Blue Mink - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: 1970-1974

Here is the second and last of BBC sessions albums for the British band Blue Mink.

As mentioned in the write-up for "Volume 1," Blue Mink was fairly popular in Britain in the early 1970s, having six Top Ten hits there. However, they never had any commercial success in the U.S. During the time period of this album, they had three big British hits: "The Banner Man," "Stay with Me," and "Randy." This has versions of the first two, but not "Randy."

Everything here is officially unreleased. Like "Volume 1," nearly all of it comes from BBC studio sessions, thanks to an anonymous friend who send the music to me. There are only two exceptions. "The Banner Man" comes from the "Whittaker's World of Music" BBC TV show, and "By the Devil (I Was Tempted)" comes from the "Cilla" BBC TV Show. 

The great thing about all the BBC sessions sources is the sound quality is excellent. The downside is BBC DJs were still in the habit of talking over the starts and ends of songs. So I had to fix that in the usual way, using the MVSEP audio editing program. That's why many of the songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

Blue Mink's commercial success petered out after 1973. They had no songs that made the charts in 1974, and they broke up at the end of that year. But actually, except for the last song, which is from 1974, all the others here are from 1971 and 1972, when they were more popular. They may well have had more BBC sessions after 1972. However, around that time, the BBC began switching to just playing the record versions of songs. I'm not interested in posting that. So that's probably why their BBC appearances stopped after that, other than the occasional BBC TV show appearance.

This album is 48 minutes long. 

01 Mind Your Business [Edit] (Blue Mink)
02 Our World (Blue Mink)
03 Cat House [Edit] (Blue Mink)
04 Everybody's Singing like Now [Edit] (Blue Mink)
05 Live with Life [Edit] (Blue Mink)
06 Something [Edit] (Blue Mink)
07 We Have All Been Saved [Edit] (Blue Mink)
08 The Banner Man (Blue Mink)
09 Sunday (Blue Mink)
10 Count Me In [Edit] (Blue Mink)
11 Mayday [Edit] (Blue Mink)
12 Wacky, Wacky, Wacky (Blue Mink)
13 Just Goes to Show (Blue Mink)
14 Stay with Me (Blue Mink)
15 By the Devil [I Was Tempted] (Blue Mink)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sYPYVgLE

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/EFQfVAaI75iIVz4/file

The cover image shows the band performing on an unknown TV show in April 1971. The image focuses on the band's two lead singers, Roger Cook and Madeline Bell.

Blue Mink - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1968-1970

I'm trying to prioritize posting BBC recordings from the 1960s and early 1970s that remain unreleased. Here's another collection of that. I've found enough for two volumes of BBC recordings by the band Blue Mink. Here's the first one.

If you've never heard of this band, here's their Wikipedia entry intro: "Blue Mink were a British six-piece pop group that existed from 1969 to 1977. Over that period they had six top 20 hit singles on the U.K. Singles Chart, and released five studio based albums. According to AllMusic: 'they have been immortalized on a string of compilation albums, each recounting the string of effervescent hits that established them among Britain's best-loved pop groups of the early 1970s.'" 

They're much better known in Britain than the U.S., because they had a bunch of hits in Britain, as mentioned above, but no hits at all in the U.S. They had two lead singers, Roger Cook and Madeline Bell. Both of them have appeared elsewhere in this music blog. Cook was one half of a songwriting team with Roger Greenaway. I've profiled their songwriting in the "Covered" series, as you can see here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2025/02/covered-roger-cook-roger-greenaway.html

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2025/02/covered-roger-cook-roger-greenaway_14.html

Cook and Greenaway generally wrote most of the songs for Blue Mink. But while Cook was a good lead vocalist, Madeline Bell sang just as much or more than he did. She was a Black American who had lived in Britain since the early 1960s. She was able to bring authentic American soul music vocals into the band's sound. So the hit songwriting of Cook and Greenaway plus the vocals of Bell was a powerful combination that separated this band from most other similar pop bands in Britain at the time.

