蜜芽传媒

by Bob Stanley

It always surprised me to see the Applejacks' album on wants lists with people willing to pay over 拢100 - a huge sum for a record back then.

At Hammersmith Odeon, in December 1979, was headlining the last of four all-star Concerts For Kampuchea. There were strong rumours that John Lennon was about to come out of four years retirement and join his old mate on stage. There was some logic to this - John was about to go back in the studio to record Double Fantasy, after all. But by the time Paul was about to appear on stage, the buzz going round London was that all four Beatles would be performing. The compere, Billy Connolly, looked conspiratorially at the audience and whispered that he’d “just seen three of The Applejacks backstage”.

Poor Applejacks! The Coventry group deserved better than to be the butt of Connolly's joke. They were a six piece from Solihull, notable for their female bassist Megan Davies. Fifty years ago they scored a brace of Top 20 hits on Decca with Tell Me When - the first hit co-written by Les Reed and Geoff Stephens - and Lennon/McCartney's cast-off Like Dreamers Do. They even got to release an album with a distinctive cover involving toffee apples.

As a young record collector in the early eighties, it always surprised me to see the Applejacks' album on wants lists with people willing to pay over £100 - a huge sum for a record back then - to get a copy. It was a mixed bag with a couple of corking tracks, the obscure Brill Building song, Wishing Will Never Make It So, and Over Suzanne, written by Pete Dello and Ray Cane, both later of the Honeybus (Dello and Cane also wrote most of the group's b-sides - any Avid out there know the connection between the two groups?). The reason for the high price and high demand was that it was, and remains, an extremely rare album. This could be down to a disagreement between the group and Decca. After their third single, Three Little Words, stalled at no.23 in late 1964, Decca wanted the group to record Chim Chim Cheree from Mary Poppins. They refused and stood their ground, even though the single was given a catalogue number. This state of affairs would hardly have encouraged Decca to promote the group's album, and so it bombed. Another Applejacks single wouldn't appear for six months - the loss of momentum meant they never scored another hit.

Their penultimate Decca single was a version of 's I Go To Sleep, which led to a longstanding rumour that bassist Megan was one of Ray and Dave's many sisters! Megan married Applejacks drummer Gerry Freeman in 1965, with the rest of the group acting as collective bridegrooms.