Greetings pop pickers and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and another of our fortnightly dibbers in the gently sloped gardens of musical magnificence.
This week, as we respectfully mark both International Digital Learning Day and Period Poverty Week, we shall take a quick look at a few dodgy artists from the Del Boy bargain basement of too-good-to-be-true, guv’nor. Not arf!
This article was inspired by a recent chance meeting in Corralejo, where I was skiving and soaking up some winter sun. One evening, as I was comfortably ensconced in a salubrious bar and eatery, I realised I was getting some attention from a reasonably handsome and distinguished looking gentleman of about my vintage (i.e. near decrepitude). As the evening in question was not a Friday evening, I be-stilled my beating heart and acknowledged his attention with a polite nod. This he took as an invitation to join me and we quickly established that we were in fact old colleagues from somewhere back in the mid-90s. Being a couple of convivial old farts, we then quite naturally proceeded to spend a very pleasant evening reminiscing, exchanging tales, comparing maladies and working our way through lists of the missing and departed.
The following morning, whilst hazily tip-toeing my way through a military-grade hangover, avoiding the silent, steely and calculating gaze of ‘er indoors (a look that informed me I had returned at a deeply inappropriate hour in a deeply inappropriate condition), I began to muse on one of the seemingly tall and improbable tales from the previous evening that had, against all odds, managed to register in my alcohol befuddled brain: ZZ Top had been hired to impersonate The Zombies. Could this be true?
To my surprise, a little research suggested there was at least a smidgeon of substance to this particular tall tale. The Zombies were a splendid UK ’60s band, headed up by their lavishly talented keyboardist, Rod Argent, and the equally gifted singer/songwriter, Colin Blunstone. The group had a tremendous run of success in the UK, which was capped off by their magnificent 1968 album Odessey and Oracle – an absolute corker and still one of my favourite albums from that period. Sadly, by 1969 the lads had split up, with Rod forming the band Argent and Blunstone going on to enjoy a successful solo career. This meant the US market had a band with a substantial stack of US hit singles and absolutely no musicians to promote or exploit them.
Sniffing an opportunity for shenanigans, a company called Delta Promotions decided they should fill the void with their own version of the band. They hired a bunch of Texas musicians – including two thirds of the soon-to-be-formed ZZ Top (Dusty Hill on bass and Frank Beard on drums) – to tour North America as The Zombies. It seems a great many fans had no idea what the original band members looked like, allowing the deception, by and large, to work. The fake band lacked a keyboard player, which was explained with the excuse that he was banged up in jail, and the change of vocalist was explained by a sad tale of the original singer being killed in a car crash.
Eventually, Rolling Stone magazine uncovered the scam and cease and desist orders were served to stop the imposters. However, it quickly emerged that a second (and apparently very good) fake version of The Zombies was also treading the boards in the US, along with an equally fake touring version of The Animals. This sort of thing, it would seem, was not that uncommon. Rod Argent seemed quite sanguine about the entire affair, and even joked that perhaps his band, Argent, should tour as ZZ Top.
The Zombies / Animals tale reminded me of the fake Deep Purple that was around for a very short while in the early 1980s. Deep Purple formed in 1968 with their original singer, Rod Evans. Evans was a pretty decent singer, but was quickly replaced by the leather-lunged Ian Gillan (who was later replaced by David Coverdale). The Gillan / Coverdale versions of the band had a tremendous run of Top 10 albums in both the UK and US, but by 1976 had split up and proceeded to ignore a string of highly lucrative offers from various promoters (particularly in the US) to get their bottoms in gear and put the band back on the road.
Eventually, a US-based management company spotted an opportunity and persuaded Deep Purple’s original throat warbler, Rod Evans, to come out of retirement and sign-up to front and tour a new version of Deep Purple (essentially a bunch of hired session musicians fronted by Rod).
As you might imagine, this did not go down very well with the production company that actually held the rights to the Deep Purple brand. M’learned friends were soon sniffing the air and scenting blood, and Deep Purple’s management team famously placed an advert in the Los Angeles Times which read, “The following stars WILL NOT PERFORM at the Deep Purple Concert at Long Beach Arena”. Underneath this notice was a long list of every Deep Purple member except Rod Evans.
