Episode 125: “Here Comes the Night” by Them

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 125

Here Comes the Night

by Them

Today we're going to take a look at a band whose lead singer, sadly, is more controversial now than he was at the period we're looking at.

I would normally not want to explicitly talk about current events up front at the start of an episode, but Van Morrison has been in the headlines in the last few weeks for promoting dangerous conspiracy theories about COVID, and has also been accused of perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes with a recent single.

So I would like to take this opportunity just to say that no positive comments I make about the Van Morrison of 1965 in this episode should be taken as any kind of approval of the Van Morrison of twenty twenty one, and this this should also be taken as red for one of the similarly controversial subjects of next week's episode.

Anyway, that aside, today we're going to take a look at the first classic rock and roll records made by a band from Northern Ireland, and at the links between the British RB scene and the American Brill Building.

We're going to look at Van Morrison, Burt Burns, and Here Comes the Night by them.

I could see right out my window, walking down the street, my girl with another guy.

His arms around her like it used to be with me.

Oh, it makes me want to die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, here it comes.

Here comes the night.

Here comes the night.

When we last looked at Burt Burns, he was just starting to gain some prominence in the East Coast recording scene, with his productions for artists like Solomon Burke and the Isley Brothers.

We've also, though it wasn't always made explicit, come across several of his productions when talking about other artists.

When Lieber and Stoller stopped working for Atlantic, Burns took over production of their artists, as well as all the other recordings he was making, and so many of the mid-sixties drifters records we looked at in the episode on Stand By Me were Burns' productions.

But while he was producing soul classics in New York, Burns was also becoming aware of the new music coming from the United Kingdom.

In early 1963, he started receiving large royalty checks for a cover version of his song Twist and Shout by some English band he'd never heard of.

He decided that there was a market here for his songs, and made a trip to the UK, where he linked up with Dick Rowe at Decca.

While most of the money Burns had been making from Twist and Shout had been from the Beatles version, a big chunk of it had also come from Brian Poole and the Tremolos, the band that Rowe had signed to Decca instead of the Beatles.

After the Beatles became big, the Tremolos used the Beatles' arrangement of Twist and Shout, which had been released on an album and an EP, but not a single, and had a top ten hit with their own version of it.

Well, that's a working on out, working on out.

Well, that's working on out.

Yeah, you look so good.

Well, you got me going now.

Just like I knew that

Row was someone who kept an eye on the American market and saw that Burns was a great source of potential hits.

He brought Burns over to the UK and linked him up with Larry Page, the manager who gave Roe an endless supply of teen idols, and with Phil Solomon, an Irish manager who had been the publicist for the crooner Ruby Murray and had recently brought Roe the group The Bachelors, who had had a string of hits like Charmaine.

My Charmaine cries in vain.

I wonder when blue birds are maiding,

Will you

come back

again?

Page, Solomon and Rowe were currently trying to promote something called Brumbeat as a Birmingham rival to Merseybeat, and so all the acts Burns worked with were from Birmingham.

The most notable of these acts was one called Jerry Levine and the Avengers.

Burns wrote and produced the B-side of that group's only single, with Levine backed by session musicians, but I've been unable to find a copy of that B-side anywhere in the digital domain.

However, the A-side, which does exist and wasn't produced by Burns, is of some interest.

Cause I'm away from down home.

Don't need no shine bone.

Yeah,

cause you got to be

all

The line-up of the band playing on that included guitarist Roy Ward, who would go on to be one of the most important and interesting British musicians of the later 60s and early 70s, and drummer Graham Edge, who went on to join the Moody Blues.

Apparently, at another point, their drummer was John Bonham.

None of the tracks Burns recorded for Decker in 1963 had any real success, but Burns had made some useful contacts with Rowe and Solomon, and most importantly had met a British arranger, Mike Leander, who came over to the US to continue working with Burns, including providing the string arrangements for Burns' production of Under the Boardwalk for the Drifters.

In May 1964, the month when that track was recorded, Burns was about the only person keeping Atlantic Records afloat.

We've already seen that they were having little success in the mid-60s, but in mid-May, even given the British invasion taking over the charts, Burns had five records in the Hot 100 as either writer or producer.

The Beatles' version of Twist and Shout was the highest charting, but he also had hits with One Way Love by the Drifters.

No more half-hearted kisses.

That's better enough.

That's When it hurts by Benny King.

Like you used to do.

You don't miss me, darling,

darling, darling, darling, when the night is through.

So I sit at home

and off the light.

Here comes the night.

