Friday, January 15, 2021

Various Artists - Covered: Graham Gouldman. Volume 2: 1967-1971

A few days ago, I posted the first album in this series celebrating the songwriting of Graham Gouldman. Here's the second, and there's one more to come.

That first album largely covered Gouldman's big successes in the mid-1960s, when he wrote some big, classic hits for different artists. The first half has some more in that vein, still with some success. For instance, "Tallyman" was a hit for Jeff Beck in 1967. However, in 1967 and 1968, music trends were changing rapidly and drastically. Gouldman's pop style fell out of favor as music grew increasingly "heavy" and serious towards the end of the 1960s. Note how many of the bands here like the Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana, the Mindbenders, and so on went from often being near the top of the charts to dropping off the charts altogether.

As a result, Gouldman spent a few years more or less in the music wilderness. But during that time, he increasingly linked up with the three other songwriters in 10cc. They finally went by the 10cc in 1972, and soon had a series of hits on their own. Yet during this time, Gouldman never lost his knack for writing catchy and good songs, as you'll see here.

Note that, once again, these are all songs without Gouldman singing lead on them. While he continued to write for others during this period, he often sang and wrote songs for himself, though under a variety of names. I will be compiling the best of those on a different album in the future.

01 Schoolgirl (Hollies)
02 Ooh She's Done It Again (Herman's Hermits)
03 Naughty Nippon Nights (Shadows)
04 Tallyman (Jeff Beck)
05 Upstairs, Downstairs (Herman's Hermits)
06 The Impossible Years (Wayne Fontana)
07 The Love Was in My Eyes (Applejacks)
08 My Father (Jonah Jones)
09 The World Is for the Young (Herman's Hermits with Stanley Holloway)
10 Uncle Joe, the Ice Cream Man (Mindbenders)
11 It's Nice to Be Out in the Morning (Herman's Hermits)
12 Some People (Chords Five)
13 It's Alright Now (Herman's Hermits)
14 Crickets (Peter Cowap)
15 Come On Plane (Silver Fleet)
16 Because You're There (Peter Noone)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15259531/CoveredGrahamG_1967-1971_Volum2_atse.zip.html

I'm not exactly sure when or where this cover art photo is from, but I'm guessing it's the late 1960s or early 1970s. There was a bunch of stuff behind him that I found distracting, so I replaced all that with a blank background.

4 comments:

  1. Really enjoyed volume one. I'm much less familiar with the songs and the artists here but I'm going to give it a listen. Thanks for making it available.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry to ask again but i'm trying to figure out how to do this myself...how do you pull stuff off of YouTube without being limited to 128kb output?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One thing I do is record the audio straight to Audacity. I'm not sure what the quality is exactly in any specific case, but it's the best possible.

      Delete
    2. Thanks Paul, I'll give that a shot, I was always under the impression that YouTube only pushed 128kbps, so I was never sure how you got those tracks to be 320 but maybe I heard that wrong somewhere on the interwebs...

      Delete