The last big hit the Tremeloes had was "Me and My Life," which reached the top five in Britain in 1970. The BBC version of that one was the last song on Volume 4 in this series. They had two minor British hits in 1971, "Right Wheel, Left Hammer, Sham," and "Hello Buddy," and then faded from the charts entirely.
Clearly, the Tremeloes were increasingly out of step with music trends, especially as "glam rock" dominated the charts by 1972. But in retrospect, this music was just as good as when they were having earlier hits. It's just that it was seen as weak tea compared to the hard rock and other sounds of the era. One plus was they went from a band that mostly did covers to one that mostly did their own material.
All the songs here are officially unreleased. The vast majority come from BBC transcription discs given to me by musical associate Marley. All of those sound excellent. The first two songs, however, aren't even BBC recordings. Instead, they were performed on the British TV show "Doing Their Thing." They did some other songs on that show (which you can see on YouTube), but I didn't include those because they were done for the BBC without crowd noise.
Even in the early 1970s, some of the songs had BBC DJs talking over the music (all the ones with "[Edit]" in their titles). As usual, I used the X-Minus audio editing program to wipe out the talking while keeping the underlying music. But as you can see from the chronological song list, that talking trend slowly died off, with only one instance of it in the second half of this album.
The Tremeloes kept going off and on after 1972, and a version of the band is still going as I write this in 2022. But there were many personnel changes and they became an "oldies" band with little to no new material, so I lose interest at the point, just as the BBC did.
01 Games People Play - Proud Mary (Tremeloes)
02 Hound Dog - Rip It Up - Johnny B. Goode - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (Tremeloes)
03 But Then I [Edit] (Tremeloes)
04 I Swear [Edit] (Tremeloes)
05 Wait on Me [Edit] (Tremeloes)
06 Hello Buddy [Edit] (Tremeloes)
07 Right Wheel, Left Hammer, Sham [Edit] (Tremeloes)
08 Too Late to Be Saved (Tremeloes)
09 If You Ever (Tremeloes)
10 How Can You Say Goodbye (Tremeloes)
11 Do I Love You (Tremeloes)
12 Gotta Get Away (Tremeloes)
13 Hands Off [Edit] (Tremeloes)
14 I Like It That Way (Tremeloes)
15 Blue Suede Tie (Tremeloes)
16 Laura Lee (Tremeloes)
I'm not sure when or where the cover photo is from, but judging from their appearance, I think it's a good guess that it dates to the early 1970s.
Thanks for all The Tremeloes!!!
ReplyDelete