Most of the songs here come from excellent sounding BBC studio session recordings given to me by a musical associate. I don't think these have been widely publicly available until now. One problem though was that BBC DJs in this time period often talked over the starts and ends of songs. In fact, of all the BBC studio session songs here, EVERY SINGLE ONE had BBC DJ talking over it! But I was able to get rid of that talking in the usual way, with the use of the MVSEP audio editing program. That's why all but the first two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

The first two songs are not from the BBC. In fact, they are from Blue Mink even formed as a group. But Madeline Bell had a solo career going on before, during, and after her time in Blue Mink. These two songs are from an obscure U.S. T.V. show in 1968 called "Live at the Bitter End." It showed live performances at the Bitter End venue in New York City. These two songs only featured Bell singing live lead vocals over recorded instrumentation, but I thought they were worth including anyway. 

Also, later in the album, there was one BBC session of three songs featuring Bell from her solo career. So I included them here as well.

In case you're not familiar with Blue Mink's music, the two big hits they had in Britain during the time span on this volume were "Melting Pot" and "Good Morning Freedom." Both of those are included here.

This album is 41 minutes long. 

01 I'm Gonna Make You Love Me [Live Lead Vocals Only] (Madeline Bell)
02 Picture Me Gone [Live Lead Vocals Only] (Madeline Bell)
03 Melting Pot [Edit] (Blue Mink)
04 Gimme Reggae [Edit] (Blue Mink)
05 The Onion Song [Edit] (Blue Mink)
06 Mary Jane [Edit] (Blue Mink)
07 Good Morning Freedom [Edit] (Blue Mink)
08 Morning Dew [Edit] (Blue Mink)
09 Proud Mary [Edit] (Blue Mink)
10 Country Chick [Edit] (Blue Mink)
11 How Much Do I Love You [Edit] (Madeline Bell)
12 You're Messing Up My Mind [Edit] (Madeline Bell)
13 We're So Much in Love [Edit] (Madeline Bell)
14 Jubilation [Edit] (Blue Mink)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RJEnuDXi 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/0GNgfn7HtOOWiHy/file

The cover image shows Blue Mink in 1970. I don't know who all the band members are. But in front is Roger Cook (with the beard) and Madeline Bell (with the Coca Cola T-shirt). 

Various Artists - Covered: Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway, Volume 2: 1971-1998

Here's the second of two "Covered" albums featuring the songwriting talents of Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway.

This album starts in the early 1970s, with Cook and Greenaway continuing their successful songwriting partnership begun around 1965. They did very well in the early 1970s, as more pop groups made the charts with songs written by professional songwriters like them. One particular highlight was "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)" by the Hollies, mainly written by Hollies vocalist Allan Clarke with Cook, although Greenaway got credited too. Although it didn't reach Number One in the U.S. or Britain, it ended up being one of the best selling songs of the year.

Their partnership was shook up in 1975. Apparently, Cook really got into country music, so much so that he decided to move from Britain to Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of the country music business. He has apparently lived there ever since. (Both Cook and Greenaway are still alive as I write this in 2025.) Cook's move really hurt their songwriting partnership, due to sheer communication difficulties, as well as Cook's new focus on country music. I believe they still wrote some songs together, but a lot less than before. Greenaway wrote with some other professional songwriters, like Geoff Stevens and Barry Mason. But he had less success after the 1970s, and switched mostly to business administration in music companies. 

Meanwhile, Greenaway also had less success than before after the 1970s, but he still had some hits through the end of the 1990s, mostly on the country charts. In 1997, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the first person from Britain to do so.

