A FAMILIAR figure from Liverpool’s music scene in the crazy days of stack-heeled shoes, flares and Old Testament hairstyles has bounced back into view with a song, which he wants to become an anthem to the city he loves.
Although never quite making the top themselves, Colonel Bagshot and the Incredible Bucket Band supported more stars than Heaven, including Slade, on their triumphant European tour of 1973. Two years before, Bagshot had appeared at the Reading Festival.
Now, their singer Brian Farrell, sometimes likened to Joe Cocker, has recorded his Liverpool song Ee-Aye-Addio, in the hope that it will be heard all over the world when the city is the 2008 European Capital of Culture. Local radio stations are already playing it.
Playing the keyboards and percussion himself, Brian recorded it with his pals Rita Slater (vocals) and Alex McGrath (also vocals) at the Houndog recording studio in Dovecot, Liverpool.
It will now be on sale at his gigs in pubs and clubs. Brian, 59, also occasionally gets together with the old Bagshot boys: Kenny Parry, Dave Dover and Terry McClusker.
Coming in the Liverpool wave immediately after The Beatles, Bagshot never received the acclaim many critics thought they deserved.
But their album, Oh What A Lovely War, did sell on both sides of the Atlantic, which brought them a stroke of luck in 2002.
Josh Davis, from California, admired their song, The Six Day War. Known to the younger music world as DJ Shadow, he renamed it Six Days and put his own interpretation of it on the album, Shadow’s Private Press. It topped the British dance chart.
An article at the time described Shadow, to the surprise of the Bagshots, who were more accustomed to real instruments, as “a camera-shy bedroom mixologist who constructs his epic sonic collages entirely from snippets of sound extracted from pre-recorded sources”.
But in his composition Ee-Aye-Addio, Brian is back on earth.
“It’s our tribute to Liverpool,” he says.
Patriotic, but light-hearted with a jolly tune, it has lines such as, “Mersey tunnels we’ve got two, football teams of red and blue, Billy Fury tugboat crew, Cains the crew that makes the brew . . . seven hills and the pool below, 800 years to the city we know, our time has come watch us grow, ee-aye-addio, here we go . . . ”
davidcharters
