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59: ONE IN A MILLION
Fredereek Hernando/Double Sight
(MGM, 1967)

THERE can be no doubt that The Who had a seismic effect on the tougher beat groups who criss-crossed Britain in BMC vans on the snowy A-roads of the 1960s.

For those bands who felt less inclined to buy into the fiction that a spruce-up and a toothy grin automatically ensured instant success, The Who's surly demeanour and blistering, confrontational sonic attack were extraordinarily liberating and massively influential.

One In A Million had a more direct claim to appropriating The Who's brash, rushing sound than most. This young Scottish band started life as The Jaygars and actually supported The Who, alongside fellow Scots Studio Six, in Greenock on May 8, 1965 - rather thrillingly, at a gig attended by my big brother.

The Who took a shine to the band and were particularly intrigued by the precocious talent of lead guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, at that point still just 11 years old.

McCulloch would later feature in Thunderclap Newman, the ad hoc collective brought together by Pete Townshend just long enough to bequeath us that epochal single (Something In The Air) and a criminally under-appreciated album (Hollywood Dream).

In 1967, however, McCulloch was still a member of The Jaygars, who had changed their name to the more vogueish and intriguing One In A Million and decamped to, er, Potters Bar in search of the elusive grail.

Fredereek Hernando, their finest moment, is an all-too-little-known UK psych classic - a dreamlike, fiercely compressed fog of exultant, disembodied harmonies and gibbering guitars. In fact, a more perfect encapsulation of the freakbeat end of British psychedelia may not exist this side of The Creation's How Does It Feel To Feel, and it is an enduring mystery why neither track managed so much as a sniff at the charts.

A truly bizarre postscript to One In A Million's brief tale is provided by the fact that their pounding, headachey downer nightmare No Smokes somehow ended up being used in an episode of The Clangers. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction to a genuinely gratifying degree.

7:42am Friday 7th March 2008

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