As I mentioned in Volume 1, there are many more hit songs I could have included, but didn't. I wanted to keep this to the best of the best. But here's a list of all the hit songs Cook and/or Greenaway was involved in:

List of songs written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - Wikipedia

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Something Tells Me [Something's Gonna Happen Tonight] (Cilla Black)
02 Long Cool Woman [In a Black Dress] (Hollies)
03 Softly Whispering I Love You (English Congregation)
04 Like Sister and Brother (Drifters)
05 Blame It on the Pony Express (Peter Noone)
06 Kissin' in the Back Row of the Movies (Drifters)
07 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 [Blow Your Whistle] (Gary Toms Empire)
08 Jeans On (David Dundas)
09 You're More than a Number in My Little Red Book (Drifters)
10 I Believe in You (Don Williams)
11 Talking in Your Sleep (Crystal Gayle)
12 Love Is on a Roll (Don Williams)
13 One Night at a Time (George Strait)
14 I Just Want to Dance with You (George Strait)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/inQkfLA5

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/2dV4QBt3x9eekMD/file

The cover photo shows Cook and Greenaway in 1972. That's Greenaway on the left and Cook on the right. This originally was a black and white photo. But I colorized it using the Palette program.

Various Artists - Covered: Roger Cook & Roger Greenaway, Volume 1: 1965-1971

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a "Songwriters' Circle" album that included Roger Cook performing some of the hit songs he wrote. I thought that would be a good occasion to post the two "Covered" series albums I've made of the many hits songs written by Cook and his frequent songwriting partner Roger Greenaway. Here's the first volume.

Both Cook and Greenaway were British. They first met while members of an obscure vocal group. They had a short but successful career of their own from 1965 to 1967 as "David and Jonathan," scoring hits with a cover of "Michelle" by the Beatles and their own "Lovers of the World Unite." In 1968, they decided to focus solely on songwriting. However, Cook was one of the two lead vocalists for the band Blue Mink from 1969 to 1974, and had some big hits with them. Greenaway also was briefly a member of the bands the Pipkins and Brotherhood of Man around that same time period.

However, despite such musical projects, their main attention and greatest success was with songwriting. They generally wrote all their songs together until 1975, when Cook moved to the U.S., and still wrote some together after that. But sometimes a third or fourth writer would get credited too. They had a big success right out the gate, when "You've Got Your Troubles" by the Fortunes reached the Top Ten in both the U.S. and Britain. After that, it was a rare year when they didn't have at least one big hit. I could have included many more hits, but their songs could get quite poppy and even cheesy at times, with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Andy Williams having hits with their songs. So I tried to limit this collection to songs with a wider appeal, though often still very poppy.

Probably the most famous, even notorious, song here is "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The song was originally written by Cook and Greenaway as "True Love and Apple Pie." It was released in 1971 by someone called Susan Shirley and went nowhere. Then Bill Backer, an advertising executive, happened to run into Cook and Billy Davis at an airport in Ireland. Davis was another songwriter who had written many soul hits, but by this time was mainly writing jingles for advertisements. Backer came up with the line "I'd like to buy the world a Coke," and suggested the others write a song with that line for a TV commercial. So Cook, Greenaway, and Davis reworked "True Love and Apple Pie" into "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing."

The resulting Coca Cola commercial, featuring a crowd of young people singing the song on a hilltop, went on to become of the most popular and well known commercials of all time. The TV show "Mad Men" even kind of had a finale that promptly featured it, decades later. Coca Cola made variations of the commercial for decades. But in 1971, it proved so popular as a song that people kept calling radio stations, asking just to play the music of the commercial! So the songwriters quickly rewrote the song, adding three verses and removing the Coke references. Two groups had huge hits with it, the Hillside Singers, and the New Seekers. The New Seekers version in particular hit Number One in many countries, and went on to sell 12 million copies, making it one of the most popular songs of all time.    

This album is 45 minutes long.

01 You've Got Your Troubles (Fortunes)
02 Lovers of the World Unite (David & Jonathan)
03 I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman (Whistling Jack Smith)
04 Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (Gene Pitney)
05 Melting Pot (Blue Mink)
06 Hallelujah (Deep Purple)
07 A Way of Life (Family Dogg)
08 Gasoline Alley Bred (Hollies)
09 My Baby Loves Lovin' (White Plains)
10 Home Lovin' Man (Andy Williams)
11 United We Stand (Brotherhood of Man)
12 Hey Willy (Hollies)
13 Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again (Fortunes)
14 I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (New Seekers)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/mX3SfA9R

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/rgPJC8FpMAx7UTu/file

The cover photo is from 1965. That's Greenaway on the left and Cook on the right. In the original image, Cook was holding a telephone receiver in one hand, on the side close to Greenaway. But I thought that didn't fit. So, with the magic of Photoshop, I erased the phone and the hand holding it.

