Brian Bastow (1968/70)

"The Girl who Plays the Bass Guitar" / "Half hearted" (1970)

"Poinciana" / "Do-dum dum" (1968)"Give and Take" / "And I Love Her" (1968)

"Cara-lin" / "Time" (1969)

_____________
(also here "Too Late For Tears" / "I WIll Stay", to complete the collection yes)

About the songs themselves (imho): "Poinciana" is quite nice, but really sounds a little old fashioned; and one notices very fast that there's something odd concerning the beat (see Alan's notes below). The B-Side "Do-Dum-Dum" is just as trashy as the title suggests, but lovers of innocent 60's pop will enjoy it I'm sure.

The same applies to "Give and Take", but it has a little more drive and is probably less annoying - I wouldn't recommend to hear it more than two times a day though - and the brass section after the chorus is nice. It's hard to say something about his cover of "And I Love Her", because as I see it it is pretty impossible to cover the Beatles as no one could ever reach their standard. Brian's attempt is quite charming though, and if one pretends not to know the original version, we got a wonderful mellow lovesong.

"Too Late For Tears" also is average nice 60's pop, emulating to softer side of the British invasion. This 45s B-Side, "I Will Stay", is a little more groovy and I like it a lot better - somehow reminds me of Chris Farlowe and such likes.

"Cara-lin" is the same song that appeared on your Summertime-Shake Spears comp as "Caralyn", so this is nothing new here. Cool psych/garage track by the way; not at all trashy. "Time" is a slow, rather mediocre pop song that Brian wrote himself. The whistling can be a little annoying after a while, but you can really notice that he was not too bad as singer.

"The Girl with the Bass Guitar" certainly is the odd one out here... I only gave it two out of five stars. This is the kind of song you play on a party when everyone's already drunk and doing silly dances to silly songs. But the B-Side really outweighs that flop; "Half Hearted" was also written by Brian himself and is an almost rock-orientated track. Still, no musical revelation, but nice.
(anyonesdaughter review)

Some words of Alan:

"His biggest hit was a cover version of a very old song from the 1930's Poinciana which we played on.The thing that we always found annoying about the Belgian public was the fact that when they clapped along to a song they always clapped ON the beat - not as one would normally clap to a rock song on the OFF beat, so for a complete joke we recorded Poinciana with the emphasis on the ON beat.It proved a point as the Belgians loved it and it was a hit.Apart from the songs we wrote for him and Poinciana, all the other songs he recorded were cover versions as the manager did a deal with a record label in Ireland (Major Minor Records).They would provide Ronnex records with Irish hit songs and just remove the voice so that Brian could sing over the musical backing.This was ok on records, but the band he formed couldn't really play the stuff live so his career didn't last very long.
Well, that is a little background on Brian. The last I heard was that he was back in Australia working as a postman in Sydney.

(...)

Remember when listening to Poinciana what I said about the ON beat, also the little bass line which starts the song THAT IS ME !!
I wonder if the copy you found has the original paper sleeve which was a picture of Brian with the other guys on the cover with their backs to the camera. That was us.

(...)

Brian would be thrilled to know anyone was still listening to his stuff. I am certain he never even signed any performing rights contracts or if he did they would have expired years ago as he certainly wouldn't pay to keep them going if he wasn't receiving any royalties."

In the Shake Spears article on rhodiemusic.com there's a 45 mentioned by the Shake Spears under the name "Teeny and Tony & the Bushbabies", about which there is virtually NO information availible on the internet (not even to talk about the record being availible itself). So I asked Alan what was the mystery about this record, and the answer I got was quite interesting:

"I think the Teeny and Tony record on Parlophone label ("A" side is This is the end and "B" side It Hurts me") is probably the rarest record in the world.Probably only about 1000 were released before the huge dispute about publishing rights started and EMI/Parlophone withdrew the record from the shops.The songs were written by a guy called Bill Crompton together with Chris Kritzinger from The Shake Spears. Because The Shake Spears were still under contract to Ronnex Records in Belgium the stupid name Teeny Toni etc. was used by Bill Crompton to try and hide the release from our Belgian manager.As Chris Kritzinger was also under publishing contract to Ronnex Records, the name shown as a writer on the record was Chris Kavery (I don't know where he got this secret name from).Of course our manager in Belgium found out about the release very quickly and sued Parlophone Records for half the publishing rights and royalties for the sales.All very nasty, but that is the sort of thing that was going on with bands and contracts in the 1960's. Bill Crompton was trying to manage and promote a girl singer Linda Millington as she was very much like Lulu, so on the "A" side Toni was Gene Latter, and on the "B" side Teeny was actually Linda, and The Shake Spears were the Bushbabies.They thought it would be a unique idea to have a guy singing on one side and a girl on the other. The record was actually pretty good and in the first week of release received very good reviews and publicity, so it is not surprising that the Belgian manager found out about it very quickly as he used to read all the English music papers."