Chart entered : 15 July 1978
Chart peak : 21
Amid all the new talent breaking through in 1978 the swansong of the decade's most easily-forgotten superstars passed almost unnoticed. The band had bossed the charts in the early seventies scoring two million selling number ones with "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" and "You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me" but split unexpectedly in May 1974 just weeks after scoring another top 5 hit with "I Get A Little Sentimental Over You". In 1976 Eve Graham, Marty Kristian and Paul Layton reformed the group with newcomers Kathy Ann Rae and Danny Finn ( no relation to the New Zealand boys who'll be popping up here before too long ) replacing Lyn Paul and Peter Oliver ( a 1973 replacement for Peter Doyle ) and scored a few more hits but they'd lost too much ground to Abba and Brotherhood of Man and couldn't replicate their earlier success. In fact this one was coming off the back of three flop singles in a row.
"Anthem" is a weird one. The song was a cover of a minor Australian hit from 1968 by the band Procession featuring future Manfred Mann's Earth Band singer Mick Rogers who co-wrote the song. The shambolic original , which seems to be about a kept mistress , was used ten years later in the UK for a newspaper ad and the New Seekers' manager David Joseph, who'd also been Procession's manager, suggested they have a crack at the song. They kept the a cappella arrangement with Danny taking the lead though their's is a considerably cleaner version and instrumentation comes in ( to not much effect ) at the end. Still, there are some startling discordant shrieks and it's not an easy listen.
When they appeared on Top of the Pops to perform it Noel Edmunds announced that Eve and Danny had just got engaged. Shortly afterwards they decided to quit the group leaving Marty as the only original member . That really killed them off commercially. Eve and Danny were replaced by Vivien Banks and Brian Engel. Banks lasted for just two singles , singing lead with quite a nice vibrato on a cover of Randy Goodrun's "You Needed Me" which lost out to Anne Murray's version and also appearing on the likeable disco ballad "Don't Stop The Music" on which Kathy took the lead. That one , written by Bonnie Tyler's songwriting team, could have been a hit with airplay but I think they were now seen as old hat.
Banks quit when CBS dropped them in 1979 and was replaced by Nicola Kerr. Their first single for EMI in October that year was "Love Is A Song" which I haven't heard. The following year they tried for another shot at Eurovision glory with the cheesy synth-pop of "Tell Me" but it was disqualified from the British heats because they'd already performed it on TV the previous year. To rub salt in the wound Danny's new group Prima Donna won the right to represent the UK. They released one more single for EMI, "California Nights " written by Engel which I haven't heard before being let go.
Kathy briefly left the line up in 1979 but came back and Donna Jones and Mick Flinn from the group Pussyfoot replaced Kerr and Engel. Kathy quit for good in 1983 and the group continued as a quartet. They released their final single in December 1985 "Let The Bells Ring Out Forever" on the tiny Tomcat label , a horrible Christmas power ballad in the style of Jennifer Rush's The Power Of Love which richly deserves its obscurity.
Still they soldiered on as a touring act. Teenager Vikki James ( now songwriter Victoria Horn ) brought them back up to a five piece from 1990 to 2002 when she left along with Marty. Paul soldiered on with Jones and Flinn and newcomers Francine Rees and Mark Hankins and that's the line up that endures to this day. In July 2009 they sneaked some new recordings onto a compilation which charted at number 17.
So what did the departees get up to ? Lyn immediately put out a solo single "Sail The Summer Winds" the theme tune to a yachting film The Dove written by Don Black and John Barry. With the film not doing much business the country-flavoured single sold steadily for weeks helped by an appearance on Sez Les but never managed to break into the Top 50. Her follow-up was a brassy music hall version of "Who's Sorry Now" which failed despite an appearance on It's Cliff. Her third single "Love" written by Reed and Mason is the best record Abba never made but still couldn't crack the charts. Finally the overly optimistic "It Oughta Sell A Million" , a lightly jazz-flavoured pop tune written by Cook and Greenaway with a couple of others became her only solo hit reaching number 37 in the summer of 1975. Even so it had to be helped by its use in a Coke ad. Her album "Give Me Love" passed unnoticed. After two more singles "Here Comes That Wonderful Feeling" and "Mama Don't Wait For Me" which I haven't heard, Polydor lost faith and cast her adrift.
