Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 21, 2011 14:46:52 GMT
The Doors Consumers' Guide, Part 1
"There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are the doors."
THE DOORS (Elektra 74007, released 1967).
Personnel: Jim Morrison – vocal/Ray Manzarek – organ, piano, bs/Robbie Krieger – gtr/John Densmore – drms. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Break On Through (To The Other Side)'/'Soul Kitchen'/'The Crystal Ship'/'Twentieth Century Fox'/'Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)'/'Light My Fire'/'Back Door Man'/'End Of The Night'/'Take It As It Comes'/'The End'
"THE WEST Is The Best" sang Jim Morrison in 1967 and anyone hearing this debut album for the first time would add, "And you'd better believe it". The Doors is maybe the most breathtaking introduction to a rock and roll career ever, a blueprint for what would become variations on several themes.
The sex, death, lyrical ambiguity roles are all here, beginning with the crisp menace of 'Break On Through', a deliberate statement of intent and the best possible musical corollary to the group name. Morrison and friend Dennis Jakob had already discussed the idea of forming a duo called The Doors; Open And Closed, working from William Blake's famous phrase: "There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors." (Aldous Huxley got there first with his dour mescaline treatise The Doors Of Perception, but no matter).
From the ashes of that, Rick and the Ravens (Manzarek plus brothers Rick and Jim) and The Psychedelic Rangers (Krieger and Densmore) came The Doors and this album. It was recorded at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, natch, by Paul Rothchild and master engineer Bruce Botnick, two men as influential on their superior aural impact as Jac Holzman was on their sophisticated, inbuilt quality control.
The result is an unparallelled electricity, the theatrical atmosphere of stage performance channelled into the urban blues menace that was The Doors. Morrison is a William Bonney vocalist, an upfront outlaw with hidden dimensions, and the group his technical foils; impossible to have one without the other, even if he tends to overshadow them by sheer weight of personality.
Their force lies in tension. Krieger wrote 'Light My Fire' but as Morrison tears it apart he's fighting to follow the acid guitar solo, the dramatic organ pursuit which threaten to eclipse an extraordinary vocal performance. Disintegrating sections of the song hold together in layers, always under control.
In that same year The Velvet Underground employ a similar hit and miss tactic all the time and delight in stumbling. The Doors stay just the right side of anarchy and will seldom veer away from their chosen pattern.
Morrison showcases his gentler, hedonistic nature with 'The Crystal Ship' and its thousand girls, its thousand thrills. An eerie, melancholy song beautifully sung ballad fashion, whatever an embarassed Nik Cohn thought.
Songs for swinging rockers came as a surprise after the raucous innuendo of 'Soul Kitchen' and the Ray Davies type humour of 'Twentieth Century Fox' but it's Morrison's poetic escapades that most often draw critical rebukes from those who view him as nothing more than a clever con-man.
In this case he raids Celine's 'Journey To The End Of The Night' (Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit) for 'End Of The Night'.
'The End' itself heralded another set of Morrisonian subjects, 11 minutes of murder, oedipal complex and reptilian alter ego. The snake is a metaphoric ally in solitude: "Desperately in need of some stranger's hand, in a desperate land."
Apart from Brecht and Weill's 'Alabama Song' and the Willie Dixon standard 'Back Door Man', this is intensely original material. The influences are negligible, emanating from a barely recognisable California. William Harvey's cover extends the With The Beatles album design and creates something unearthly in keeping with the music.
Time for the garage bands to close down.
STRANGE DAYS (Elektra 74014, released 1967)
Personnel as above. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Strange Days'/'You're Lost Little Girl'/'Love Me Two Times'/'Unhappy Girl'/'Horse Latitudes'/'Moonlight Drive'/'People Are Strange'/'My Eyes Have Seen You'/'I Can't See Your Face In My Mind'/'When The Music's Over'
STRANGE DAYS followed the first album into the American Top Five within four months, by which time Morrison had set his balls rolling at New Haven and been arrested for his trouble. Some of the songs are left over from their Columbia demo with Billy James; before Columbia, and The Whisky A-Go-Go, chickened out and rejected The Doors. (Ironically it was Love's Arthur Lee who recommended that Jac Holzman go and see them – an act Lee later regretted when The Doors took precedence over Love at Elektra and the country as a whole).
