And finally “Bang Bang” written by Sonny Bono for Cher, with the Fudge trading vocals, and the narrative interspersed by musical quotes from ‘Ring-a-ring-a-Roses’ and ‘March Of The Siamese Children’ from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The King And I’. They’d had a couple of lower-charting follow-ups with “Leave Me Be” and “Tell Her No”, but for the moment this was their one biggie. And “She’s Not There”, the Zombies UK Top Ten hit which was even bigger in the States.
#Vanilla fudge bang bang mod#
Curtis Mayfield was still pretty-much a Mod cult-name with little mainstream recognition factor. After its climax-histrionics and primal screams the calm play-in to the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” offers a contrastingly sensitive interpretation, its churchy organ-tone and gospel-flavoured harmonies spiritual enough to touch even this heathen soul. You can’t get much more obvious than that. Side one opens with “Ticket To Ride”, the Beatles no.1 from the ‘Help’ soundtrack. They are straight and largely familiar chart hits. Neither are they obscure well-researched Blues or Folk rarities. There’s not a single group-composition on the entire album. That much is obvious from the first run-down of the titles. Different in a way that other different groups are not. So what happens when the stylus hits the vinyl? Vanilla Fudge are… different. So I bought the LP on the strength of the cover-image, what it implied, and what it promised. No, Love… and Vanilla Fudge, use only invention to reach out from the display and connect with the impressionable frontal lobes. ‘Their Satanic Majesties’… obviously, but the Stones were in the elevated position of being able to lavish oodles of promo-cash on the most ornate 3D-tech. The Byrds ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ was startling. A solo singer smiling a sultry posed smile into the lens. When most album sleeves of the time consist of a simple studio-photo of the artist. Above the image, to the left, the group name ‘Vanilla Fudge’ in rounded cartoon font, and the box to the top right, a blue rayographed head speaking the voice-balloon containing that lettering. A yellow-orange rayographed image of a distorted reclining female figure. That, too, carried overtones reaching out to connect. But ‘Vanilla Fudge’ was special (August 1967, US Atco 33-224). The first Spirit album, with its jigsaw of photo-segments assembling a face – with the bald cranium-section, to a lesser degree, carried a quite disconcerting sleeve-design that also snagged at the attention.
The composite painting made up of different elements of the group’s faces fused into one carried all the weird-art implications any pretentious kid could desire. The moment first glimpsed framed in the record-shop window – yes, there were local record-shops which had displays back then, I knew I had to own it. I’m thinking of ‘Forever Changes’, the third album by Love. Big old twelve-inch vinyl LP’s offered the designer scope and opportunity to create some arresting images that adhere to the mind.
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