Sadly for Rod, Deep Purple’s lawyers soon caught up with him and the full personal horror of his situation emerged. He’d very foolishly signed a somewhat dodgy contract with the management company behind the ruse, which left him solely and fully liable for all legal costs and damages. This was not good news. He was eventually ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation and, as a result, was utterly ruined. Because he was now flat broke and couldn’t pay in full, costs and damages were also taken from his future royalty payments from the sales of his genuine recordings with Deep Purple and, cripplingly, from any other projects he might start in the future. His career in music was effectively over.
It’s now time for a twisted tale on which Uppers may wish to comment: the strange and intriguing tale of Joyce Hatto and Chief Inspector iTunes.
Joyce Hatto was a well regarded classical pianist. Born in 1928, she rose to prominence in the 1950s, played with the London Symphony Orchestra and was regarded as a fine and solid musician. Certainly not world class, but an accomplished and admired musician. However, in the 1970s, due to illness, she retired from both public life and live performance, drifting into the comfortable obscurity of a quiet rural life with her husband William Barrington-Coupe. Despite her illness, she apparently continued to play at home until her death in 2006.
In the early 2000s, the record label Concert Artists began releasing a splendid series of recordings made by Joyce Hatto at home. Nobody could deny the quality of these performances – they were spankingly good – and our largely forgotten pianist quickly became something of a classical music sensation. The Boston Globe called her “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of” and The Grauniad lauded her remarkable discography as being “equalled by few pianists in recent history”. Sadly, it was all a scam. Her recordings were fakes and Joyce’s husband, William Barrington-Coupe (known as Barry, he died in 2014), was the mastermind behind the scenes.
Our Baz was certainly an interesting character: ducker, diver, bit of a lad, and a chap with whom I would very much have liked a few drinks. Despite his very English sounding name, Baz was a Taffy – born in Llanelli in 1931. He then grew up as an east-ender in Lewisham (I mean, c’mon! What chance did he have with a background like that?) so I’m prepared to cut him a lot of slack. I suppose I picture him as a cross between Del Boy and one of Terry Thomas’ more endearing cads.
By the mid ’60s, young Baz had already earned himself a bit of a reputation as a somewhat ingenious and slippery operator in the music business. Then, in 1966, after what was apparently (at the time) the longest-running and most expensive trial in Old Bailey history, our Baz was found guilty of failing to cough-up whopping amounts of purchase tax associated with the sale of dodgy imported Chinese radios around London’s many street markets. Grandad, Uncle Arthur and Rodney were unavailable for comment. Barrington-Coupe was banged up for 12 months for what the Judge called “blatant and impertinent frauds”.
Anyway, by the early 2000s, Barry was cheerfully releasing what were claimed to be home recordings of his wife’s performances. Unfortunately for our Baz, Inspector iTunes was on the case. Eventually, someone popped a Joyce Hatto CD into their computer and iTunes immediately identified it as a recording by another artist.
The doubts and rumours continued to grow and in 2007 Gramophone magazine submitted Hatto’s recordings to audio experts who quickly confirmed they were in fact pre-existing recordings, ripped from the CDs of other artists. Barrington-Coupe eventually fessed up to ripping off the recordings of around 90 pianists, selling them as Joyce Hatto recordings through his own Concert Artists record label. “I did it for my wife”, he would later claim. No charges were brought against him and he was never prosecuted for the fraud.
And we can’t possibly ponder the subject of fake bands without a look at the infamous mid-’70s fake Fleetwood Mac. In 1973, Fleetwood Mac were on tour in the US (promoting their Mystery To Me album) when Mick Fleetwood discovered his guitarist, Bob Weston, was allegedly enjoying – ahem – intimate cuddlesome knowledge of his missus. Understandably, Mick was somewhat displeased by this revelation and felt disinclined to continue the tour. He quickly fired knobbin’ Bob and cancelled the rest of the American tour – an additional 26 dates. The band’s manager, Clifford Davis, was somewhat staggered by this turn of events, fully realising the huge financial implications this sort of cancellation could entail. He apparently issued an ultimatum to the band: do the tour, or I’ll be forced to push on without you. Davis claimed he owned the name “Fleetwood Mac”, and as such could legally choose the band members and decide who would be allowed to tour under that name.
Mick and the team refused to comply, so push on is exactly what Davis did. In late 1973, he recruited members of the band “Legs” to tour the US as “The New Fleetwood Mac”. The band were apparently told that members of the old Fleetwood Mac line-up would join them once the tour was up and running.
