The Artwoods - BBC Sessions (1965-1967)

If you've been following this blog, you'll have noticed that I'm working on a big project of posting as many (good) BBC sessions albums from the 1960s and 1970s as I can. A few weeks ago, I got a suggestion to post an album of the Artwoods. To be honest, despite very much being into British Invasion styled music, I'd barely even heard of them. But I decided to find out if they had enough material for a BBC. As you can see from this post, yes they do.

The Artwoods was a very popular British live band of the mid-1960s, led by someone named Art Wood. (Thus the band name.) However, they didn't record that much studio material, putting out only one album, and they never had a significant hit. I just read some about them. I think the reason for their relative lack of success is that they didn't focus much on writing their own material, and as that become more important towards the late 1960s, they fell behind and then broke up. But they were a talented band just the same, especially with R&B flavored material.

Art Wood was the older brother of Ronnie Wood of the Faces and the Rolling Stones. Jon Lord also was in the band for their entire existence. He later became the long-time keyboard player for Deep Purple. Here's their Wikipedia entry if you want to know more:

The Artwoods - Wikipedia

This was an easy album to put together, because all of the performances come from the archival album "Steady Gettin' It: The Complete Recordings, 1964-67." I looked for other material to add to that, such as live appearances on TV shows, but I didn't find anything. I guess that isn't surprising given their relative lack of success. We're lucky that this much exists.

If you look at the song list below, you'll see that 11 of the 16 songs have "[Edit]" in them. For whatever reason, they were unlucky when it came to BBC DJs talking over their music. But I fixed that in the usual way using the audio editing software X-Minus. 

This album is 44 minutes long. There's one song that was performed twice, "In the Deep End." Normally I don't include two versions of the same song, but since it's just one song, I figured what the heck.

01 Smack Dab in the Middle (Artwoods)
02 Goodbye Sisters [Edit] (Artwoods)
03 She Knows What to Do [Edit] (Artwoods)
04 Can You Hear Me [Edit] (Artwoods)
05 I Take What I Want (Artwoods)
06 Jump Back [Edit] (Artwoods)
07 One More Heartache [Edit] (Artwoods)
08 I Feel Good (Artwoods)
09 Things Get Better [Edit] (Artwoods)
10 Stop Think It Over (Artwoods)
11 In the Deep End [Edit] (Artwoods)
12 What Shall I Do (Artwoods)
13 Day Tripper [Edit] (Artwoods)
14 Steady Getting It [Edit] (Artwoods)
15 Devil with a Blue Dress On - Good Golly, Miss Molly [Edit] (Artwoods)
16 In the Deep End [Version 2] [Edit] (Artwoods)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17168589/TARTWODS1965-1967BBSessions_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/R5rkE6yC

Because this band never hit the big time, photos of them are very few and far between. So I was lucky to find one usable one. It was a bit rough, so I used some Photoshop tricks to clean it up. The guy at the top had the top of his head cut off, but I fixed that by using the top of one of the other heads.

UPDATE: On September 27, 2024, I upgraded the cover using the Krea AI program.