Beach Baby

I get notified whenever a blog says the words "Jimmy Page". (I'll probably get notified of this one too.) Recently this has netted me very little apart from 10,000 bland reviews of It Might Get Loud. But today, I learned something I didn't know.

The blog Top Twenty Club, unpromisingly (for those of us not from Bridgewater) subtitled A history of artists that appeared at Bridgwater's Town Hall - 1960-1966 has a piece today on Carter Lewis and the Southerners.

Now any fule kno that Carter Lewis et al were one of the first bands Jimmy Page played in, just before he became a Face on the studio scene and gave up playing in bands (luckily not permanently). But who knew that Carter and Lewis eventually mutated into the Flowerpot Men and had a hippie, or possibly ironic-hippie hit, Let's Go to San Francisco in 1967, or that Carter sang lead vocal on Winchester Cathedral (New Vaudeville Band, 1966) and Carter was in the band First Class, which had a hit with Beach Baby in 1974? Or that they sang harmony on I Can't Explain, Hi Ho Silver Lining, There's Always Something There to Remind Me and It's Not Unusual?

I'd assumed they were one of the ten million touring bands of 1964 that never went anywhere, like the likely lads in the movie That'll Be The Day.

Apparently not.

Since YouTube embedding has been disabled for Let's Go to San Francisco, I won't give the uploader the traffic by giving you the URL. And Winchester Cathedral is so dire, I won't link to it on principle. Hm. Well, all right, here's The First Class with Beach Baby.



How annoyingly catchy is that?