Again Harvey's cover artwork complements the mysterious quality of the music; a bunch of silent circus freaks grimace in a mews and each song is like a dream – some good, some hideous nightmares.
The title track takes the characters out of a box and brings them to life with a wispy, ethereally-treated voice. Densmore pumps the drums like hot blood seeping out of a torn vein. The music is innocuous but on edge and syncopated, as are most of the melodies, with Krieger and Manzarek still managing to draw out maximum texture from short, nervous songs.
Morrison's supposed revolutionary leanings come to the fore on 'When The Music's Over', a long and obvious finale in keeping with Jim's repeatedly inflammatory quotes for the press. The fact is that Morrison was already tired of being a mouthpiece for other people's inadequacy. He might sing, "We want the world and we want it now", but when asked by rock critic Richard Goldstein on National Educational TV if he still saw himself as an 'erotic politician' he replied, "That's just a catch phrase for journalists, that's all."
It seems to me that he was using the audience for convenience. As Mick Farren says, "He appeared to be performing in his own private movie" and here was the ideal vehicle. Get them along on the pretext of a concert, have them malleable and then kick the whole thing back as masochistically as possible.
It was this studied built-in obsolescence that lost The Doors so much support...but not yet. If one listens to the ecology rap at the close of the song ("What nave they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?") he sounds supremely sarcastic. The song revolves more around a one-to-one relationship, the outcome being self-evident:
"When the music's over, turn out the light."
Simple. The maniacal screaming and the group's feverish assault on just three instruments act as an energy outlet because until now Strange Days keeps deliberately mute and low key. The desired effect is thus achieved; gradual build-up to a prolonged draining climax.
Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek, no longer on a tasteful leash, launch into a destructive orgy to equal 'Light My Fire'. Meanwhile Jim thunders through petulantly – these being the two numbers where he really enjoyed disrupting the calm concentration of the musicians.
Often he'd incite the crowd beyond endurance, and be carried away in a seething mass of adulation while Krieger was involved in the intricate job of a solo.
'Horse Latitudes' is a minor failure, too much a self-conscious poem, but it cuts nicely into the placid good dream mood of 'Love Me Two Times' and 'You're Lost Little Girl'.
The lyrics to 'People Are Strange' revert to the guise of outcast in the city. (L.A.):
"People are strange when you're a stranger, faces seem ugly when you're alone. Women seem wicked, when you're unwanted, streets are uneven, when you're down."
The music on Strange Days shows The Doors at their most imaginative though not always their most powerful. Weird orientally tinged arrangements creep out and altogether there's a definite mystic cohesion which they never tried for again.
All in all, Strange Days was more flexible than the first record and had the added dimension of an outside bassist (The Doors didn't ever employ one full-time) Doug Lubahn, who made albums of his own for Elektra.
WAITING FOR THE SUN (Elektra 74024. released 1968).
Personnel: As above plus Doug Lubahn, Kerry Magness, Leroy Vinegar (all providing occasional bass). Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Hello I Love You'/'Love Street'/'Not To Touch The Earth'/'Summer's Almost Gone'/'Wintertime'/'Love'/'The Unknown Soldier'/'Spanish Caravan'/'My Wild Love'/'We Could Be So Good Together'/'Yes, The River Knows'/'Five To One'
BY NOW The Doors' commercial success was inevitably losing them some of their earlier clique following. It's no fun when everybody's hip...They'd made Morrison's hoped for 'million dollars' and were big business, bigger even than the Jefferson Airplane, once considered the 'in' group.
The fact that Morrison had been M.A.C.E.'d (tear gassed) at New Haven, Connecticut, did them no harm either, but a marked critical cabal, previously favourable, set to the new album with vengeful glee. "The Doors sell out". They were now so popular they qualified as 'Establishment', and that hurt.
In Britain this was the first record they promoted – by appearing live at London's Roundhouse – and they had their only hit single here with 'Hello I Love You', supposedly copped from The Kinks 'You Really Got Me'.
Inside was the full libretto to "The Celebration Of The Lizard", a diffuse narrative poem based on the beliefs of The Shaman and some of the obliquer fertility rites prevalent in the East.