Donovan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, & Roger Cook - Songwriters' Circle, Porchester Hall, London, Britain, 10-14-2011

I recently got a couple requests to post a BBC album by Buffy Sainte-Marie. I looked, and it seems there's only a couple of songs here and there, not nearly enough for an album. However, I remembered I have this, and I've been trying to make a point of posting more of these interesting "Songwriters' Circle" concerts. So here you are, with Donovan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Roger Cook.

As usual, this BBC TV program brought together three talented and famous singer-songwriters, and had them take turns performing their own songs in solo acoustic mode. In this case more than most episodes of this show, I feel the three musicians liked each other and the music they made. One can hear this with some of the between-song banter, as well as they way they supported each other on some songs with backing vocals and such. In the case of Donovan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, their musical connection went way back, because Donovan covered Sainte-Marie's song "Universal Soldier" in 1965 and had a hit with it, which was the first big commercial success for both him and Sainte-Marie.

I've posted a lot of Donovan's music at this blog already, with more planned to come, so I don't feel the need to introduce him. Sainte-Marie was one of the most famous female singer-songwriters in the 1960s and 70s. But while she had some success with her own songs, for instance "Soldier Blue" reached the Top Ten in Britain and many other countries in 1971, she's had more success with others covering her songs. The most prominent example of this is "Up Where We Belong." She started it, and it was finished off by two professional songwriters. A duet version by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes reached Number One in the U.S. singles chart in 1982, and was one of the biggest hits of the year.

I'm writing this in 2025. In recent years, Sainte-Marie has faced controversy because she prominently identified as Native American for her entire music career, but a 2023 investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) concluded that this wasn't true, and she is of English and Italian descent. She has since stated, "My mother told me that I was adopted and that I was Native, but there was no documentation as was common for Indigenous children at the time," and "I don't know where I'm from or who my birth parents are, and I will never know." She hasn't attempted to settle the dispute by publicly posting DNA results.

Here's her Wikipedia page if you want to know more:

Buffy Sainte-Marie - Wikipedia

Roger Cook never had a successful music career of his own. However, he was an extremely successful professional songwriter, writing dozens of hits from the 1960s to the 1980s, often in partnership with Roger Greenaway. I would say more, except I plan on posting his hits in my "Covered" songwriter series. So I'll wait for more of an explanation there.

Here's his Wikipedia page:

Roger Cook (songwriter) - Wikipedia

This unreleased concert has been available as a video on YouTube, but I haven't seen it as an audio bootleg. I found a high quality version of the video and converted that to audio, and broke it into mp3s.

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 Sunshine Superman (Donovan)
02 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
03 Until It's Time for You to Go (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
04 talk (Roger Cook)
05 Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart (Roger Cook)
06 talk (Donovan)
07 Catch the Wind (Donovan)
08 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
09 Codine (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
10 talk (Roger Cook)
11 You've Got Your Troubles (Roger Cook)
12 talk (Donovan)
13 Colours (Donovan)
14 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
15 Little Wheel Spin and Spin (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
16 talk (Roger Cook)
17 Talking in Your Sleep (Roger Cook)
18 talk (Donovan)
19 Lalena (Donovan)
20 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
21 I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
22 talk (Roger Cook)
23 I Believe in You (Roger Cook)
24 talk (Donovan)
25 Mellow Yellow (Donovan)
26 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
27 Up Where We Belong (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
28 talk (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
29 Universal Soldier (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
30 talk (Roger Cook)
31 I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (Roger Cook)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZPW7vK93

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/user/files/Anj3vGR3SMp1NMU/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. It's a screenshot I took from a YouTube video, so the quality isn't the best. I improved it slightly with the Krea AI program.