Remaining
together following the departure of frontman Wayne Fontana, the
Mindbenders got off to one of the most promising starts any band could
enjoy, when their debut single "A Groovy Kind of Love" soared to number
two in the U.K. and topped the chart in America. And had the group only
succeeded in locating a decent follow-up, they might well have
developed into one of the finest British bands of the late '60s.
Instead, a series of disastrous choices of 45s condemned them to the
ranks of rank also-rans, and it is only later that the sheer quality of
their other work — material hitherto lost on two Mindbenders LPs — had
been re-evaluated sufficiently to let listeners state that here was one
of the greatest of all Britain's post-beat bands.
A Groovy Kind of Love
album totally failed to capitalize on the success of its title track,
floundering to a lowly number 92, while a second song by "Groovy"
composers Carole Bayer and Toni Wine, "Ashes to Ashes," scarcely
improved on that in the singles' listings. It made number 55, although
Fontana did still try to capitalize on it, repressing the Groovy Kind
of Love album with "Ashes to Ashes" replacing "Don't Cry No More."
(Later in the year, "Ashes to Ashes" hit number 14 in Britain, but only
after the vaguely Spector-ish "Can't Live With You (Can't Live Without
You)" had struggled to break the Top 30.The Mindbenders made their
final American tour in July 1966, kicking off in Atlanta on
Independence Day, in front of a capacity 25,000 crowd. It was a shame
they were only the opening band. James Brown was the headliner and,
while Eric Stewart remembered, "we went down quite well," a more
memorable show came when the Mindbenders played the Fillmore West later
in the tour.
"The liquid light show was great and really worked
with our act, which was a lot heavier than on our records." Stewart
himself had developed into a very strong songwriter in his own right,
contributing one song ("My New Day and Age") to the newly emergent prog
rock favorites Family, and coming up with another, "Yellow Brick Road,"
which has been described as "the best record Traffic never made." For
singles, however, the Mindbenders continued looking outside for new
material. It was not necessarily a bad decision; their taste, after
all, remained impeccable. Their final release of 1966, "I Want Her, She
Wants Me," for instance, was written by the Zombies' Rod Argent and was
handed to the Mindbenders a full year before it reappeared on the
Zombies' own Odyssey & Oracle album. Fighting hard to keep
abreast
of the changing currents, the Mindbenders next embarked on their most
audacious yet strangely prescient move yet, a full-blown concept album.
No matter that, several months before Sgt. Pepper and even longer
before SF Sorrow and Tommy, nobody had even heard of concept albums,
the Mindbenders' With Woman in Mind remains a gem in that genre. And
yet, despite the presence of both "I Want Her, She Wants Me" and "Ashes
to Ashes," plus a startling new Graham Gouldman song, the lascivious
"Schoolgirl" is an undiscovered gem as well. Unreleased in America, it
did little anywhere else and disappeared as quickly as the accompanying
single, yet another Bayer/Wine composition, "We'll Talk About It
Tomorrow." Faltering ratings and drooping self-confidence, of course,
were not necessarily an insurmountable hurdle.
The group was invited to
contribute two songs to the soundtrack of Sidney Poitier's movie To
Sir, With Love — "number one hitmakers the Mindbenders" are seen
performing live in the school gymnasium, airing "It's Getting Harder
All of the Time" and "Off and Running," both sides of their next
single. Unfortunately, not even major celluloid exposure could break
the group's run of bad luck. Neither could an infusion of new blood,
after drummer Ric Rothwell quit to be replaced by Paul Hancox. By
the end of the year, the band was reduced to recording covers of
current American hits, which could be rush released in Britain in the
hope of beating out the original. Art had been reduced to a crapshoot
and, even as the first of the Mindbenders' efforts, a version of the
Boxtops' "The Letter." ground its way to number 42 in September 1967
(the competition, by the way, reached number five), it was clear that
the end was in sight. The Mindbenders made one final stab at reversing
their fortunes, re-recording "Schoolgirl" and pulling out every
psychedelic rock trick in the book. A BBC ban (that lasciviousness
again), however, kept the single a good arm's length from either the
radio or the charts and, when a reading of Robert Knight's "Blessed Are
the Lonely" followed "Schoolgirl" into the dumper, in March 1968, Bob
Lang quit (he would reappear as a member of soft rockers Racing Cars in
the mid-'70s). He was replaced by Graham Gouldman, in which form the
band cut one final single "Uncle Joe, the Ice Cream Man." The
Mindbenders then broke up, calling it a day at the Liverpool Empire on
November 20, 1968, the last night of a U.K. tour with the Who, Arthur
Brown, and Joe Cocker. Stewart and Gouldman, however, would continue
working together, first as partners in the newly launched Strawberry
Studios, then as one half of 10cc. source:
allmusic.com