Morrison had read Shamanism by Andreas Lommel and, no doubt, Frazer's The Golden Bough, but to translate those avenues of thought into exciting rock music was now a prime preoccupation. Plans for presenting "The Celebration" as theatre didn't reach fruition but he was able to make the film A Feast Of Friends with two UCLA companions.
Only one section, 'Not To Touch The Earth' is included on the album – either The Doors or Elektra had not yet decided on the best means of presentation. Neither does the title track appear until Morrison Hotel, though an American single 'The Unknown Soldier', created enough interest on its own account.
Carefully, or accidentally, released to coincide with the Yip-ins and the massed confrontations of Chicago and New York State, it stirred a controversy that turned to rebuke when Morrison kept quiet.
A four-minute promo film and a John Shepherd Granada documentary fanned the media flames but Jim remained conspicuous by his absence at any anti-Vietnam rallies. The song is not at all demagogic: instead it relies on straight description:
"Practice where the news is read, television children fed."
Morrison doesn't explicitly condemn the government, he goes the opposite way and romanticises the soldier's death as a welcome release, hence the bells at the end. Similarly, 'Five To One' maintains an ambiguous cloak of secrecy with at least three possible different interpretations of the song. If Jerry Rubin or the Panthers only recognised the violent angle, that was nothing to do with The Doors, though it suited them fine. Any publicity, as they say.
I think the song is mostly about Morrison's personal clashes with the law. At the end he starts a barely audible Bonny and Clyde type rap:
"You see I've got to go out in this car with these people."
With some exceptions Waiting For The Sun sounds like a rush job, fine when you play it to yourself but not too memorable. There again, Krieger plays magnificent classical guitar on 'Spanish Caravan' and the seasonal sadness of the combined 'Summer's Almost Gone'/'Wintertime Love' hark back to Jim the crooner. The overall impression is that Morrison had other things on his mind, notably "A Feast Of Friends", and this album (produced to deadline) suffered by necessity.
THE SOFT PARADE (Elektra EKS 75005, released 1969).
Personnel: As above plus Orchestral Arrangements Paul Harris. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Tell All The People'/'Touch Me'/'Shaman's Blues'/'Do It'/'Easy Ride'/'Wild Child'/'Runnin' Blue'/'Wishful Sinful'/'The Soft Parade'
THE YEAR 1969 was a bad one for The Doors. Firstly, there was the March 2nd Dinner Key Auditorium incident at Miami where Morrison allegedly exposed himself and yelled. "Why don't we have a revolution here". He escaped five warrants by departing for the Bahamas while outraged Floridians 'Rallied For Decency', led by Jackie Gleason.
Music-wise it was pretty mixed. The Soft Parade proved to be the last outing for pretty boy Morrison. He returned with a beard and paunch. The Doors heralded the changes with their most blatant pop album.
Paul Harris (later with Manassas) managed to submerge the group under some very untypical arrangements, while the Krieger songs aren't his most exciting. They even do a bluegrass tribute to Otis, 'Runnin' Blue', using Jimmy Buchanan and Jess McReynolds on fiddle and mandolin!
Some compensation for a noticeable lack of direction (the album took nine months to make) comes with 'The Soft Parade' and 'Shaman's Blues'. Guidelines to some of the ritualistic mystery herd were available in Morrison's first poetry collection, An American Prayer, once only available to friends but published in 1971 as The Lords and The New Creatures, an invaluable aid to fuller understanding of the lyrics.
The Shaman obsession reaches its zenith on the nine part 'Soft Parade', where a troupe of deranged characters lose their identity in a deadly modern hell, presumably Los Angeles. In a very exclusive conclusion Morrison emerges with companion as the only one prepared to find a Nietzsche-like superman. All part of his daily revolution:
"We need someone or something new
Something else to get us through."
For the collective pronoun read personal pronoun. "The spectator is a quiet vampire...the spectator is a dying animal". He wasn't going to be one.
The Doors don't sound at home trading licks inside the structured confines of jazzers Champ Webb and Curtis Amy. When you can hear them, as on 'Wild Child' or the delicious 'Wishful Sinful', they're almost as unique as ever.
