Manfred Mann - Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James - Non-Album Tracks (1966-1967)

Here's the next in my series of albums that gather all the good songs the 1960s versions of Manfred Mann ever did.

The one big hit here is "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James." In my opinion, it's a good example of what makes 1960s music great: excellent melody, interesting lyrics, and a solid performance. It's the only A-side. Remarkably, only three more songs were released in the 1960s. Another, "Wang Dang Doodle," is a BBC performance (with the BBC DJ's annoying talking over the start of the song removed). Five more were only released decades later as bonus tracks.

Remarkably, two more, "Seasons in the Sun" and "I Want to Be Wanted," still remain unreleased. However, there's a bootleg of some Manfred Mann studio sessions in the late 1960s, and it has excellent sound, just as good as the released stuff. These songs come from that, so there's no sound quality problem. (And I'll draw more from them on following albums.) Note that "Seasons in the Sun" was a massive hit for Terry Jacks in 1973, hitting number one in the US, Britain, and many other countries. A lot of people (including me) found that hit annoying because it was overly maudlin and sappy. But note this version predates the hit by many years (the original was done in French in 1961), and isn't nearly as problematic. In fact, it sounds a bit underproduced. I'm guessing it has remained unreleased because they never quite finished the recording.

I did some research to figure out the month each song was recorded, and then ordered them as chronologically as I could. The first songs are from June 1966, and the last three are from January 1967. Some of the songs going back to June 1966 were finally released as bonus tracks to the "Up the Junction" soundtrack, but this is a bad fit, since that album came out in 1968. There really should have been a proper Manfred Mann studio album in 1967, but there wasn't.

The album is on the short side, at 34 minutes, but it's a solid set of songs.

01 Eastern Street (Manfred Mann)
02 I Wanna Be Rich (Manfred Mann)
03 Let It Be Me (Manfred Mann)
04 Miss JD [Instrumental] (Manfred Mann)
05 Wang Dang Doodle [Edit] (Manfred Mann)
06 Mohair Sam (Manfred Mann)
07 Lovebird (Manfred Mann)
08 Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James (Manfred Mann)
09 Seasons in the Sun (Manfred Mann)
10 All I Wanna Do (Manfred Mann)
11 I Want to Be Wanted (Manfred Mann)
12 Brown and Porter's [Meat Exporters] (Manfred Mann)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dk74U

The album cover art is based on the cover for the "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James" single. Except that had the name of the B-side filling the upper right of the cover. I didn't want that, so I removed it, then stretched the A-side name and the band's name sideways to fill up that space. Also, the only color on the original was the pink around the band's name, and I thought that looked a bit boring. So I added some blue and green tinting to the band photo.