That's when we've heard

Goodbye, baby, baby, goodbye by Solomon Burke.

Baby, goodbye.

You made me lonely, baby.

Yes, you made me hurt

like a fool.

I gave you candy

and my girl Sloopy by the vibrations.

Now, I want you to tell me something

we're going to make you feel crazy, baby.

And a week after the production of Under the Boardwalk, Burns was back in the studio with Solomon Burke, producing Burke's classic Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, though that track would lead to a major falling out with Burke, as Burns and Atlantic executive Jerry Wexler took co-writing credit they hadn't earned on Burke's song.

Burns was finally at the point in his career where he was big enough that he could start stealing black men's credits rather than having to earn them for himself.

I feel a little sad inside.

My baby, Mr.

Eaton,

can I get a little

bit?

But I need to be you

just to see me through

somebody to hold my hand

when I feel a little lonely.

But I wanna hear you say, yeah.

Not everything was a hit, of course.

He wrote a dance track with Mike Leander, Show Me Your Monkey, which was definitely not a big hit, but he had a strike rate that most other producers and writers would have killed for, and he was also having hits in the UK with the new British Invasion bands.

The Animals had made a big hit from Baby Let Me Take You Home, the old folk tune that Burns had rewritten for Hoagie Lands, and he was still in touch with Phil Solomon and Dick Rowe.

both of whom came over to New York for Burns' wedding in July.

It might have been while they were at the wedding that they first suggested to Burns that he might be interested in producing a new band that Solomon was managing, named Them, and in particular their lead singer, Van Morrison.

Van Morrison was always a misfit from his earliest days.

He grew up in Belfast, a city that is notoriously divided along sectarian lines, between a Catholic minority who, for the most part, want a united Ireland, and a Presbyterian majority who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.

But in a city where the joke goes that a Jewish person would be asked, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?

Morrison was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, and for the rest of his life he would be resistant to fitting into any of the categories anyone tried to put him in, both for good and ill.

While most of the musicians from the UK we've looked at so far have been from middle-class backgrounds, and generally attended art school, Morrison had gone to a secondary modern school, and left at fourteen to become a window cleaner.

But he had an advantage that many of his contemporaries didn't.

He had relatives living in America and Canada, and his father had once spent a big chunk of time working in Detroit, where at one point the Morrison family planned to move.

This exposed Morrison Sr.

to all sorts of music that would not normally be heard in the UK, and he returned with a fascination for country and blues music, and built up a huge record collection.

Young Van Morrison was brought up listening to Hank Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimmy Rogers, Louis Jordan, Jelly Roll Morton, and his particular favourite, Lead Belly.

The first record he bought with his own money was Hootin' Blues by the Sonny Terry Trio.

Like everyone, Van Morrison joined a skiffle group, but he became vastly more ambitious in 1959 when he visited a relative in Canada.

His aunt smuggled him into a nightclub where an actual American rock and roll group were playing, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks.

She took my watch and chain

Hawkins had been inspired to get into the music business by his uncle Del Mar, a fiddle player whose son, Dale Hawkins, we looked at back in episode 63.

His band, the Hawks, had a reputation as the hottest band in Canada.

At this point, they were still all Americans.

but other than their drummer Lee Von Helm, they would soon be replaced one by one with Canadian musicians, starting with bass player Robbie Robertson.

Morrison was enthused and decided he was going to become a professional musician.

He already played a bit of guitar, but started playing the saxophone too, as that was an instrument that would be more likely to get him work at this point.

He joined a show band called The Monarchs, as saxophone player and occasional vocalist.

Showbands were a uniquely Irish phenomenon.

They were eight or nine piece groups, rhythm sections with a small horn section, and usually a couple of different singers, who would play every kind of music for dancing, ranging from traditional pop to country and western to rock and roll, and would also perform choreographed dance routines and comedy sketches.

The Monarchs were never a successful band, but they managed to scrape a living playing the Irish showband circuit, and in in the early 60s they travelled to Germany, where audiences of black American servicemen wanted them to play more soulful music, like songs by Ray Charles, an opportunity Morrison eagerly grabbed.

It was also a black American soldier who introduced Morrison to the music of Bobby Bland, whose Turn on Your Love Light was soon introduced to the band's set.

breathe.

Turn on the light, let it shine on me.

Turn on your love, light, let it shine on me.

And let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine.

And I wanna love

what I

wanna.

But they were still mostly having to play chart hits by Billy Jake Framer or Jerry and the Pacemakers, and Morrison was getting frustrated.

