THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,445) The Remo Four* — “Live Like a Lady”
The Remo Four (see #1,437) give us Liverpool’s (by way of Hamburg) “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)”: a raucous, infectious and “really nifty gender-bending original . . . its growling guitar sweetened by organ”. (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, https://www.allmusic.com/album/smile%21-peter-gunnand-more-mw0002073691) “Lady” would surely have been a hit on MTV!
As to the Remo Four, Bill Harry tells us:
A Mersey group who first formed as a vocal outfit, the Remo Quartet, in 1958 and played at social clubs and weddings. They changed to rock‘n’roll music at the beginning of 1960 . . . . [and] appeared on a number of Cavern bills with The Beatles, changing their name to The Remo Four . . . . The group comprised Keith Stokes (rhythm/vocals), Colin Manley, who was rated as Liverpool’s top rock‘n’roll guitarist [and who wrote “Live Like a Lady”] . . . Don Andrews (bass) and Harry Prytherch (drums). In December 1962 they became Johnny Sandon & The Remo Four in order to embark on a tour of US bases in France, when Roy Dyke replaced Prytherch and Johnny Sandon joined them. . . . The Remo Four turned down the offer of becoming Billy J. Kramer’s backing band but . . . accepted the offer of backing Tommy Quickly. . . . They were now managed by Brian Epstein and were included on the Beatles Christmas show at the Finsbury Park Astoria and also joined The Beatles on their autumn tour of Britain in 1964. They were excited when The Beatles provided them with “No Reply” to record and felt that it would be the single to take them and Tommy to the top of the charts. . . . Unfortunately, Quickly was slightly drunk and very nervous at the session and the single was never released. The group then began to back a variety of singers including Georgie Fame, Billy Fury, and Billy J. Kramer . . . . By this time Tony Ashton had joined the group . . . .
Stephen Thomas Erlewine adds:
Contemporaries of the Beatles, along with other Liverpudlian rockers . . . the Remo Four were . . . . in something of a time warp in 1966 and 1967. While their contemporaries were enjoying the fruits of swinging London, the quartet were stuck in Hamburg playing the Star Club, working off an enormous debt to their management company NEMS along with a tax bill. They were working hard, playing upwards of four times a night, delivering Merseybeat with a hard, jazzy R&B edge. In a sense, they hadn’t moved forward from the glory days of Merseybeat, relying on driving, crowd-pleasing, floor-filling covers, but the constant playing gave the group a deep, muscular groove and jazz chops . . . . [Their sole LP] Smile! and its accompanying singles [ate] rather unique: ostensibly, this is generic British R&B, but the Remo Four swing with an authority that no other British Invasion band had . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/album/smile%21-peter-gunnand-more-mw0002073691
*”Their name derived in a roundabout way from an Italian singer and bandleader who’d appeared at the London Palladium, Marino Marini, and from there they thought of Italy’s San Remo Music Festival . . . .” (Oliver Schuh, liner note to the CD reissue of Smile! (Smile!, Peter Gunn . . . and More)
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