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Oh, You Pretty Things

It's a great, overlooked album.

With Phil May's passing, you should give the Pretty Things' Parachute a listen.

If you like Big Star, Badfinger, Todd - especially Something/Anything?, or the Raspberries, you'll like it. Same thing if you like the VU's Loaded, especially the pretty parts. It should have had a presence on the airwaves. At the very least, it should have been - if not in my record collection - in that of a friend so I could have made a tape.

It's not just a lost classic. It's unheard. It's not even like their previous album, S.F. Sorrow, or Oar, or the VU & Nico, albums that people know about even if they haven't actually listened to them.
Aside from a couple of longish numbers - it was 1970 - on side two, 6 of its 13 tunes clock in at under two minutes...strung together, almost as a medley.

That such an album should go unnoticed for 50 years is bad enough. What they had to do to get by while recording it and S.F. Sorrow.....well.

For starters, they sold outtakes to a company that used them in third-rate and softcore films... as the jukebox music as, according to Phil, "a gangster gets shot in a bar".  They performed in one of the films as  Electric Banana.
Good work, if you can get it.

They might have gotten away with it, but one of the songs, "I See You", was subsequently included on Sorrow, blowing their cover.

Then they were retained by some French millionaire playboy, Philippe DeBarge, to write some songs and back him on an album that he never intended to release. It seems he just wanted to use it to impress his friends.
You can laugh, but you shouldn't. Philippe was a visionary. It would be years before Gram Parsons hires Elvis's TCB band to back him on his solo albums....and just listen to what it got us.


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  1. GlamSlamMay 19, 2020 at 8:13 PM

    They should’ve been bigger. I once consider Pretty Things as a bit of a guilty pleasure. Nothing to be guilty about, really. They captured the times.

    ReplyDelete

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