Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 53

Record label: Deram

Produced: Tommy Scott, Bert Berns and Dick Rowe

Recorded: Decca Studios, West End Lane and Regent Studios, Denmark Street; July, September–October 1964 and January 1965

Released: June 1965

Chart peaks: None (UK) 54 (US)

Personnel: Van Morrison (v, hm, s); Billy Harrison (g); Eric Wrixon, Jackie McAuley, Peter Bardens (k); Ronnie Millings (d); Pat McAuley (d, k); Alan Henderson (b)

Track listing: Mystic Eyes (S); If You And I Could Be As Two; Little Girl; Just A Little Bit; I Gave My Love A Diamond; Gloria (S/US); You Just Can’t Win; Go On Home Baby; Don’t Look Back; I Like It Like That; I’m Gonna Dress In Black (S/US); Bright Lights Big City; My Little Baby; (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66

Running time: 39.13

Current CD: POR8101652PMI

Further listening: Them Again (1966), the band’s second album

Further reading: Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart (John Collis, 1996); Van Morrison: No Surrender (Johnny Rogan, 2006); www.makingtime.co.uk/them.html

Download: Not currently legally available

Any listener only familiar with the sophisticated sounds of the middle-aged Van Morrison would be shell-shocked hearing Them, on which the Belfast bluesman, then only 19 years old, sings with a ferocity that’s still startling. The album is a British blues boom classic and yet under-appreciated; rumours are that it was actually made by sessionmen having sabotaged its – and the band’s – reputation. Morrison has never publicly refuted the allegations, but his colleagues are adamant that like contemporaries The Kinks and The Who, sessionmen – including Jimmy Page – were occasionally imposed upon them, only to fill out the sound of the core band, not the featured roles. And aural evidence supports this, for, frankly, the ramshackle excitement of the playing is surely the sound of a bunch of rowdies from the bars, clubs and dives of Belfast, rather than the sound of professional sessionmen.

Sometimes known as The Angry Young Them after the slogan emblazoned on the back of the sleeve, the album begins electrifyingly with the rampaging Mystic Eyes, an instrumental until near the end, when Morrison improvises some enigmatic, fragmentary lyrics. ‘Van was always good at ad-libbing,’ enthuses guitarist Billy Harrison. ‘He could just conjure words as he was performing. And no one in Britain could phrase like him.’ Them includes Gloria, previously the B-side of the band’s debut hit, Baby Please Don’t Go, which became a US hit for the Shadows Of Knight and a rock standard, covered by Hendrix, Patti Smith, the Grateful Dead and countless others. Morrison had been the last to join the original band (‘We brought him in to play saxophone, but he knew more blues songs than me so he began to sing,’ recalls Harrison) but Them’s personnel never stabilised, which further undermined the band’s status.

‘If management had supported, instead of exploited, Them could have been on a level with the Stones,’ sighs founder member Eric Wrixon. ‘We were more extreme and musically in advance of them.’ But it wasn’t to be and, to many, Them are now regarded as only a trivial, early footnote in the history of Van the Man, the absurdity of which is obvious to anyone who has ever thrilled to the raw power that throbs from this extraordinary album.