Chart entered : 10 March 1973
Chart peak : 12
Number of hits : 15
These guys are another good example of sixties strugglers getting a lift from glam rock. Their hits total , all but one in the Top 20 , is pretty impressive given their chart career ended less than four years after it had begun.
Mud were all from suburban Surrey, three from Carshalton and one from Guildford. They were all born within 18 months of each other in 1946-7 .Guitarist Rob Davis and singer Les Gray were schoolmates, something that became very hard to credit when you compared their appearance in later years. Along with bassist Ray Stiles and Les's brother Pete on drums they formed Mud in February 1966.
Mud's live act was based on audience participation and humorous elements. They found it hard to please London audiences and increasingly worked in the Northern clubs. They were signed by CBS and released their first single, Rob's "Flower Power" in October 1967. This blatant bandwagon-jumper failed to pay off though it's not a bad song with some nice harmonies. Rob also wrote the follow-up "Up The Airy Mountain" a jaunty pyschedelic nursery rhyme where Keith Mansfield's brassy arrangement almost drowns the band out, apart from the military tattoos by new drummer Dave Mount who joined after Pete decided to become a draughtsman instead.Dave had played with Rob and Ray before in local bands.
When that failed to take off in March 1968, the band were dropped by CBS and went on tour in Sweden and Germany. They were given a second chance by Philips who initially recruited them for a tour as backing band for Hair star Linda Kendrick. Their first single for the label was 1969's "Shangri-la" written by Miki Anthony, a superior slice of sunshine pop with a string-laden Johnny Arthey arrangement that makes the chorus sound remarkably like ELO. I'm presuming lack of airplay did for it as it certainly holds up well. Their next single came out over a year later. "Jumping Jehosaphat" , written by the successful Murray/ Callendar partnership, is a competent bubblegum effort but even an appearance on The Basil Brush Show couldn't break it.
The band toiled away in provincial obscurity for the next two years before a very lucky break. As The Sweet grew more successful their desire for more creative control of their output increased and their songwriters Nicky Chin and Mike Chapman started looking for a band that would be less fussy about what they recorded. Mud seemed to fit the bill. It's hard to believe Mickie Most didn't have reservations about signing a band with such a long track record of failure but he went along with it and so they joined the RAK stable. Their visual contribution to the glam phenomenon was eyeliner and garish striped suits while Rob would soon start to cultivate an androgynous look like The Sweet's Steve Priest.
This was their first single. As the sleeve suggests it was written with a tango rhythm. The tub-thumping beat and Rob's contorted guitar work anchor it in the glam sound and Les does a fair impersonation of Brian Connolly increasing the suspicion that the song was originally pitched at The Sweet. Both the ( slightly dodgy ) lyric of awed admiration for a precocious girl who doesn't follow the rules and brooding atmosphere put me in mind of Talk Talk's Mirror Man , a connection I've not made before. Though overshadowed by the monster hit they enjoyed less than a year later it's one of their better records and though rarely played , a worthy addition to the glam canon.
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