Bournemouth isn’t particularly well known
for its music. A renowned retirement zone where Tolkein used to holiday and
eventually, er,retired to, it’s
cavernous NIC venue plays host to major tours but the sleepy coastal town has
more in common with bath chairs and bowls than wild psychedelia and mod
grooves.
However, back in the ‘60s, it was
“swinging” and at the centre of the local scene was Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band,
a jazz, R&B and blues-inspired combo powered by the eccentric behaviour and
tuneful keyboards of Zoot Money who’d, by 1964, drafted in future Police
guitarist Andy Summers. Zoot, was a local scenester whose move to London was
legendary through his tight trousers which occasionally split in a pre-PJ Proby
moment. Zoot Money was already an enigma.
Later, through the ‘70s, Money would go on
to play with The Majik Mijits featuring Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriot, The
Electric Blues Company, various incarnations of The Animals, Grimms, jazz rock
fusionists Centipede as well as alongside Geno Washington, Spencer Davis, one
time Stones’ guitarist Mick Taylor, Kevin Ayers and a host of others. But in
the mid-‘60s the whole world was turning upside down and Zoot was similarly
rotating.
The early Big Roll Band albums had provided
some groovy blue-eyed soul and a few Ray Charles-like sounds before, in 1966,
Zoot embarked on a solo project which would become ‘Transition’. Featuring the
same players who were in the Big Roll Band, he began recording this unique set
which touched on soulful ballads, uptempo mod material and included a track
called ‘Soma’ which was written by Andy Summers and featured him on sitar. An exciting
mix of sounds, ‘Transition’s route to the record shop was truncated to say the
least.
‘Soma’ had inspired Summers and Money to
new tangents of music. It pushed the boundaries and encouraged the band to wig
out further and, in a state of psyche-pop bliss, they decided they were so far
out of the Big Roll Band sound that they should change their name to
Dantalian’s Chariot and don the patchouli oil of the day. They would eventually
play shows with the likes of Pink Floyd and their sole album ‘Chariot Rising’
featured a couple of the tracks from ‘Transition’ in stranger incarnations and
became a cult classic in the process, as it failed to ignite and turned their
existing mod following off.
After the Dantalion hiatus, ‘Transition’
was finally released on the Direction label and, by that time, the mods had
embraced the psychedelic bug and the album slipped into obscurity and indeed
became one of those buried treasures that is talked of but seldom actually even
seen.
Finally, this lost gem has belatedly made
it to CD. Remastered from the original quarter inch tapes, with all of its
glorious sweeping sounds, aching vocals and groovy upbeat tunes intact, it’s
the epitome of cool. A year after its initial vinyl release, Zoot’s ‘Welcome To
My Head’ proved to be another out there experience that again gained cult
status for its inventiveness but failed to garner sales – the right music at
the wrong time again.
Zoot Money is one of the great heroes of
long lost eccentric English music. ‘Transition’ – from the bizarre sleeve down
– is one of his finest moments.
TRACKLISTING
1 Let The Music Make You Happy
2 River’s Invitation
3 Soma
4 What Cha Gonna Do ? Bout It
5 Stop The Wedding
6 Deadline
7 Recapture The Thrill Of Yesterday
8 Problem Child
9 Just A Passing Phase
10 Coffee Song
“Zoot Money is one of the great blues
characters.” Sunday Express magazine
