Compared to what we were capable of, it’s f*cking terrible.

Record Collector: 100 Greatest Psychedelic Records: High Times and Strange Tales from Rock’s Most Mind-Blowing Era

As to July, Bruce Eder tells us:

July started out in the early ’60s as an Ealing-based skiffle act working under the name of the Playboys, and then metamorphosed into an R&B outfit known as the Thoughts and then the Tomcats . . . . [who] found some success in Spain when they went to play a series of gigs in Madrid in 1966. They returned to England in 1968, the group’s lineup consisting of Tony Duhig on guitar, John Field on flute and keyboards, Tom Newman on vocals, Alan James playing bass, and Chris Jackson on drums, and changed their name to July. The band lasted barely a year, leaving behind one of the most sought-after LPs of the British psychedelic boom . . . . Their sound was a mix of trippy, lugubrious psychedelic meanderings, eerie, trippy vignettes . . . and strange, bright electric-acoustic textured tracks . . . with some dazzling guitar workouts . . . all spiced with some elements of world music, courtesy of Tony Duhig . . . . Their first single, “My Clown” b/w “Dandelion Seeds,” has come to be considered a classic piece of psychedelia . . . . The band separated in 1969, with Duhig moving on to Jade Warrior, [and] Newman becoming a well-respected engineer, with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells to his credit . . . .

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/july-mn0000976711/biography

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