Tell people we play Maximum Garage Soul!

Hey, try this! Myspace has a facility to search through it for bands’ influences, and if you search through for bands influenced by the Small Faces, you get a whole host of really good sounding groups.

The other week I posted about Fuzzface (those tracks are still on my i-Pod); they were the first band that came up from a Small Faces search, and you could really hear it with their obvious fondness for Steve Marriott. Here’s another band with a Small Faces thing – Roundabout from Swindon.

Roundabout

I really liked the email I got from Lee from the band. He said (and I quote)

Tell people we play Maximum Garage Soul. Maximum as in "The Who". Garage as in Sixties RnB and Freakbeat. Soul as in Blue Eyed Sixties a la Steve Marriott, Eric Burdon, Chris Farlowe.

Pressing all the right buttons fellers!

The garage punk thing really comes through on the first track I’m posting here – “Without Her” - the Shadows of Knight or the Music Machine, maybe. The second track I’m posting though - "Oldtown" - has a much more British, slightly jazzy feel to it – a bit of Georgie Fame to it.

Roundabout are playing a Small Faces tribute gig on April 20th in Chippenham (have a look on the Myspace page for details) to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Steve Marriott (whom I once saw play in London supporting Chuck Berry, but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t really pay much attention to his set, being largley ignorant of his real importance and also more than a little distracted by the prospect of seeing Chuck Berry in the flesh).

Again (I feel obliged to mention) these tracks are both links from Myspace, and so might be a tad slow. (I’ll be putting together a compilation of tracks in the next few days, if this isn’t working for you…)

Without Her

Old town, Friday PM

Blake

As well as this, I'm posting a track by a band called Blake, who was also turned up by a Small Faces search and does a pretty neat line in "Maximum Garage Soul" himself (copyright, Lee, Roundabout).

To be honest most of Blake's tracks are not quite like this one though still worth a listen. "Solomon's Tump" is a real stormer, though, and it seems to fit in neatly with this post. Blake tells me that "Solomon's Tump" is a track he recorded four years ago and that he's recently quit his Cheltenham-based band to concentrate on his own work. He also has a website and a Myspace page.

Solomon's Tump

Blake says that the album he's now working on might just be his last shot, which to my ears would be a bit of a shame...

Keep at it, I say!