Max Bell, NME, 4 October 1975
"There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are the doors."
THE DOORS (Elektra 74007, released 1967).
Personnel: Jim Morrison – vocal/Ray Manzarek – organ, piano, bs/Robbie Krieger – gtr/John Densmore – drms. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Break On Through (To The Other Side)'/'Soul Kitchen'/'The Crystal Ship'/'Twentieth Century Fox'/'Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)'/'Light My Fire'/'Back Door Man'/'End Of The Night'/'Take It As It Comes'/'The End'
"THE WEST Is The Best" sang Jim Morrison in 1967 and anyone hearing this debut album for the first time would add, "And you'd better believe it". The Doors is maybe the most breathtaking introduction to a rock and roll career ever, a blueprint for what would become variations on several themes.
The sex, death, lyrical ambiguity roles are all here, beginning with the crisp menace of 'Break On Through', a deliberate statement of intent and the best possible musical corollary to the group name. Morrison and friend Dennis Jakob had already discussed the idea of forming a duo called The Doors; Open And Closed, working from William Blake's famous phrase: "There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors." (Aldous Huxley got there first with his dour mescaline treatise The Doors Of Perception, but no matter).
From the ashes of that, Rick and the Ravens (Manzarek plus brothers Rick and Jim) and The Psychedelic Rangers (Krieger and Densmore) came The Doors and this album. It was recorded at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, natch, by Paul Rothchild and master engineer Bruce Botnick, two men as influential on their superior aural impact as Jac Holzman was on their sophisticated, inbuilt quality control.
The result is an unparallelled electricity, the theatrical atmosphere of stage performance channelled into the urban blues menace that was The Doors. Morrison is a William Bonney vocalist, an upfront outlaw with hidden dimensions, and the group his technical foils; impossible to have one without the other, even if he tends to overshadow them by sheer weight of personality.
Their force lies in tension. Krieger wrote 'Light My Fire' but as Morrison tears it apart he's fighting to follow the acid guitar solo, the dramatic organ pursuit which threaten to eclipse an extraordinary vocal performance. Disintegrating sections of the song hold together in layers, always under control.
In that same year The Velvet Underground employ a similar hit and miss tactic all the time and delight in stumbling. The Doors stay just the right side of anarchy and will seldom veer away from their chosen pattern.
Morrison showcases his gentler, hedonistic nature with 'The Crystal Ship' and its thousand girls, its thousand thrills. An eerie, melancholy song beautifully sung ballad fashion, whatever an embarassed Nik Cohn thought.
Songs for swinging rockers came as a surprise after the raucous innuendo of 'Soul Kitchen' and the Ray Davies type humour of 'Twentieth Century Fox' but it's Morrison's poetic escapades that most often draw critical rebukes from those who view him as nothing more than a clever con-man.
In this case he raids Celine's 'Journey To The End Of The Night' (Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit) for 'End Of The Night'.
'The End' itself heralded another set of Morrisonian subjects, 11 minutes of murder, oedipal complex and reptilian alter ego. The snake is a metaphoric ally in solitude: "Desperately in need of some stranger's hand, in a desperate land."
Apart from Brecht and Weill's 'Alabama Song' and the Willie Dixon standard 'Back Door Man', this is intensely original material. The influences are negligible, emanating from a barely recognisable California. William Harvey's cover extends the With The Beatles album design and creates something unearthly in keeping with the music.
Time for the garage bands to close down.
STRANGE DAYS (Elektra 74014, released 1967)
Personnel as above. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Strange Days'/'You're Lost Little Girl'/'Love Me Two Times'/'Unhappy Girl'/'Horse Latitudes'/'Moonlight Drive'/'People Are Strange'/'My Eyes Have Seen You'/'I Can't See Your Face In My Mind'/'When The Music's Over'
STRANGE DAYS followed the first album into the American Top Five within four months, by which time Morrison had set his balls rolling at New Haven and been arrested for his trouble. Some of the songs are left over from their Columbia demo with Billy James; before Columbia, and The Whisky A-Go-Go, chickened out and rejected The Doors. (Ironically it was Love's Arthur Lee who recommended that Jac Holzman go and see them – an act Lee later regretted when The Doors took precedence over Love at Elektra and the country as a whole).
