The Tornados - Love & Fury : The Holloway Road Sessions 1962-1966

The Tornados got their start when Joe Meek needed a second in-house band to help with the large amount of work that The Outlaws were handling for him.  One of the first musicians to audition was Heinz (check out his Tea Chest Tapes box set - Heinz: The White Tornado – The Holloway Road Sessions 1963-1966).  He initially was almost made a member of The Outlaws, but when he auditioned, Chas Hodges, one of the band’s members, felt his bass playing wasn’t good enough, so Meek built The Tornados around him.  From 1962 to 1966, The Tornados (in numerous incarnations) were mainstays at Meek's studio at 304 Holloway Rd.  They were also Billy Fury's permanent backing band for live performances and in 1962 were the first British group to top the billboard charts (a year before The Beatles) with the song "Telstar".  It should also be noted that over the course of those years there were many membership changes and at the end there were no original members in the band.  Also, while they started as an instrumental band, in 1963 they started adding vocals in order to compete with the Mersey Sound.  They are the focus of Love & Fury: The Holloway Road Sessions 1962-1966, which contains 131 track on five CD’s with 119 being previously unreleased, and is the latest in Cherry Red’s outstanding series of Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes releases.

Through a variety of alternate and original speed versions, backing tracks and pre-overdubs, disc one covers the Telstar album, which combined their first three UK EP's for the US market, disc two covers the follow-up Away From It All and the third and fourth discs cover sessions recorded for their various singles.  As with the prior Tea Chest Tapes releases, they are fascinating glimpses into Meek’s genius and the bits and pieces that would eventually come together to create the final songs.  He often sped up the recordings and to me a lot of the more interesting tracks are the ones released here at their original speed, which honestly usually sound a lot better and more natural.  There are also interesting and offbeat tracks like the sound effects tape for “Telstar”, which actually evolved from the sessions for Joe Meek and the Blue Men’s I Hear A New World album, and a sped up, pre-sound effects version of “Telstar”.   A few others include the session for the intro speech to “Life On Venus” as well as a recording of the special effects used as the intro for that song.  

That brings us to disc number five, titled Demos, Unreleased and Curios, an outstanding collection of various odds and ends.  Kicking things off are nine demos and writing sessions that show the earliest days of six different Tornados songs.  Most of these contain Meek on vocals and if you are familiar with any of the previous Tea Chest Tapes releases you will definitely recognize his off key singing.  A couple of tracks that are especially notable are demos of “Telstar”, one with him caterwauling the non-lyrics over the backing track for Geoff Goddard’s “Try Once More” and another recorded over Mike Berry’s “Every Little Kiss”.   His frequent collaborator Dave Adams assisted on a few of these tracks, and he also plays a great version of “Indian Brave” on organ, that comes across more like a sea shanty.  Since the band was Billy Fury’s backing band, they had rehearsals at Meek’s studio and next up are four tracks recorded at one of these rehearsals.  The band and Fury sound fantastic together here, especially when they tear through “Go Go Go” (Move On Down The Line)”.  Originally released on the soundtrack to the movie Just For Fun, the twinkling, somewhat spacey sounds of the hypnotic “All The Stars In The Sky” is here at its original speed.  The remaining tracks are various takes of twelve songs that were never official releases, although many showed up on compilations or bootlegs.  One major highlight is a crystal clear take on “Lullaby Of The Stars”, an infectious instrumental that has been bootlegged over the years, but always in deliberately slurred versions.  There are also takes of the more Mersey Beat sounding "Alright Alright", "Hurtin' Inside", "Fortune Teller" and "You Can Make It If You Try" that came from a recently discovered tape box and are quite different than the bootleg versions already out there.  The grandiose “Lawrence Of Arabia” is an epic sounding track that was recorded in 1966 and is one of the few Tea Chest Tapes tracks recorded in stereo (some think it was recorded somewhere besides Meek’s 304 Holloway Road studio).  It was supposed to be a double A-side single along with “No More You And Me”, a stunning, prog-tinged hard rocker that was a complete shift in direction for the band, made more notable by fuzzbox drenched overdubs provided by Ritchie Blackmore.  It would be interesting to see where this single would have taken the band, but unfortunately it was never released due to Meek’s death.  Closing things out are a couple takes on the newly discovered “You Always Did What You Wanted”, a more mature sounding track highlighted with some gorgeous piano runs.  Rounded out with a CD booklet with very comprehensive notes from The Joe Meek's Society's Craig Newton and previously unseen photos, this is another winner from the Tea Chest Tapes series.  

(Cherry Red Records)