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One of the great hard-luck stories in British rock. The Pretty Things were formed at Sidcup Art College in 1963 by vocalist Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor. Taylor had been the original bassist with The Rolling Stones, but chose to complete his art- school course before pursuing music, thus giving Bill Wyman a job.
The Pretty Things were cast in the same mould as the early Stones, and worked hard to catch up with Jagger and Jones's growing reputation for outrage: they had longer hair and a trashier name, drank heavier and played harder, dirtier versions of R&B standards, concentrating particularly on Bo Diddley's back catalogue. For a while, it looked as though it was all going to work: signed almost immediately to Fontana, they hit the Top 10 in 1964 with "Don't Bring Me Down", and the following year did the same with their eponymous debut album. This was to be as good as it got.
Subsequent singles and the second album brought diminishing returns, and as the tide of British music began to turn away from R&B , the band struggled against being washed away. The third album, emotions (1967), saw the group augmented by strings and brass; long overdue for rediscovery, it was a superb example of the mellowing of British beat, and showed the band keeping pace artistically with their old rivals, The Stones. But where the latter's between the buttons spent six months in the charts, emotions made no impact at all.
Dropped by Fontana, and with a new line-up behind May and Taylor — most notably the addition of Twink (later of THE PINK FAIRIESi) on drums and, uhh, mime - The Pretty Things were reborn in the Summer Of Love as one of the crucial London psychedelic bands. A new contract with Columbia was inaugurated by their finest single, "Defecting Grey", in 1967. Constructed from several fragmentary tunes, with abrupt switches back and forth, "Defecting Grey" blended acid rock with English art-school whimsy in a way that only Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd were capable of matching. Needless to say, it had to settle for the status of cult legend.
A similar fate overtook the 1968 album SF sorrow. Now acknowledged as the first 'rock opera', the album followed its eponymous hero from birth to death, through love, war, insanity and sickness. Regrettably, it provided an inspiration for Pete Townshend to write tommy, but it far excelled that work and remains one of the few concept albums worth hearing.
Taylor left during the recording of SF sorrow, which he had co-written, and Twink moved on soon after. Without Taylor the band got heavier but continued to display . a sense of adventure and flexibility that was matched only by the profound indifference of the British and American public. By 1969 the group were reduced to appearing in the Norman Wisdom movie What's Good For The Goose. The following year the hard rock parachute (album of the year in Rolling Stone) edged into the UK Top 50, the first hit since the debut, and their last. The band struggled on for a while, but not even the endorsement of Led Zeppelin (on whose Swansong label a couple of mid-70s albums appeared), and of Bowie (who covered their hits "Rosalyn" and "Don't Bring Me Down" on pin-ups) was sufficient to give them a break. In 1976 May finally left his own group, and The Pretty Things effectively came to an end, though members continued to work with each other, and over recent years there have been repeated reunions.
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