Week of January 18, 2004
Mo Foster - Bass
Ray Fenwick - Guitar
Les Binks - Drums
Clem Cattini - Drums
Alan Hawkshaw - Keyboards
Helen Caunt - Vocals
Annie Kavanagh - Vocals
Henry Spinetti - Drums
Mike Hurst - Producer
First, let me explain how this all came about. I had always loved Chip
Taylor's song "Wild Thing". Reg Presley was great, but the
Troggs' original was not sexy. However, the Jimi Hendrix version certainly was. Around 1972, I began to wonder if it could be done in a different way. Would it be even sexier sung by a woman? I became obsessed with this idea, to the extent that I didn't even want it to be sung, I wanted it to be 'massaged'. The first thing I did was to get my old friend, guitarist Ray Fenwick to work on an arrangement with me. Next I had to find a woman. God, this business is tough. I can't remember who came up with the name of Helen Caunt, and no, that isn't a spelling mistake. She was a Penthouse Pet, and looked it. She was also a
Rod Stewart discard. What other qualifications did she need?
I made the record at the Music Centre in Wembley, with Dave Hunt engineering. Ray brought in Mo Foster on bass, and I provided Henry Spinetti on drums and myself on backing vocals with Ray. I wanted a slow funky record, with liberal splashes of sex. The track sounded great, but working with Helen was a problem. She was determined to sing. A big mistake. It put me in mind of Jane Mansfield in The Girl Can't Help It, and she could act, a little. Finally, I persuaded Helen to breathe all the way through. Oh God, it worked, and turned everybody on to such an extent that mature musicians were seen to blush. The only thing missing was a different sounding instrumental. I booked an old friend, Alan Hawkshaw, to play keyboards. It was rumoured he had all the latest synthesisers, and his porterage proved it. He took 2 hours to set up, and when it was complete, he was invisible behind this array of technology. What he delivered was spot on and incredibly expensive. In fact, it cost half the entire session.
I now needed a B-side. In true producer tradition, I suggested to Ray that we write an instrumental on session. I had decided to call the band
Fancy and thus I came up with a scintillatingly original title for the song…
Fancy.
I now had a record. But I had to sell it. Turned down by Decca and Phonogram, I finally persuaded an old friend, Phil Carson at Atlantic to run with it. To assist with the marketing, I suggested to Helen we do a picture surrounded by four black models. For a Penthouse Pet she was surprisingly demure, but she finally came round to my way of thinking. The results were spectacular and very rude. You only saw Helen's back, but the entire band and camera crew were rushing around behind to get the full frontal. She was not amused.
Atlantic brought it out in the UK in April 1973 to a response something less than inertia. The BBC said it was too near the knuckle and they were right. Holland was quite interested, but then they would be, but by and large it looked like a stiff. In June that year, I got a call from Atlantic telling me that their subsidiary' in the USA, Big Tree, wanted to go with it. What did I have to lose? By July,
'Wild Thing' was at No.65 with a bullet in the American charts and by early August it was sitting at number 7!
By this time, and with the success in the USA, Helen had got herself a new manager, her boyfriend. That was two strikes against her, she had to go. Now Ray and I were convinced that we had to get real. It was 1974, and a follow-up to
'Wild Thing' was needed, plus Big Tree was calling for an album. The band needed to exist, not simply in my imagination. We auditioned for drummers and came up with Les Binks (does he?) after a hectic Nomis rehearsal session. We needed a replacement girl singer. With lingering thoughts of Helen, we auditioned girl after girl, or should I say, model after model. Many of them looked great but they were all bloody awful in the singing department.
One day in Nomis, when we were all really depressed, we saw the name of a session singer on the board that was looking for work. Her name was Annie Kavanagh. We fixed an audition, she turned up and blew us all away. Annie had worked with
Steely Dan and many others and was a great lady as well as a great singer.
Fancy was complete, and with a decent budget for further recordings.
Ray and I wrote 'Touch Me', and all the tracks for the first album, except for
'I'm A Woman', the Lieber and Stoller classic. 'Touch Me' was released in the USA in February 1974 and went Top 20 within a month. The album, with a wonderfully cheap British cover, and a better American one, fared less well and only saw the bottom of the American charts that year. In the UK it sank without trace.
'Touch Me' was recorded by an awful Australian male singer who took it to Number 1 in the Aussie charts. I don't think he had any idea what the lyric was about.
Atlantic really had no interest in marketing us. I pulled out of the deal and signed with Bell/Arista and an old friend Tony Roberts. Now we really got serious. An American tour was booked for Summer 1974, with an agency called Mr. Mouse. I suppose it could have been 'Mickey' and sometimes it was. The tour was hysterical. It consisted largely of Ray's naked bum and some great gigs with artists as varied as
Steppenwolf, Earl Scruggs, Wishbone
Ash, Guess Who and Kiss. Los Angeles at the Whisky A Go-Go was wonderful. I was in the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, as one is from time to time, and there, next to me was Donald Pleasance. Equally, as one does, I said "Hello Donald" even though I had never met him. We struck an immediate friendship, and I invited him to the Whisky. The Whisky was full of freaks as always, and I wondered what Donald made of them. It didn't matter, because as we waited for
Fancy's grand entrance, the PA system suddenly came alive with the sounds of
Derek and Clive! Even the Whisky was not ready for "Kirk Douglas?", "You and your fucking blue eyes", and "Jane?". "She was a lovely girl, the lobsters got a nip out of it and so did she". Donald also had no idea what to make of it. I rushed upstairs to the dressing room, and, sure enough, there was the band rolling around on the floor in paroxysms of laughter and vulgarity. It was undoubtedly one of the better moments of the tour, and even Donald ended up laughing. By early 1975, the band had toured with
10CC, appearing in London at the Hammersmith Odeon. The new album was wonderful. Mo's double-bass on
Mose Allison's 'Everybody's Cryin' Mercy' was masterful, as was Annie's vocal. All the tracks, except that one and an incredible version of
Stevie Wonder's 'I Was Made To Love Him', were written by Ray and myself. Some, like the
'Tour Song', were autobiographical. Listen to the lyric and imagine what we were going through at the time.
Was Fancy a pop band or a real rock band? We knew the answer, but the trouble was the media and the record company didn't. We had had two big American chart singles, and that apparently made us a pop band. The band was worth far more than that. Those who saw the Montreux Blues Festival that year, which included
BB King and Lowell Fulson, knew differently.
What had started out as a pop whim, had metamorphosed into a full-blown rock act.
Fancy were great, and deserved better. All I ask is that the listener gives the tracks a fair listening and then makes up his or her mind. Don't just take my word for it.
Fancy turned me on then, and they still do.
Mike Hurst, June 2001
Taken from the CD reissue of both of the band's albums, Angel Air
Records, 2001, SJPCD094