The Monarchs did get a chance to record a single in Germany, as Georgie and the Monarchs, with another member, George Jones, not the famous country singer, singing lead, but the results were not impressive.

Morrison moved between several different showbands, but became increasingly dissatisfied with what he was doing.

Then another show band he was in, the Manhattan Showband, briefly visited London, and Morrison and several of his bandmates went to a club called Studio 51, run by Ken Collier.

There they saw a band called the Downliners Sect,

who had hair so long that the Manhattan members at first thought they were a girl group, until their lead singer came on stage wearing a deer stalker hat.

The Downliners Sect played exactly the kind of aggressive RB that Morrison thought he should be playing.

Baby, I know we got fun.

John, my man be a strong

club, they're all night along.

Save me,

that's right.

Morrison asked if he could sit in with the group on harmonica, but was refused, and this was rather a pattern with the Downliners sect, who had a habit of attracting harmonica players who wanted to be frontmen.

Both Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott did play harmonica with the group for a while, and wanted to join full-time, but were refused, as they clearly wanted to be lead singers, and the group didn't need another one of them.

On returning to Belfast, Morrison decided that he needed to start his own RB B band, and his own R and B Club night.

At first he tried to put together a sort of supergroup of show band regulars, but most of the musicians he approached weren't interested in leaving their steady gigs.

Eventually he joined a band called The Gamblers, led by guitarist and vocalist Billy Harrison.

The Gamblers had started out as an instrumental group, playing rock and roll in the style of Johnny and the Hurricanes, but they'd slowly been moving in a more R and B direction, and playing Chuckberry and Bo Diddley material.

Morrison joined the group on saxophone and vocals, trading off leads with Harrison, and the group renamed themselves after a monster movie from a few years before.

Born in that swirling inferno of radioactive dust were things so horrible, so terrifying, so hideous, there is no word to describe them.

The newly renamed Them took up a regular gig at the Maritime Hotel, a venue which had previously attracted a trad jazz crowd, and quickly grew a substantial local following.

Van Morrison later often said that their residency at the Maritime was the only time Them were any good, but that period was was remarkably short.

Three months after their first gig, the group had been signed to a management, publishing, and production deal with Philip Solomon, who called in Dick Rowe to see them in Belfast.

Rowe agreed to the same kind of licensing deal with Solomon that Andrew Oldham had already got from him for the Stones.

Them would record for Solomon's company, and Decker would license the recordings.

This also led to the first of the many, many line-up changes that would bedevil the group for its short existence.

Between 1964 and 1966, there were 18 different members of the group.

Eric Rickson, the keyboard player, was still at school, and his parents didn't think he should become a musician.

So while he came along to the first recording session, he didn't sign the contract because he wasn't allowed to stay with the group once his next term at school started.

However, he wasn't needed.

While Them's guitarist and bass player were allowed to play on the records, Dick Rowe brought in session keyboard player Arthur Greenslade and drummer Bobby Graham, the same musicians who had augmented the kinks on their early singles, to play with them.

The first single, a cover version of Slim Harpo's Don't Start Crying Now, did precisely nothing commercially.

baby, black bow, oh my lord

Blackbow, baby, black bow, oh my lord

Gonna wake up in the morning, find your good man gone,

black box woman, take one log and now

you backpoint.

The group started touring the UK, now as Decca recording artistes, but they almost immediately started to have clashes with their management.

Phil Solomon was not used to aggressive aggressive teenage RB musicians and didn't appreciate things like them just not turning up for one gig they were booked for, saying to them, the bachelors never missed a date in their lives.

One of them even had an accident on their way to do a pantomime in Bristol and went on with his leg in plaster and 21 stitches in his head.

Them were not particularly interested in performing in pantomimes in Bristol or anywhere else, but the British music scene was still intimately tied in with the older showbiz tradition and Solomon had connections throughout that industry.

As well as owning a publishing and production company, he was also a major shareholder in Radio Caroline, one of the pirate radio stations that broadcast from ships anchored just outside British territorial waters to avoid broadcasting regulations, and his father was a major shareholder in Decca itself.

Given Solomon's connections, it wasn't surprising that them were chosen to be one of the Decca acts produced by Burt Burns on his next UK UK trip in August 1964.

The track earmarked for their next single was their rearrangement of Baby Please Don't Go, a Delta Blues song that had originally been recorded in 1935 by Big Joe Williams and included on the Harry Smith anthology.

Now baby, please, don't go.

Baby, please, don't go

back to your deep and get your call like me.

