Glass Menagerie - BBC Sessions (1968-1969)

The Internet is amazing. (But you already knew that, I'm sure.) Just yesterday, I'd never even heard of the band Glass Menagerie. Then I happened to stumble across their anthology album and saw that they had enough BBC sessions to make up and album. Since they were a late 1960s British band dabbling in poppy and psychedelic rock sounds, I figured it was a given I'd like their stuff, and I was right. A couple hours later, I'd listened to all their music, edited all their BBC sessions, made the cover art, and here you are.

The reason I'd never heard of the British band Glass Menagerie is because they're pretty damn obscure. They never released an album while they were together, though that anthology I mentioned came out decades later. They only released five singles, and none of them came close to being hits. In retrospect, it's kind of remarkable that they got as much BBC exposure as they did.

Perhaps that had something to do with how good they were with cover versions. The BBC seemed to really like that. For instance, the obscure band Orange Bicycle got to perform dozens and dozens of BBC sessions mostly because they could do covers of musical acts that the BBC usually couldn't get on air much, if at all. Seven of the 18 songs here are covers of then-recent, popular songs. But note that still leaves the lion shares as originals. This band definitely had talent with their own material.

This band is so obscure that they don't seem to even have a Wikipedia page. (Or at least I can't find it. Unfortunately, there are many other things called "Glass Menagerie," so maybe I couldn't get past that.) If that's so, I don't think I've ever come across that before while looking up musical acts for this blog. Instead, here's a link to a blog that has a long write-up about the band's history:

Glass Menagerie

In short, they really only recorded for two years, 1968 and 1969. Musical tastes were changing and the band seemed to be going nowhere fast. So they broke up in early 1970 and generally joined other bands. Their main vocalist and songwriter, Lou Stonebridge, joined a new band called Paladin. They had a couple of prog rock albums in the early 1970s before breaking up as well. One band member effectively joined the Bee Gees and stuck with them through "Saturday Night Fever" and long after that.

Most of the songs here come from the anthology mentioned above, called "Have You Forgotten Who We Are?" But surprisingly, that left out some songs that I found elsewhere. There even was one John Peel session where only two of the four songs were chosen for the anthology, and the other two had just as good sound quality. Five of the songs here are unreleased (plus the bonus track). The songs had the usual problem of the era, that BBC DJs liked to talk over the beginnings and the ends. I did my usual thing of using the UVR5 program to wipe out that talking while keeping the music. Those are all the songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. A couple of the unreleased songs don't sound as good as the rest, but they weren't that far off.

The one song that sounded really rough is the one relegated to bonus track status: "Love Me Two Times (Long Version)." Note that I actually have this song as the fourth track too. The bonus track is the exact same performance, except that version is six minutes long, and the fourth track version is less than three minutes long. What happened is that the long version was recorded for a John Peel session. But some songs from that were later selected to be rebroadcast for the more poppy "Top of the Pops" radio show, and a drastic cut was made, loping off a big jammy section in the middle. The short version survived in excellent sound quality and made it onto the official anthology, but I could only find a rough sounding version of the long version. However, it seems a better quality of the long version does exist, on a grey market album simply called "BBC Sessions," the same as my album title. If anyone has that, please let me go, because I couldn't find it.

This album is an hour and two minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 She's a Rainbow (Glass Menagerie)
02 Run Out of Time [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
03 Somebody to Love [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
04 Love Me Two Times [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
05 Dear Mr. Fantasy (Glass Menagerie)
06 One More Heartache (Glass Menagerie)
07 You Didn't Have to Be So Nice (Glass Menagerie)
08 I Said Goodbye to Me [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
09 I Can't Quit Her [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
10 Do My Thing Myself [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
11 Frederick Jordan (Glass Menagerie)
12 Watching the World Pass By (Glass Menagerie)
13 Putting It Off Till Another Day (Glass Menagerie)
14 Chequebook Girl (Glass Menagerie)
15 Life Is Getting It Together (Glass Menagerie)
16 She Came from Hell (Glass Menagerie)
17 Have You Forgotten Who You Are [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)
18 Do You Ever Think [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)

Love Me Two Times [Long Version] [Edit] (Glass Menagerie)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/WCW1ouCr

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/WYsjWFNLlu2l8f4/file

I couldn't find any color photos of the band. Not even the colorful and well illustrated anthology booklet has one, so there probably aren't any. But I did find a good black and white one. I colorized that using the Kolorize program, then I improved it some more with the Krea AI program.