She re-surfaced in 1977 as a Eurovision contender with "If Everybody Loved The Same As You" which is a fair attempt at the early Abba sound. It came sixth in the British heat and did nothing as a single on Pye. They gave her another shot with the routine variety show ballad " I Don't Believe You Ever Loved Me " and Lyn bravely went on the Freddie Starr Show to promote it but to no avail.
Lyn didn't record again for nearly six years during which time she maintained herself as a celebrity with appearances on panel shows and showbiz liaisons of varying degrees of substance while slogging up and down the country on the cabaret circuit. She resurfaced on the tiny Crash label in the mid-eighties with two singles under her own name "Echoes of Love" and "Make The Night" where she's showing a bit more flesh on the sleeves and a single with her brother under the name Furure Primitive entitled "Hold Me". I've not heard any of these records.
After that she languished in obscurity until 1997 when she got the role of Mrs Johnstone in Blood Brothers. Since then she has established herself as a big name in musical theatre and from 2001 started to get regular acting work on TV. In 2006 she released a mainly covers album "Late Night". In 2009 she did a singing tour performing New Seekers material which led to a public spat with Paul whose ongoing version of the band she ( and Eve too ) rubbished. In 2011 she did a naked calendar with other Blood Brothers cast members to raise funds for the Alzheimers Society.
Lyn had a relationship with Peter Doyle and it was giving her a black eye in a drunken rage that saw him ejected from the group in 1973. He too was quick off the mark with a solo single , "Rusty Hands Of Time" written by Tony Macaulay . It's a great song with a terrific vocal performance from Peter but does sound late sixties sunshine pop rather than mid-seventies which might account for its failure. Peter based himself in the UK and did the lead vocal on a children's song "Jungle Ted and the Laceybuttonpoppers" and backing vocals on Lyn's "It Oughta Sell A Million". Shortly after that he was offered the lead singer's job in the Little River Band but declined it. In 1976 he released a version of "Friday On My Mind" as Manfred Mann's Earth Band might have attacked it. It's not bad but didn't get any airplay. The following year he released the album "Skin Deep" and the title track as a single. One of the producers involved was Alan Tarney and the song sounds very like Cliff did at the time. It's another decent effort which got ignored. Peter had more success with advertising jingles scoring with Ribena and Sugar Puffs. He put out two more singles on the tiny Limelight label "Do You Wanna Make Love" and "This And That" in 1980 before abandoning the UK for good.
In 1981 he quit the UK for Australia where he began working with a band called Standing Room Only. The following year he began a five year long sojourn in the U.S. working on a fruitless project called Regis with ex-Wings drummer Steve Holly. He returned to Australia in 1987 where he made a living in the clubs as lead singer in The Ram Band. In the mid -90s ill health forced him off the road and he died of throat cancer in 2001 aged 52.
Peter's replacement was 21 year old Peter Oliver from Southampton who'd made a minor splash as would-be teen sensation Jonny Ross in the late sixties ; his trio of singles on Columbia had all flopped. He found refuge in Hair before joining the group Sunshine as a guitarist for one album and a single "When Will I See The Light" a hard rocking boogie tune that bears little relation to the rest of his career.
After the New Seekers split he too tried his luck as a solo artist . His first single "Loving You Is Killing Me" in October 1974 is disastrously bland and vacuous; even Peter sounds half asleep. The following May he went on tour as support act to Paper Lace and released his second single "Love Ship" , a reasonable MOR pop effeort somewhere between Cliff and Bobby Goldsboro. When that failed he accepted an invitation to join Paper Lace. The band were trying for a harder sound and their first single with Peter , "So What If I Am" in June 1975, tries to inject some snotty-nosed attitude into their music along with some screechy synth sounds. Unfortunately there's not much of a tune and it flopped. It was their last release on the Bus Stop label but EMI gave them another shot the following year with "I Think I'm Gonna Like It" a quirky pop effort with echoes of Fox and 10cc but it failed to take off. The band toiled on without a label then made a surprise return to the charts with Nottingham Forest FC providing the musical know-how on "We've Got The Whole World In Our Hands " a number 24 hit as Forest cruised to a sensational league title in the spring of 1978. It is one of the better football records and bafflingly made the Top 10 in Holland.