Though it's likely that them had learned it from Muddy Waters' version, which is much closer to theirs.

Bert Burns helped the group tighten up their arrangement, which featured a new riff thought up by Billy Harrison, and he also brought in a session guitarist, Jimmy Page, to play rhythm guitar.

Again, he used a session drummer, this time Andy White, who had played on Love Me Do.

Everyone agreed that the result was a surefire hit.

At the session with Burns, them cut several other songs, including some written by Burns, but it was eventually decided that the B-side should be a song of Morrison's, written in tribute to his dead cousin Gloria, which they'd recorded at their first session with Dick Rowe.

I'm gonna shout it all now,

I'm gonna shine everything,

Baby Please Don't Go, backed with Gloria, was one of the great double-sided singles of the 60s, but it initially did nothing on the charts, and the group were getting depressed at their lack of success.

Morrison and Harrison were constantly arguing as each thought of himself as the leader of the group, and the group's drummer quit in frustration.

Pat McCauley, the group's new keyboard player, switched to drums and brought in his brother Jackie to replace him on keyboards.

To make matters worse, while Baby Please Don't Go had flopped, the group had hoped that their next single would be one of the songs they'd recorded with Burns, a Burns song called Here Comes the Night.

Unfortunately for them, Burns had also recorded another version of it for Decca, this one with Lulu, a Scottish singer who had recently had a hit with a cover of The Izzy Brothers Shout, and her version was released as a single.

right out my window, walking down the street.

A girl, but she's with my dad.

His arms around me like it used to be with me.

Oh, it makes me wanna cry.

Here comes the light.

Luckily for them, though unluckily for Lulu, her record didn't make the top 40, so there was still the potential for them to release their version of it.

Phil Solomon hadn't given up on Baby Please Don't Go though, and he began a media campaign for the record.

He moved the group into the same London hotel where Jimmy Saville was staying.

Saville is now best known for his monstrous crimes, which I won't go into here, except to say that you shouldn't google him if you don't know about them.

But at at the time he was Britain's most popular DJ, the presenter of Top of the Pops, the BBC's major TV pop show, and a columnist in a major newspaper.

Several started promoting them, and they would later credit him with a big part of their success.

But Solomon was doing a lot of other things to promote the group as well.

He part-owned Radio Caroline, and so Baby Please Don't Go went into regular rotation on the station.

He called in a favour with the makers of Ready Steady Go, and got Baby Please Don't Go made into the show's new theme tune for two months.

And soon the record, which had been a flop on its first release, crawled its way up into the top ten.

For the group's next single, Decker put out their version of Here Comes the Night, and that was even more successful, making it all the way to number two on the charts and making the American top 30.

me

Why can I accept the fact she's chosen him

and simply let them be?

As that was at its chart peak, the group also performed at the NME Pole Winners' Party at at Wembley Stadium, a show hosted by Saville, and featuring the Moody Blues, Freddy and the Dreamers, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, Herman's Hermits, Scylla Black, Donovan, The Searchers, Dusty Springfield, the Animals, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, among others.

Even on that bill, reviewers singled out them's seven-minute performance of Bobby Bland's Turn On Your Love Light for special praise, though watching the video of it, it seems a relatively sloppy performance.

But the group were already starting to fall apart.

Jackie Macaulay was sacked from the group shortly after that Wembley show, according to some of the group, because of his use of amphetamines, but it's telling that when the Protestant bass player Alan Henderson told the Catholic Macaulay he was out of the group, he felt the need to emphasise that, I've got nothing against.

and then use a term that's often regarded as an anti-Catholic slur.

On top of this, the group were also starting to get a bad reputation among the press.

They would simply refuse to answer questions, or answer them in monosyllables, or just swear at journalists.

Where groups like the Rolling Stones carefully cultivated a bad boy image, but were doing so knowingly and within carefully delineated limits, them were just unpleasant and rude because that's who they were.

Burt Burns came back to the UK to produce a couple of tracks for the group's first album, but he soon had to go back to America, as he had work to do there.

He'd just started up his own label, a rival to Redbird, called Bang, which stood for Bert, Ahmet, Neshwi, Gerald.

Burns had co-founded it with the Ertigan brothers and Jerry Wexler, though he soon took total control over it.

Bang had just scored a big hit with I Want Candy by The Strange Loves, a song Burns had co-written.

Sets the summer sun on fire.

I'm okay

there.

I'm okay with it.

And the Strange Loves, in turn, had discovered a singer called Rick Deminger, and Bang put out a single by him under the name The McCoy's, using a backing track Burns had produced as a Strange Loves album track, their version of his earlier hit, My Girl Sloopy.