Again Harvey's cover artwork complements the mysterious quality of the music; a bunch of silent circus freaks grimace in a mews and each song is like a dream – some good, some hideous nightmares.
The title track takes the characters out of a box and brings them to life with a wispy, ethereally-treated voice. Densmore pumps the drums like hot blood seeping out of a torn vein. The music is innocuous but on edge and syncopated, as are most of the melodies, with Krieger and Manzarek still managing to draw out maximum texture from short, nervous songs.
Morrison's supposed revolutionary leanings come to the fore on 'When The Music's Over', a long and obvious finale in keeping with Jim's repeatedly inflammatory quotes for the press. The fact is that Morrison was already tired of being a mouthpiece for other people's inadequacy. He might sing, "We want the world and we want it now", but when asked by rock critic Richard Goldstein on National Educational TV if he still saw himself as an 'erotic politician' he replied, "That's just a catch phrase for journalists, that's all."
It seems to me that he was using the audience for convenience. As Mick Farren says, "He appeared to be performing in his own private movie" and here was the ideal vehicle. Get them along on the pretext of a concert, have them malleable and then kick the whole thing back as masochistically as possible.
It was this studied built-in obsolescence that lost The Doors so much support...but not yet. If one listens to the ecology rap at the close of the song ("What nave they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?") he sounds supremely sarcastic. The song revolves more around a one-to-one relationship, the outcome being self-evident:
"When the music's over, turn out the light."
Simple. The maniacal screaming and the group's feverish assault on just three instruments act as an energy outlet because until now Strange Days keeps deliberately mute and low key. The desired effect is thus achieved; gradual build-up to a prolonged draining climax.
Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek, no longer on a tasteful leash, launch into a destructive orgy to equal 'Light My Fire'. Meanwhile Jim thunders through petulantly – these being the two numbers where he really enjoyed disrupting the calm concentration of the musicians.
Often he'd incite the crowd beyond endurance, and be carried away in a seething mass of adulation while Krieger was involved in the intricate job of a solo.
'Horse Latitudes' is a minor failure, too much a self-conscious poem, but it cuts nicely into the placid good dream mood of 'Love Me Two Times' and 'You're Lost Little Girl'.
The lyrics to 'People Are Strange' revert to the guise of outcast in the city. (L.A.):
"People are strange when you're a stranger, faces seem ugly when you're alone. Women seem wicked, when you're unwanted, streets are uneven, when you're down."
The music on Strange Days shows The Doors at their most imaginative though not always their most powerful. Weird orientally tinged arrangements creep out and altogether there's a definite mystic cohesion which they never tried for again.
All in all, Strange Days was more flexible than the first record and had the added dimension of an outside bassist (The Doors didn't ever employ one full-time) Doug Lubahn, who made albums of his own for Elektra.
WAITING FOR THE SUN (Elektra 74024. released 1968).
Personnel: As above plus Doug Lubahn, Kerry Magness, Leroy Vinegar (all providing occasional bass). Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Hello I Love You'/'Love Street'/'Not To Touch The Earth'/'Summer's Almost Gone'/'Wintertime'/'Love'/'The Unknown Soldier'/'Spanish Caravan'/'My Wild Love'/'We Could Be So Good Together'/'Yes, The River Knows'/'Five To One'
BY NOW The Doors' commercial success was inevitably losing them some of their earlier clique following. It's no fun when everybody's hip...They'd made Morrison's hoped for 'million dollars' and were big business, bigger even than the Jefferson Airplane, once considered the 'in' group.
The fact that Morrison had been M.A.C.E.'d (tear gassed) at New Haven, Connecticut, did them no harm either, but a marked critical cabal, previously favourable, set to the new album with vengeful glee. "The Doors sell out". They were now so popular they qualified as 'Establishment', and that hurt.
In Britain this was the first record they promoted – by appearing live at London's Roundhouse – and they had their only hit single here with 'Hello I Love You', supposedly copped from The Kinks 'You Really Got Me'.
Inside was the full libretto to "The Celebration Of The Lizard", a diffuse narrative poem based on the beliefs of The Shaman and some of the obliquer fertility rites prevalent in the East.
