Music Reissues Weekly: You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls

After co-fronting Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer, Elkie Brooks first charted as a solo artist in 1977 with “Pearl’s a Singer.” Yet there was more to her musical past than the 1971 to 1974 spell in the blues-rock outfit. Her contributions to You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls are “He's Gotta Love me” and “Stop the Music” – both released a decade before “Pearl’s a Singer.”

“He's Gotta Love me” was the June 1965 A-side of her fourth single. “Stop the Music” was the B-side of her February 1966 sixth single. Each is a top-drawer uptown soul-pop nugget with a strong tune, driving rhythm and confident vocal. They were arranged by Ivor Raymonde, who did the same job for Dusty Springfield. Setting aside “Stop the Music’s” inexplicable B-side status, each stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of Dusty. They sound like hits. But they weren’t. Elkie Brooks – born Elaine Bookbinder – had to wait a while before the pop charts embraced her.

The same circumstances apply to Lesley Duncan and Kathy Kissoon, also on the Sixties-focused You Got Me Hooked! Both only got wider recognition once the Seventies arrived. Here, Kissoon’s “Will I Never See the Sun” is amazing: a 1969 B-side along the Eurovision/San Remo Song Festival lines. In an extreme case of this belated appreciation – though later and achieved more circuitously – Vashti’s low-selling 1970 LP Just Another Diamond Day first received widespread appreciation in the 1990s. Contemporary recordings followed. Now, both sides of her May 1966 "Train Song" / "Love Song" single are heard on You Got Me Hooked! She is also the collection's cover star.

This isn’t to say that this deeply satisfying 26-track collection of British female pop – named in tribute to the London base of the EMI group of labels, from whose repertoire these tracks are drawn – is a before-they-were-famous exercise. More that everything here is and was part of a continuum which did not spiral into a plug hole once the Sixties turned into the Seventies; after pop was cleaved into pop and rock. Viz: Ottilie Patterson’s 1964 barrelhouse romp through “Baby Please Don't go” which features Sonny Boy Williamson (credited) on harmonica and Jimmy Page (uncredited, as a session player) on guitar. Page crops up regularly on You Got Me Hooked! It wasn’t just him who achieved their highest profile in the Seventies.

Of course, there are those here who did sell heaps of records in the Sixties to achieve their initial omnipresence: Cilla Black, Alma Cogan, Helen Shapiro. These successes weren’t with what’s heard here though. This collection is about celebrating what might have been unlauded. For example, Shapiro’s dramatic version of the oft-covered “I'm Going Out (The Same Way I Came in)” was recorded in 1967 but first issued in 1998. The by turn reflective and stomping (in a Eurovision way, again) 1967 Cilla Black B-side “From Now on” sounds like it should have been a plug side.

Then there are those who didn’t, to varying degrees, commercially click in a sustained manner. Which doesn’t mean the records they made weren’t fantastic. Best-known from TV, Millicent Martin's “Get Lost my Love” is an eyebrow-raising groovy vocal reinterpretation of the Quincy Jones instrumental “Soul Bossa Nova.” Barbara Ruskin was as much a songwriter as recording artist and her tension-filled October 1967 single “Come in to my Arms Again” is measured but terrifically exciting – Dalida should have recorded a version. There is the Rupert The Bear and White Horses theme-singing Jackie Lee – whose Eurostar-long discography is packed with gems – who is represented by November 1966’s brilliant “The Town I Live in,” a peerless catalogue of New Town psychogeographic angst which initially became well-known to collectors after it was first compiled on 1994’s Dream Babes Volume One. Also present is Glenda Collins, who producer Joe Meek stuck with over eight singles. No hits, but the nonetheless treasured Collins was recently the subject of a three-CD box set.

Likewise, there are other tracks which have been previously compiled, but those collections are long gone and there are 13 – half the tracklist – selections here which have not been on earlier Brit-girl collections. Add in a meticulous track-by-track commentary taking account of knowledge accrued to date and this set stands on its own. You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls is part of a series, but it’s so marvellous it may as well be an introduction to this particular strand of British pop.

• Next week: the Beggars Arkive series unearths 1978’s second John Peel session from punk contenders The Lurkers
• More reissue reviews on theartsdesk
• Kieron Tyler’s website

@kierontyler.bsky.social