(* as part of Love Sculpture )
Chart entered : 27 November 1968
Chart peak : 5
Number of hits : 13 ( just this one with Love Sculpture. Dave also played on three hits credited to Nick Lowe because the existence of their group Rockpile couldn't be legally acknowledged on a record label. )
Another Peel favourite but this time introducing us to one of the least pretentious artists in the whole story.
Dave was born in Cardiff in 1944. He was in a string of local bands from the age of 10 initially with his older brother Geoff. He first encountered the other Sculptors, drummer Bob "Congo" Jones and bassist John Williams in a band called The Raiders in the early sixties. After a brief spell in the band The Image ( Dave is not on any of their three singles for Parlophone ) he formed the band Human Beans in 1966 with Jones and Williams and another guitarist Mickey Gee. Their only single in June 1967 was a cover of the post-apocalypse folk rock standard "Morning Dew" written by Bonnie Dobson but popularised by The Grateful Dead and first played at the Human Be-In concert at the beginning of 1967. That would suggest the Dead's version was the most influential but the Welsh lads' version is faster and heavier. The vocal appears to be shared as the verses don't sound like Dave.
At the end of the year Gee left , apparently amicably since he frequently worked with Dave in the seventies, and the band re-christened themselves as Love Sculpture. Dave now began a long and fruitful association with the brothers Charles and Kingsley Ward who had briefly worked with Joe Meek and been inspired to set up their own recording studio on their farm in Wales. The name Rockfield was Dave's suggestion. They wrote and produced the first Love Sculpture single "River To Another Day" which is classic British pyschedelia in Pictures Of Matchstick Men vein ( Dave's nasal voice isn't too far removed from Rossi's ) with liberal use of phasing and backwards effects. They moved from Quo to Fleetwood Mac for their second single which was a blues cover , Willie Dixon's "Wang Dang Doodle", which rests on Williams' creeping bassline with Dave playing around it. It's OK but I think Mac would have done something more inventive with it.
"Sabre Dance" was their third single. It's an adaptation of a classical piece by Khachaturian inspired by Keith Emerson's re-arrangements with The Nice. Played at a lunatic pace, they first tried it out in a session for Top Gear in September 1968. Peel was so impressed he played it twice and the public response was such that the band raced back to Rockfield to record it. It must have been a close thing as to what was sorest , Dave's fingertips or Bob's wrists at the end of it. Forty-five years later it still sounds an extreme record and a credit to the 1968 public.
If I can slip a personal anecdote in here, I used this to pose around to with a borrowed acoustic as a prelude to my act in the Bishop Henshaw School Sixth Form Review in December 1982 to a muted response from the audience ( I didn't subject them to the whole five minutes ). The main part of the act was a Top 20 countdown setting song titles to appropriate teachers which got some laughs although I suffered from having done the same thing - with different jokes- the year before so it wouldn't have been fresh to 4/5 of the school. Incidentally I think Dave's mate Nick Lowe might have got into one of the charts with I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass being applied to science teacher Mr Doyle who was notoriously clumsy when demonstrating experiments.
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere sometime that the tape was sped up in the studio, to add more excitement. Must have added pressure on replicating it on stage!
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