Sunday, July 16, 2023

Honeybus - Broken Wings - Non-Album Tracks (1970-1972)

Now that some missing songs have been found, I can continue with more Honeybus. Here's the third stray tracks album by them.

As I've mentioned previously, it's a crying shame how badly this band was treated by their record company. They wrote lots of great songs, but very few of them were released at the time. As a result, their legacy is really underappreciated. Consider that, of all the songs here, only three of them would have been publicly available at the time. "She Is the Female to My Soul" was an obscure 1972 A-side, and "Fighting for Peace" and "For Where Have You Been" were even more obscure B-sides. Adding to the insult, if I were to pick an A-side out of all these songs, "She Is the Female to My Soul" would have been near the bottom of my list.

At least these songs are finally available after all these years. The first three songs were only officially released two months ago as I write this in July 2023. They come from an official BBC compilation. They might be my favorite three songs here. One of them, "Melinda," has "[Edit]" in the title due to the usual problem of having to edit out a BBC DJ who talked over the music.

As with the previous stray tracks album, a number of songs here are technically credited to individual band members, but in fact are Honeybus tracks, since all the band members played on them. This is due to the record company giving up on the band (after releasing a Honeybus album in 1970, called "Story"), leading to singer-songwriters Colin Hare and Pete Dello to release their own solo albums in 1971. None of these songs are from those albums. Both of them ("March Hare" by Hare and "Into Your Ears" by Dello) are very good, and should be owned by any Honeybus fans. These are songs recorded around the same time and latest released as bonus tracks.

Although these songs were recorded between 1970 and 1972, they sound more like 1968 or 1969 tracks to me. The band was still capturing that magical, innocent late 1960s sound, and were seemingly impervious to musical trends. They remind me of the Left Banke, with poppy songs that used a lot of stringed instruments.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 Follow the Plan (Honeybus)
02 Melinda [Edit] (Honeybus)
03 Broken Wings (Honeybus)
04 Fighting for Peace (Colin Hare & Honeybus)
05 She Is the Female to My Soul (Honeybus)
06 For Where Have You Been (Honeybus)
07 Hold Up, Fold Up (Pete Dello & Honeybus)
08 Texas Candy (Pete Dello & Honeybus)
09 Didn't I Tell You (Colin Hare & Honeybus)
10 Seek Not in the Wide World (Colin Hare & Honeybus)
11 Hear Me Only (Honeybus)
12 Texas Gold (Honeybus)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15484724/Honeybs_1970-1972_BroknWngs_atse.zip.html

NOTE: This album got flagged due to a copyright issue with one song, a demo version of "Delighted to See You." That's not a big loss, since a different version is on the album I posted here, "I Can't Let Maggie Go." So I've reposted this without that song.

I've only found a few good photos of this band. So I had to resort to a black and white one here. But I used the program Palette to colorize them, and I'm really impressed at the result. I only did a little bit of touch-up work with Photoshop. I'm not sure what year this photo is from, but I'd guess 1968 or 1969. 

I took the style of the band name at the top from the artwork for one of their singles.

No comments:

Post a Comment