The Pretty Things' Phil May Chats with Garagerocktopia! (Part 1)

They’ve been ignored, written off and passed over, and yet more than 50 years later, the Pretty Things, through rock’s ever-changing landscapes, through personnel changes the MIT Statistics Department would have trouble tracking, through legendary legal donnybrooks, have managed yet another great rock and roll album.

The Pretty Things circa 1966

“The Sweet Pretty Things (Are In Bed Now, Of Course)” comes out July 10 on the Repertoire label. The title is taken from the song “Tombstone Blues” by Bob Dylan, who hung out with the Pretty Things a bit back in the day (partly documented in the documentary “Don’t Look Back”). It’s the first studio album from the storied British group in eight years. You can visit the label's website at http://www.repertoirerecords.com

  

If you look up the definition of “freakbeat” you’ll probably see a picture of the Pretty Things, but this is probably not an accurate way to describe the influential London-based group.
 

Rather than being an obscure, short-lived ensemble whose members went on to better things (or not), some form of the Pretty Things has been around since the early ‘60s. And rather than playing state fairs or oldies shows, the band is putting out tough new music that slides quite nicely into their lengthy and wide-ranging oeuvre.

Singer Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor, despite time off at various points, have remained the heart and soul of the Pretty Things through nearly its entire run. Garagerocktopia was lucky enough to talk with May on telephone from the UK. We should say that with a 50-plus year history, it’s rather tough to do justice to this band in just a short article. The Pretty Things deserve a whole book, which Alan Lakey has already written, “Growing Old Disgracefully.”

Instead, we’ll spend our brief time here talking about the new album and some interesting odds and ends. We are massively grateful to May for taking the time to chat.

The buzz on the street is that the new album an excellent one. The sound, in many ways, harkens back to the group’s blues roots from their very early days but is updated with vicious hooks and enough melody to burn. This album does not sound like a bunch of old guys grasping for one more hiccup of glory, but like a great British band that still has lots to say.


Actually, the new album is just part of a 2015 that has been a bonanza year for fans of the Pretty Things. A boxed set, “Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky,” was released in March to generally rave reviews, and has sold so well that finding it can be a little tough. As good as the boxed set was, there was an added bonus – it ignited the band into making a new studio album.

“We were up to our armpits sorting out the boxed set,” recounted May, talking by telephone from London. “(Manager) Mark St. John had been talking to the European label about the boxed set and they wanted something new to inject into it. We found that putting the boxed set together and the new songs fed each other.”

“It came about in a strange way,” May revealed. “You write all the time, a voice inside you that never stops. Things come out in sound checks and in all kinds of places, and in these circumstances, they coalesced and things started happening very quickly. We got together and listened to what we had and decided we had the bones for a decent album.”

The band has in the past had issues with too much production, and part of what makes the new album apparently succeed so well is that there’s not a lot of studio trickery – that it’s borderline live, well-fitting the Pretty Things’ often rough and tumble style.

“We did it as live as we could. I hate studios, especially when the technology just takes over,” May explained. “When you can go and just do things, it’s great.”

So even though the band has seen its share of state of the art, the Pretty Things decided to go fairly low-tech. They bypassed many great studios in one of the most musically-stocked cities in the world to go hang out with the flowers.

 

“This was recorded in a bloke’s shed in his garden,” May revealed. “Mark checked it out, and it worked perfectly. We’ve always been kind of a garage band anyway.  We’ve recorded in Abbey Road and Olympic Studios. They’re like walking into the biggest music generators in the world, just throbbing with great (blankin’) music. But we made that shed throb, too.”

In a way, the Pretty Things are in an ideal spot personnel-wise, with May and Taylor keeping an essential continuity in place. There’s new blood, too, in the persons of Frank Holland, George Perez, and Jack Greenwood. St. John, who has occasionally played with the band, also contributes musically.

A very short, probably inadequate history of the band: The Pretty Things started in 1963, and like so many of Britain’s immortal rockers – John Lennon, Pete Townshend and Ray Davies to name just a few – Dick Taylor was an art school student.  And like those many other young British musicians of the time, Taylor had a strong affinity for American blues, that interest bonding him briefly in an early version of the Rolling Stones.

The Pretty Things circa 2015

Later, May and Taylor hooked up and formed the Pretty Things, whose name was taken from the Bo Diddley song of the same name. Like so many other British bands, the Pretty Things were solidly rooted in blues. 

But their take was always a bit rougher and harder-edged, making the Stones look like Herman’s Hermits. That image has many contending that the Pretty Things set the stage for heavy metal and punk bands later on. As Keith Richards once said in a BBC interview, “they don’t jump on bandwagons.”

“The dirtiest, the scruffiest, the most unreliable – we’ve lived up to that at times,” May confessed.

Critics and music geeks have longed agreed that the Pretty Things have always been a top-notch British band, and a groundbreaking one at that, especially during the era from the early ‘60s to the mid-80s, when artists from the UK formed the gold standard for all rock and roll. But only sporadically have they dented the charts, having to content themselves with accolades. The commercial success so definitive of many of their contemporaries has long eluded them. Click here and we’ll talk about some of these insufficiently-heralded accomplishments and why, despite that, we still love their music so many years after the fact.

The official Pretty Things website: http://www.theprettythings.com/