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Group Members:
* Tony Burrows: vocals - ex The Ivy League, later with White Plains, and The First Class
* Neil Landon: vocals (born Patrick Cahill, 26 July 1941, Kirdf
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The Flower Pot Men were a British pop group created in 1967, who enjoyed fleeting fame. The group's sound was characterised by rich, three-part vocal harmonies.
The Flower Pot Men were created as a result of the chart success of the single "Let's Go To San Francisco", written and recorded by songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis (Carter-Lewis And The Southerners and The Ivy League, which had three UK top twenty hits previously).
The duo licensed the recording to Deram Records which suddenly found itself with a full-fledged hit, but with no group to promote it. Carter and Lewis, having no interest in going on the road to promote the record, created the group from a hand-picked collective of recording studio session musicians and vocalists. They continued to write, record and produce all the subsequent recordings for the next three years until the project ended in 1970.
The name was clearly derived from the children's show Flower Pot Men, with the obvious psychedelic era puns on flower power and "pot" (cannabis).
The band's most popular song remained "Let's Go To San Francisco." Some listeners at the time assumed that the song was either a pastiche of - or in some way inspired by - Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" which was a hit earlier that summer - but the band have denied this. The topic of San Francisco was being discussed widely in UK in early 1967 because of British mass media coverage of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene - and the Scott McKenzie single was certainly not the only place where the songwriters may have found inspiration to write a song about the new social developments in that city. The track reached Number 4 in the UK Singles Chart in 1967. It was their only appearance in that chart, earning them the unenviable title of one-hit wonder.
Burrows and Shaw later surfaced in The First Class, whose sole Top 40 hit "Beach Baby" sounded similar; a harmony phrase shortly before the fadeout of this record references "Let's Go To San Francisco".
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