Morrison had read Shamanism by Andreas Lommel and, no doubt, Frazer's The Golden Bough, but to translate those avenues of thought into exciting rock music was now a prime preoccupation. Plans for presenting "The Celebration" as theatre didn't reach fruition but he was able to make the film A Feast Of Friends with two UCLA companions.
Only one section, 'Not To Touch The Earth' is included on the album – either The Doors or Elektra had not yet decided on the best means of presentation. Neither does the title track appear until Morrison Hotel, though an American single 'The Unknown Soldier', created enough interest on its own account.
Carefully, or accidentally, released to coincide with the Yip-ins and the massed confrontations of Chicago and New York State, it stirred a controversy that turned to rebuke when Morrison kept quiet.
A four-minute promo film and a John Shepherd Granada documentary fanned the media flames but Jim remained conspicuous by his absence at any anti-Vietnam rallies. The song is not at all demagogic: instead it relies on straight description:
"Practice where the news is read, television children fed."
Morrison doesn't explicitly condemn the government, he goes the opposite way and romanticises the soldier's death as a welcome release, hence the bells at the end. Similarly, 'Five To One' maintains an ambiguous cloak of secrecy with at least three possible different interpretations of the song. If Jerry Rubin or the Panthers only recognised the violent angle, that was nothing to do with The Doors, though it suited them fine. Any publicity, as they say.
I think the song is mostly about Morrison's personal clashes with the law. At the end he starts a barely audible Bonny and Clyde type rap:
"You see I've got to go out in this car with these people."
With some exceptions Waiting For The Sun sounds like a rush job, fine when you play it to yourself but not too memorable. There again, Krieger plays magnificent classical guitar on 'Spanish Caravan' and the seasonal sadness of the combined 'Summer's Almost Gone'/'Wintertime Love' hark back to Jim the crooner. The overall impression is that Morrison had other things on his mind, notably "A Feast Of Friends", and this album (produced to deadline) suffered by necessity.
THE SOFT PARADE (Elektra EKS 75005, released 1969).
Personnel: As above plus Orchestral Arrangements Paul Harris. Produced: Paul A. Rothchild. 'Tell All The People'/'Touch Me'/'Shaman's Blues'/'Do It'/'Easy Ride'/'Wild Child'/'Runnin' Blue'/'Wishful Sinful'/'The Soft Parade'
THE YEAR 1969 was a bad one for The Doors. Firstly, there was the March 2nd Dinner Key Auditorium incident at Miami where Morrison allegedly exposed himself and yelled. "Why don't we have a revolution here". He escaped five warrants by departing for the Bahamas while outraged Floridians 'Rallied For Decency', led by Jackie Gleason.
Music-wise it was pretty mixed. The Soft Parade proved to be the last outing for pretty boy Morrison. He returned with a beard and paunch. The Doors heralded the changes with their most blatant pop album.
Paul Harris (later with Manassas) managed to submerge the group under some very untypical arrangements, while the Krieger songs aren't his most exciting. They even do a bluegrass tribute to Otis, 'Runnin' Blue', using Jimmy Buchanan and Jess McReynolds on fiddle and mandolin!
Some compensation for a noticeable lack of direction (the album took nine months to make) comes with 'The Soft Parade' and 'Shaman's Blues'. Guidelines to some of the ritualistic mystery herd were available in Morrison's first poetry collection, An American Prayer, once only available to friends but published in 1971 as The Lords and The New Creatures, an invaluable aid to fuller understanding of the lyrics.
The Shaman obsession reaches its zenith on the nine part 'Soft Parade', where a troupe of deranged characters lose their identity in a deadly modern hell, presumably Los Angeles. In a very exclusive conclusion Morrison emerges with companion as the only one prepared to find a Nietzsche-like superman. All part of his daily revolution:
"We need someone or something new
Something else to get us through."
For the collective pronoun read personal pronoun. "The spectator is a quiet vampire...the spectator is a dying animal". He wasn't going to be one.
The Doors don't sound at home trading licks inside the structured confines of jazzers Champ Webb and Curtis Amy. When you can hear them, as on 'Wild Child' or the delicious 'Wishful Sinful', they're almost as unique as ever.
Max Bell, NME, 4 October 1975