Brolly good

FOR such a successful group, The Hollies are more often than not overlooked when it comes to dishing out plaudits to musicians from the 1960s.

This may be something to do with an essential stolidity and uncontroversial work ethic which kept them in beer and pies, but which also kept them out of the gossip columns.

True, vocalist Allan Clarke did have a brief dalliance with Marianne Faithfull, and true, the band did wig out slightly during the cultural upheavals of 1967’s Summer Of Love – even though a famous photo from the time shows them all in sober suits and ties looking at a soon-to-depart, luminescent kaftan-clad Graham Nash as though they all want to batter him.

Nothing can take away from the fact that they were, for the space of several years, a quite stupendous singles band. Their precision-drilled, sunburst harmonies were second to none, their arrangements were little masterpieces of space and bouyancy, and drummer Bobby Elliott was the most imaginative, flashy but metronomically solid player of his generation.

As you’d have every right to expect, I like them best in the wigging-out era, during which such adorable curios as Maker and Pegasus The Flying Horse must have caused no end of spluttering over pies and pints back in the clubs of the band’s native Manchester.

Their singles were weirding out nicely as well, from Stop Stop Stop’s reverberant banjo riff and polka rhythm to the lush, creepy orchestration of King Midas In Reverse. I love them all, but at the moment it’s Bus Stop which is hitting the spot most assiduously.

Written by the young Graham Gouldman, a good six years before 10CC got off the ground, it demonstrates not only a precociously advanced ear for melody but also a keen understanding of the kind of softly psychedelic rainy day vignettes which The Beatles were edging towards from as far back as Rubber Soul.

Those images of everyday life, when combined with the melancholic urgency of a chord progression dotted with plangent minor sevenths, come across as ravishingly filmic: and in the same context, something as commonplace as an umbrella takes on a Magritte-style strangeness.

The Hollies would probably batter me for that last sentence, and I’d probably deserve it – but I know what I mean.