The Twilights - Once Upon a Twilight - Alternate Version (1968)

I just posted a Twilights album that gathers up all their best songs from 1965 to early 1968. This is dominated by their 1968 album "Once Upon a Twilight," which makes up the first 11 songs. The last six songs are the few songs the band released after that album until they broke up. So between the two albums, you basically have the career of this short-lived but excellent Australian band.

In my opinion, there was a lot of great rock music that came out of Australia in the mid to late 1960s, but the vast majority of the really good stuff were the A-Sides of singles. I don't know of too many acclaimed albums, and I think this is the only one from that country and era in my collection. It was critically acclaimed at the time, but unfortunately didn't sell well. I think it's solid through and through, with the exception of "The Cocky Song," a "comedy" song that I think flops so badly that I didn't include it at all, not even as a bonus track. Trust me, you're not missing anything, and including it would ruin the mood and flow of the rest of the album.

As I mentioned in my previous Twilights post, the band was highly influenced by the Beatles and other similar British bands of the time. (They went to Britain in 1966 and 1967 in a brief and unsuccessful effort to make it big there. But they soaked up the music and the cultural trends, and even managed to get to watch the Beatles record "Penny Lane" in the Abbey Road studio, since they were recording there too at the time.)

The songwriting here is excellent. I especially like "Comin' On Down." In my perfect world, this catchy song would be a big hit and still get played on classic rock stations. In reality, it was merely a B-side that got very little notice. Perhaps that's because the song was about an imagined devastating nuclear war, which isn't exactly typical Top 40 material! (But the fact that bands then wrote songs about anything and everything is one reason why I especially like the musical era.)

I like the song so much that I made my own edit of it. The "real" version comes to a top stop at about 2 minutes and five seconds. Then it ends with about ten seconds of a child singing "All Things Bright and Beautiful." I found that odd and unsatisfying, when the song desperately needed to go back to the chorus again. So I have the chorus repeat and fade for another 40 seconds or so. Sorry about taking that artistic liberty, but I couldn't help myself. ;) I've included the unedited version as a bonus track for the purists who prefer to hear that.

Terry Britten was the band's main songwriter at this point. Unfortunately, after the band broke up near the end of 1968, he only put out a couple of singles before he more or less gave up performing and stuck just to songwriting. (As I mentioned in the previous post, he wrote some big hits for others.) Thanks to the help of a commenter named Big Gray, I found his three post-Twilights singles (released under the very-short-lived band Quartet), and I've included that at the end. Those  songs sound exactly like the other Twilights songs. The other single he did that I know of had the A-Side "Now" and the B-Side "Will My Lady Come."

The band's main singer Glenn Shorrock stayed busy with several bands and eventually found much bigger success with the Little River Band in the late 1970s. So I haven't included any of his post-Twilights material here.

01 Once upon a Twilight (Twilights)
02 What a Silly Thing to Do (Twilights)
03 Bessemae (Twilights)
04 Stop the World for a Day (Twilights)
05 Mr. Nice (Twilights)
06 Take Action (Twilights)
07 Blue Roundabout (Twilights)
08 Devendra (Twilights)
09 Found to Be Thrown Away (Twilights)
10 Tomorrow Is Today (Twilights)
11 Paternosta Row (Twilights)
12 Tell Me Goodbye (Twilights)
13 Comin' On Down [Edit] (Twilights)
14 Sand in the Sandwiches (Twilights)
15 Lotus (Twilights)
16 2000 Weeks (Terry Britten)
17 Bargain Day (Terry Britten)
18 Now (Quartet with Terry Britten)
19 Will My Lady Come (Quartet with Terry Britten)
20 Joseph (Quartet with Terry Britten)
21 Mama Where Did You Fail (Quartet with Terry Britten)

Comin' On Down (Twilights)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15179435/TTwlghts_1968_OnceuponTwlightAlternte_atse.zip.html

The album cover is the exact album cover that originally came out, with no changes.

The Twilights - Cathy Come Home - Non-Album Tracks (1965-1968)

Yesterday, I promised to post more 1960s music from Australia, but I got a bit distracted. Here it is. Maybe you haven't heard of the Twilights. I hadn't until a couple of years ago (as I write this). But possibly my favorite musical style is classic rock from the late 1960s, the kind similar to what the Beatles were doing then. It turns out there's a lot of that done very well outside of the US and Britain; it just that you have to dig a little deeper to find it. The Twilights are a very good example.

Unfortunately, the Twilights didn't have a long career. They were only together from 1964 to 1968. But one of the singer songwriters, Glenn Shorrock, when on to greater fame and fortune with Axiom and then the Little River Band. Another songwriter, Terry Britten, went on to write many songs for others, including the hits "Devil Woman" for Cliff Richard and "We Don't Need Another Hero" for Tina Turner. You can read more about the band at their Wikipedia page entry:

The Twilights - Wikipedia

They started out basically as an R&B band that mostly did covers, much like the Pretty Things, the Yardbirds, the early Rolling Stones, and many other British bands. But, like the best of those bands, they developed their own songwriting skills and transitioned around 1967 as psychedelic music briefly became the new trend. You can see the transition on this album. 

I didn't include all the songs they did; I only included the ones I like. In particular, I skipped a lot of the covers they did early on, because many of those are songs that have been played to death by others, such as "You Really Got a Hold on Me" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Instead, I concentrated on the songs they wrote, or songs especially written by others for them (such as "Long Life" written by Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees), plus some of the covers that they had hits with, like "Needle in a Haystack."

There are two songs at the end here that are technically by a band called "Pastoral Symphony." But no such band really existed. It was the Twilights collaborating with another Australian singer, Terry Walker, for one single. So I figured that was fit to be included.

The music here isn't all the band did. They released an acclaimed album in 1968, "Once Upon a Twilight," and a few singles after that. That'll come next.

The Twilights were so influenced by the Beatles that they got a copy of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" a few weeks early, and proceeded to play every single song on it, in order, in their concerts. I wish a recording of that existed. So if you're into that kind of music, like I am, you should enjoy this. The song "Cathy Come Home" in particular was a big hit and should be considered a classic.

01 I'll Be Where You Are (Twilights)
02 If She Finds Out (Twilights)
03 I Won't Be the Same Without Her (Twilights)
04 It's Dark (Twilights)
05 Needle in a Haystack (Twilights)
06 Long Life (Twilights)
07 Lucky Man (Twilights)
08 You Got Soul (Twilights)
09 What's Wrong with the Way I Live (Twilights)
10 9.50 (Twilights)
11 Young Girl (Twilights)
12 Time and Motion Study Man (Twilights)
13 Cathy Come Home (Twilights)
14 The Way They Play (Twilights)
15 Always (Twilights)
16 Love Machine (Pastoral Symphony [Terry Walker & the Twilights])
17 Spread a Little Love Around (Pastoral Symphony [Terry Walker & the Twilights])

https://www.upload.ee/files/15178788/TTwlghts_1965-1968_CthyComeHome_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover of the "Cathy Come Home" with a few minor changes. I removed the record company logo, since they didn't put that on their other albums. I removed the name of the B-Side, and doubled to name of the A-Side, "Cathy Came Home," to cover up for that.