Trouble started almost immediately. Promoters started complaining, ticket holders started demanding refunds and the music press were all over the story. Eventually, the genuine members of Fleetwood Mac became aware of the new line-up that was using their name – with, to their astonishment, the full support of their manager – and quickly filed lawsuits to halt the tour. Davis responded by counter-suing, claiming he owned the rights to the band’s name, held the copyright to the band’s recordings, and was therefore doing nothing wrong.
Of course, m’learned friends had an absolute field day. The New Fleetwood Mac project collapsed quite quickly, the genuine Fleetwood Mac couldn’t record or perform under that name, and the writs, accusations, claims and counter claims went on for years. It was all very, very messy indeed.
However, once all the settlements had been settled and the dust had, um… settled, Mick Fleetwood, although admitting he absolutely hated it at the time, has since claimed he’s now very grateful for the hideous, costly and prolonged legal wrangling that tied up a big chunk of his mid-’70s career. This is because almost all the band’s legal shenanigans took place in American courts, which pretty much forced Mick and his bandmates to relocate to the US to fight their case. Fleetwood has said it was this trans-Atlantic move that eventually led to the creation of the famous 1975 “Rumours” version of the band. A version that famously included both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and which, it has to be said, quickly proved to be somewhat successful in a record-shifting, planet-rodgering kinda way.
And we cant leave this topic without a few words about Frank Farian and the Milli Vanilli scandal. Milli Vanilli were Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, an R&B duo from Munich, Germany. They released their debut album, All or Nothing, in Europe in 1988 and released it as Girl You Know It’s True in 1989 in the US. The boys hit the big time almost immediately, shifting around seven million records in the US and more than 30 million singles world wide. They also picked up a prestigious Grammy Award for Best New Artist.
However, in late 1990, Milli Vanilli faced a substantial backlash when it became clear they were not singing live. Eventually their producer, Frank Farian, confirmed that neither Morvan or Pilatus had contributed to the creation of their records, that they lip-synced to backing tapes of other singers for their performances and that they did not actually exist as a band in any normally understood way. The Milli Vanilli project was his creation, assembled in the studio by himself and a team of top-notch session musicians and singers.
The backlash was immediate: Their US record label, Arista Records, promptly deleted the boy’s album from its catalog; their Grammy Award was revoked; the singer-songwriter, David Clayton-Thomas, sued them for copyright infringement (alleging they used the melody from one of his compositions); and at least 26 class action lawsuits were filed claiming Milli Vanilli and/or Arista Records had defrauded consumers. There were po-faced condemnatory articles, documentaries – even a feature film about the affair.
The career of Pilatus and Morvan was pretty much over from that point. They did eventually release an album as Rob & Fab, but it only sold a couple of thousand copies worldwide. Pilatus fell into addiction, was later sentenced to three months in jail and six months at a drug treatment facility (for assault and vehicular offences), made several suicide attempts and eventually died from an overdose in 1998. Morvan eventually gained the rights to the Milli Vanilli name and is still singing and performing.
However, many in the music business were genuinely shocked by the ferocity of the backlash. Manufactured bands (e.g. The Monkees) were nothing new, Frank was already well known for this kind of poptastic fabrication, and he was of course the creator and mastermind behind another famous band-that-never-was: Boney M.
Frank created Boney M in 1974, using the exact same template he would later use for Milli Vanilli. He and his team would write the songs, play the instruments, sing the vocals, then get some great looking dancers and performers to promote the songs and lip-synch on stage. Boney M sold well over 100 million records worldwide, almost everyone in the industry knew the band was Farian’s fabrication, and almost nobody cared. Farian’s attitude is quite simple to explain: you wouldn’t expect the fashion designer to model the clothes on the catwalk, and nobody wants to see Frank perform the songs on stage. Each and every contributor has their part to play in the creation of a collaborative art project, and music is no different.
Anyway, I doubt Frank was overly concerned about the Milli Vanilli backlash. Over his splendid career he accrued hundreds of gold and platinum discs and is believed to have shifted well over 800 million records worldwide – that’s not a bad effort Frank. Not bad at all.
Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my inane wittering for this evening. So I shall say TTFN to one and all. May your pillows be tasty, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight, and may your frog go with you – Not ‘arf!
Featured Image: Boney M (1977 Atlantic Records publicity photo) Courtesy of Atlantic Records USA, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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