THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,617) The Alan Price Set — “She’s Got Another Pair of Shoes”
While the majority of the songs on the Alan Price Set’s second LP were written by the then unknown Randy Newman (see #174), the album contained priceless Price originals, including “The House that Jack Built” (see #183) (a #4 UK hit) and today’s song, a Georgie Fame (see #103, 169, 634, 695, 721, 1,044)-style R&B delight. No wonder the two would later get together.
Richie Unterberger tells us about Alan Price and the LP — A Price on His Head:
Alan Price’s second album consolidated the change of direction he’d started in early 1967, when his cover of Randy Newman’s “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear” became a big British hit. Moving away from the jazzy Animals styled R&B-rock that he’d presented on his first album and singles, Price moved into a more original, if less powerful, brand of Newman-influenced vaudevillian pop. The Randy Newman influence isn’t a matter of conjecture; about half of the songs were covers of songs by Newman(who had yet to release his first album at the time . . .), often of tunes that remain obscure even to serious Newman fans. The effect is something like hearing an even jauntier, more lighthearted Georgie Fame, as even Price’s own compositions bore a strong Newman influence in their emphasis on poppy craft and wit. . . .
As the organist in the first Animals lineup, Alan Price was perhaps the most important instrumental contributor to their early run of hits. He left the group in 1965 after only a year or so of international success . . . to work on a solo career. Leading the Alan Price Set, he had a Top Ten British hit in 1966 with a reworking of “I Put a Spell on You,” complete with Animal-ish organ breaks and bluesy vocals. His subsequent run of British hits between 1966 and 1968 — “Hi-Lili-Hi-Lo,” “Simon Smith and His Dancing Bear,” “The House That Jack Built,” and “Don’t Stop the Carnival” — were in a much lighter vein, drawing from British music hall influences. “Simon Smith and His Dancing Bear,” from 1967, was one of the first Randy Newman songs to gain international exposure, though Price’s version — like all his British hits — went virtually unnoticed in the U.S. A versatile entertainer, Price collaborated with Georgie Fame, hosted TV shows, and scored plays in the years following the breakup of the Alan Price Set in 1968. He composed the score to Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man!, where his spare and droll songs served almost as a Greek chorus to the surreal, whimsical film . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/album/a-price-on-his-head-mw0000057904, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/alan-price-mn0000931804#biography
Tony Scherman gives us a rare glimpse of Price:
Price quit [the Animals] ostensibly because of a fear of flying, but the rift between Price and the others was more complex than that. Apart from his interest in jazz and English music-hall fare (he shared his love of the latter with the Kinks’ Ray Davies), Price was, in one writer’s words, “a complex, moody character, prone to prolonged bouts of bleak introversion, who’d always been estranged from his colleagues.” A wide reader, Price had interests he couldn’t share with the others. During downtime, “he could often be found in the tour van reading Kafka, while the rest of the boys were out chatting up the birds.” Or, as Price put it in a 1992 interview, “I’d had terrible difficulties with the Animals. As soon as we’d cracked it, all they wanted was girls, sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll. I couldn’t get them to rehearse and I kept bugging them, which they didn’t like at all.” Although the band, including Price, periodically regrouped for brief nostalgic stints, Price was far happier on his own or in collaborations with his fellow jazz lover Georgie Fame.
https://tonyscherman.substack.com/p/alan-price-geordies-progress
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