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11:50am Friday 4th July 2008

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76: LOCOMOTIVE Mr Armageddon/ There's Got To Be A Way (Parlophone, 1969)

FOLLOWING a number 25 chart placing for their single Rudi's In Love in 1968, Birmingham-based quintet Locomotive seemed to be steaming along nicely.

That single's amiable, loping ska rhythm made it a firm favourite in the clubs, and to this day the band are afforded respectful nods from tastemakers everywhere for having had the unwitting foresight to have minted the template for the 2-Tone phenomenon a decade early. A Message To You Rudy even featured as the B-side of their debut single Broken Heart.

However, for the purposes of today's exercise, we'll actually be looking at what happened when they renounced their ska influences, grew their hair and turned, wohhh, heav-eeee.

More or less everyone was doing this at the time - wigging out, wigging up and assuming general weightiness - but few did it with such all-embracing fervour as Locomotive.

Mr Armageddon is like a checklist of all the elements required to create a wilfully anti-establishment, underground statement' in 1969: portentious, finger-pointing lyrics sticking it to suburbia, delivered with spittle-flecked, declamatory vigour, accompanied by the most raving wah-wah Hammond organ in recorded history... absolutely made for idiot dancing to, in front of a backdrop of lava lamps.

We have Locomotive mainman Norman Haines to thank for all of this - and thank him I do, daily. Whatever Damascene moment it was which converted him to the ways of prog had the simultaneous effect of assuring him a place in the pantheon of unsung British greats and stalling his career, as the audience who lapped up Rudi's In Love couldn't follow this new direction, and prog fans couldn't accept that Locomotive were anything other than a pop band.

Simply everyone lost out.