Starbuck –Heart Throb

Starbuck –Heart Throb/ Ricochet –Bradleys BRAD 7411 (1974 UK)

The ongoing Brian Engel/ Martin Briley saga continues…Yes, it’s ye old Mandrake Paddle Steamer, Prowler, Liverpool Echo, Shambles guys with the follow up to Do You Like Boys. It’s pretty different from the previous Starbuck release as it leaves the camp element behind, but the 2 sides are veritable corkers. Both songs were written by Howard/Blaikley with Heart Throb being a glammed up 50s / 60s recreation with an incredible production –progressive Doo-Wop anyone?
Ricochet is more like Chicory Tip updating The Merseybeat sound but with more oomph. Fantastic stuff!

This just in...Thanks to Brian, Martin and Mark J. for the added info

From Brian:

“Well, actually, there WAS a band and we DID do a few gigs. It actually was planned as a real entity. It was absolutely outrageously stupid but I remember loving it because it was so unutterably silly.”

“We were all pounced up with the most hermaphrodite look that our girlfriends could devise and it really appealed to my sense of the bizarre to be gyrating around, looking like Lynsey De Paul singing simple pure Billy Fury songs like Half Way To Paradise.”

“Briley and I actually did a short tour of Germany with another bloke called Barry Blue. We were halfway through the tour and wondering why Germans seemed so keen on giving blokes flowers when it dawned on us that we had been booked into a series of Gay Bars.”

Martin: “I seem to remember as a four piece we were booked to play a gig at some skinhead club in Chatham, the crowd looked SO dangerous we had to decide whether to slip out the back, OR go the other direction and just totally camp it up. We chose the latter. I could never work out how we managed to get away with that, maybe they felt too sorry for us to get violent.”

Click on title for an edit of Heart Throb and Ricochet