The retitled Hang On Sloopy went to number one.

Burns was also getting interested in signing a young drill building songwriter named Neil Diamond.

The upshot was that rather than continuing to work with Burns, them were instead handed over to Tommy Scott, an associate of Solomon's, who'd sung backing vocals on Here Comes the Night, but who was best known for having produced Terry by Twinkle.

The group were not impressed with Scott's productions, and their next two singles flopped badly, not making the charts at all.

Billy Harrison and Morrison were becoming less and less able to tolerate each other, and eventually Morrison and Henderson forced Harrison out.

Pat Macaulay quit two weeks later.

The Macaulay brothers formed their own rival line-up of Them, which initially also featured Billy Harrison, though he soon left, and they got signed to a management contract with Reg Calvert, a rival of Solomon's, who as well as managing several pop groups also owned Radio City, a pirate station that was in competition with Radio Caroline.

Calvert registered the trademark in the name Them, something that Solomon had never done for the group, and suddenly there was a legal legal dispute over the name.

Solomon retaliated by registering trademarks for the names The Fortunes and Pinkerton's Assorted Colours, two groups Calvert managed, and putting together rival versions of those groups.

However, the problem soon resolved itself, albeit tragically.

Calvert got into a huge row with Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right libertarian politician who, when not co founding the Institute for Economic Affairs and quitting the Liberal Party for their pro-European stance on left-wing economics, was one of Solomon's co-directors of Radio Caroline.

Smedley shot Calvert, killing him, and successfully pled self-defence at his subsequent trial.

The jury let Smedley off after only a minute of deliberation, and awarded Smedley 250 guineas to pay for his costs.

The Macaulay Brothers group renamed themselves to Them Belfast, and the word beginning with G that some Romani people regard as a slur for their ethnic group, and made some records, mostly only released in Sweden, produced by Kim Fowley, who would always look for any way to cash in on a hit record and wrote Gloria's Dream for them.

Morrison and Henderson continued their group and had a surprise hit in the US when Decker issued Mystic Eyes, an album track they'd recorded for their first album, as a single in the US, and it made the top 40.

walking

down by

the old graveyard

The morning ball

and looking at you

on the back of of that, them toured the US and got a long residency at the Whiskier Go-Go in LA, where they were supported by a whole string of the Sunset Strip's most exciting new bands.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, The Association, Buffalo Springfield, and the Doors.

The group became particularly friendly with the Doors, with the group's new guitarist getting thrown out of clubs with Jim Morrison for shouting Johnny Rivers is a wanker at Rivers while Rivers was on stage, and Jim Morrison joining them on stage for duets, though the doors were staggered at how much the Belfast group could drink.

Their drink bill for their first week at the Whiskier Gogo was five thousand four hundred dollars.

And those expenses caused problems, because Van Morrison agreed before the tour started that he would be on a fixed salary paid by Phil Solomon and Solomon would get all the money from the promoters.

But then Morrison found out how much Solomon was making, and decided that it wasn't fair that Solomon would get all that money when Morrison was only getting the comparatively small amount he'd agreed to.

When Tommy Scott, who Solomon had sent over to look after the group on tour, tried to collect the takings from the promoters, he was told, Van Morrison's already taken the money.

Solomon naturally dropped the group, who continued touring the US without any management, and sued them.

Various mafia types offered to take up the group's management contract, and even to have Solomon murdered, but the group ended up just falling apart.

Van Morrison quit the group, and Alan Henderson struggled on for another five years with various different line-ups of session men, recording albums as them, which nobody bought.

He finally stopped performing as them in 1972.

He reunited with Billy Harrison and Eric Rickson, the group's original keyboardist, in 1979, and they recorded another album and toured briefly.

Rickson later formed another line-up of Them, which for a while included Billy Harrison, and toured with that group, billed as Them the Belfast Blues Band, until Rixon's death in 2015.

Morrison, meanwhile, had other plans.

Now that Them's two-year contract with Solomon was over, he wanted to have the solo career people had been telling him he deserved, and he knew how he was going to do it.

All along, he'd thought that Burt Burns had been the only person in the music industry who understood him as an artist.

And now, of course, Burns had his own record label.

Van Morrison was going to sign to Bang Records, and he was going to work again with Burt Burns, the man who was making hits for everyone he worked with.

But the story of Brown-Eyed Girl and Van Morrison going solo and the death of Burt Burns is a story for another time.

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