Chart entered : 14 May 1969
Chart peak : 23
This single came less than a year after their sole number one "The Legend Of Xanadu" but Dave Dee's lot too fell victim to the end-of-decade cull.
Like all their previous hits this one was written by the Howard - Blaikley partnership and like all the others I don't care for it much. The vaguely threatening nature of the lyrics is entirely neutralised by the relentlessly jolly tune and arrangement and the silly "ah-ahs" after every line. It's pure cheese aimed at the pop slot on children's programmes like Blue Peter. You can tell from the TV performance currently on youtube that while Dave Dee is giving his usual annoyingly chirpy routine the rest of the band are thoroughly hacked off with him, the material or both. Famously when it was covered for one of those awful Top Of The Pops cheap cover albums the session singer used was a certain Elton John. He couldn't improve it.
After this single the band had to re-group when Dave Dee decided to go solo in September 1969. They renamed themselves D.B.M & T and carried on as before with Howard and Blaikley releasing "Tonight Today" in November 1969. Well I say carried on as before but the single is a very strange item which starts off with Dozy doing a deep bass chant expressing confusion at the headlines before Beaky and Tich sing their own lines over the top so you have three different melody lines before they come together for the chorus. It's interesting but not too confusing to be a hit. When they performed it on Beat Club they were introduced by a stand-in presenter, Dave Dee !
At the start of the new decade he was ready to go with his first solo single "My Woman's Man" also written by Howard and Blaikley , in January 1970. It's a decent stab at Tony Christie - style cabaret pop and gave him a minor hit ( number 42 ). For his next single he chose to record a song he'd co-written with his friend David Mason. "I'm Going Back" is more of a rock single, with a pummelling piano riff and ELO-ish high harmonies, which is certainly hitworthy but perhaps confused his audience. In June he retreated back to pop with "Annabella" written by the Martin-Arnold-Morrow partnership ( Billy Fury, Cliff , Cilla ). It's a terrific song and well performed ; once again you feel the singer's associations must have told against him. Fontana had seen enough and let him go off to Philips.
In July his former bandmates released their next single , the self-written "Mr President" which sounds like they'd been listening to a lot of Crosby, Stills and Nash until the Moog synthesiser washes come in. It's not a great song but sounded different enough to become a hit ( number 33 ). Around the same time they had a covert reunion with Dave under the guise of "Cheep Boots" as he was now contracted to Philips although "Baby Do I Need You " has his name on the label as both co-composer and producer. As it wasn't a hit no one was too bothered.
Dave put out his first single on Philips in October. "Everything About Her" was written by Howard and Blaikley and is a big production ballad with strings and gospel singers. Dave's voice holds up but it still fell on deaf ears. I haven't heard the next band effort "Festival " from November but am told it borrowed rather heavily from Whole Lotta Love.
Dave's next effort was "Wedding Bells " in March 1971, a jolly Howard/ Blaikley tune . The band followed in May with "I Want To Be There" a tune they wrote together with their old mentors which I haven't heard nor Dave's next effort, "Hold On". His last new single "Swingy" from December 1971 anticipates Glitter with its double-tracked drum thump and simple tune but he wasn't going to get any more chances. Philips acquired the rights to re-release "My Woman's Man" a few months later but that was it for Dave's solo career.
The band didn't last much longer. In February 1972 they reinstated the nicknames and released "They Won't Sing My Song" a Cook Greenaway number as Dozy Beaky Mick and Tich. It sounds like Lindisfarne backing a tone deaf singer with a protest song whose tune has been pilfered from Streets Of Laredo . I don't know whose terrible vocal it is but he certainly scuppered any chance it had.
Shortly afterwards the band called it a day and relocated their families to Spain where they ran a club for a number of years but it seems like they were all reluctant to leave the stage and would make a number of attempts at a comeback over the next decade. Dave stayed in the record business as a successful A & R man for WEA. He had at least a hand in signing AC/DC, Boney M and Gary Numan. In 1974 he was given his own sub-label Antic to play with and he called back the others for a comeback single in September "She's My Lady" which is a decent soft rock effort that sounds like latter day Hollies. Unfortunately like all other releases on Antic ( which operated until 1978 ) it wasn't a hit. It was the last thing the original line up did together.
Dave subsequently became involved in the Nordoff Robins Music Therapy charity for which he campaigned for over 30 years. In November 1979 he joined the others, minus Mick Wilson who no longer wanted to be involved and was replaced as "Mick" by Peter Lucas, for a new single "You've Got Me On The Run", but only as a producer. It's a credible pop-rock effort in the style of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers but with the Mod Revival throwing up all manner of new power pop contenders for radio play these old stagers didn't get a look in. I don't think Dave was involved in their 1980 single "In The Coven" which was written by Lucas, produced by Nick Tauber and sounds like Status Quo. That year Dave made a brief - and quite possibly unwitting - appearance as a record company executive in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock And Roll Swindle.
Dave did return in November 1983 for the single "Staying With It", the last one to go out under the original banner. It was a cover of a 1978 American hit by the rock band Firefall and is just a ghastly Toto / Starship / Asia generic FM rocker with screechy synths and an off-the-peg guitar solo. As I said earlier I'm not a great fan of the band's hits but even so this sounds demeaning. As far as I can tell the guys ( without Dave ) released just one more single in the Netherlands , a cover of "Matthew And Son " in 1986. What the Dutch did to deserve this horror which features some of the nastiest synth sounds on record and is worthy of a fatwa , I can hardly guess.
In 1989 John Dymond ended his involvement with the group , forming a local band to play the clubs in Spain until last year and two more "Beakys" had to be found in the intervening decades as the band trod the boards on the nostalgia circuit. At some point Ian "Tich " Amey began running an old peoples' home with his wife.
Dave kept himself busy with his charity work and doing some producing for Magnet. He did some DJ-ing on Radio Two and appeared on Pop Quiz. Some time in the nineties he presented an amusing documentary on the Marquee Club explaining its history to his fabulously uninterested teenaged daughter Olivia who clearly couldn't wait to get home and put on some jungle. In 1995 he put out a solo album "Unfinished Business" to minimal interest and I haven't heard any of it. In 1996 he bought a mansion in Cheshire and ran it as a hotel for a couple of years; when that failed he became a magistrate and joined his old bandmates on the nostalgia circuit. In 2002 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer which finally claimed him in 2009.
With the original Beaky back on board and a third Mick , Dozy and Tich continue to tour in Europe and the UK.
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