Despite that success Peter quit the band in favour of returning to musical theatre. He recorded a song "Sleeping Like A Baby Now" for the musical Dear Anyone... which was released as a single under the name Grateful Amarillo in September 1978 then duetted with Elaine Paige on the B-side of her single "Ireland" from the little-loved musical The Barrier.
Since then Peter has been largely out of the public eye performing in jazz and blues revues in a duo with his brother though he probably has a day job too. In 2006 he joined The Rubettes for one tour.
Eve and Danny ( whose real name is Kevin ) married and started working as a duo. Danny however was being pulled in another direction. Prior to joining the New Seekers he had been in a psychedelic vocal group called Wishful Thinking whose 1971 anti-nuclear ballad "Hiroshima" had unexpectedly been resurrected in 1975 in Germany and become a small hit. In 1978 it hit the German charts again and the group reconvened to exploit the attention. They had another big hit in Germany with the synthy "America" which is strangely reminiscent of Stannard Ridgway's Camouflage and has an impressive instrumental break. One of the other members then called time on the reunion and Danny could cut his first record with Eve but the delay probably didn't do them any favours.
"Ocean And Blue Sky" released in April 1979 is a treacly country-ish duet with Eve singing in a high register. It didn't do anything and turned out to be the only record they made together. In 1980 they went their separate ways musically. Danny accepted an invitation from Stephanie De Sykes to join the group she was putting together for Eurovision Prima Donna. Danny did the lead vocal and they came third with the pretty forgettable "Love Enough For Two" . At number 48 it was the lowest charting British entry for some time which didn't augur well for the follow up "Just Got To Be You". When that tanked the group were history. Danny rejoined Wishful Thinking for one last single "Tightrope Man" then returned to Eve's side.
In the meantime Eve recorded a solo album of MOR pop "Woman of the World" but found only a minor label Celebrity to release it. She released a single "Your Love" in February 1981 then she and Danny recorded a Christmas single "Chris Must Stay " under the name Viva later that year. They then began a long recording hiatus. They continued performing together supporting Gene Pitney and Max Boyce and appeared on TV a few times until 1985 when they took a break from the music business.
Eve worked in Debenham's as a bra fitter for a time just to get out of the house while Danny set up a kitchen design firm and later started designing theme park rides. Eve eventually returned to the nostalgia circuit and participated in Coca-Cola's 20th anniversary recreation of that ad in 1991 but announced her retirement in 2000. The couple moved back to Scotland in 2004. The following year the original New Seekers producer David MacKay persuaded her to record for the cheap CD market and she made "The Mountains Welcome Me Home" a mixture of traditional Scottish tunes and re-recorded New Seekers tunes. She followed it up with a Christmas LP "Til The Season Comes Round Again" in 2006. Both show her voice to be still in good nick although the generic backing tracks don't do her any favours. Not to be outdone Danny took part in another Wishful Thinking reunion in 2009 resulting in an album "Believing In Dreams " in 2009 which contained both new songs and re-recorded old tracks.
Petula Clark-lookalike Kathy had been recruited from the Ken Mackintosh Band. After finally leaving the band she joined Audio who tried for Eurovision in 1983 with "Love On Your Mind " which Marty co-wrote. It came fourth in the British heat and I really wouldn't want to hear any of the songs rated worse than this plodding tuneless crud. She had a son the following year and retreated into family life for many years, reappearing as a cabaret singer under the name Cathy Logan in 2000. She made occasional appearances with both Eve and the New Seekers. She too died of cancer in January 2011.
That just leaves Marty. As recounted above , he retired from performing in 2002 but retains a share in the group's name and hasn't ruled out rejoining at some future date. He is mainly occupied by a surveying firm but in 2011 and 2012 put out CDs of demo recordings from the seventies and eighties to frankly not a great deal of interest.
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