53: THE PIRATES
My Babe/Casting My Spell (HMV, 1964)

MUCH as I've been enjoying BBC4's Pop Britannia series, it reiterated a commonly-held misconception that I feel duty-bound to address.

Given that it is an impossible task to present a coherent overview of the musical output of an entire decade in a one-hour episode, it was still a bit misleading to suggest that the UK had no credible response to the first wave of American rock n' rollers.

Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Tommy Steele were rather sniffily dismissed as our feeble answer to Elvis and his dynamite US peers - but no mention was made of the great Billy Fury, nor indeed the sternest, toughest rockers of that era to be found anywhere in the world, namely Johnny Kidd & The Pirates.

Kidd and his stripey-topped cohorts are justly celebrated for 1960's Shakin' All Over, which properly reeks of wintry British transport caff egg and chips cooked in AEC Mammoth Major axle grease. The song was, however, just one of a string of terrific singles which were as hard and direct as dockers' fists but also supple, limber and lean - Hungry For Love, Feelin', Restless, the brilliant Mersey Beat-influenced Jealous Girl - classics all.

By 1963, Kidd had found the definitive Pirates line-up in bassist Johnny Spence, drummer Frank Farley and guitarist Mick Green. They looked great - the small, wild-eyed Spence contrasted with the thick-set, lantern-jawed Green and the mountainous Farley, who looked like the hardest, most formidable bouncer of all time.

Better still, they sounded just like they looked. No one else in 1963 was playing with this degree of toughness, and the absence of a rhythm guitarist compelled Green to invent a style all of his own whereby he pulled sharp, stinging lead lines out of a simultaneously choppy rhythm pattern.

Both sides of the My Babe/Casting My Spell single stand as definitive examples of his economical genius and of the walloping potency of The Pirates as a performing entity. Both tracks were recorded (minus Kidd himself) in one take, no overdubs, at the end of the sessions for the Hungry For Love/Ecstasy single on October 11, 1963, and still make jaws drop whenever they receive an all-too-rare airing.

Hear Casting My Spell and discover the very moment of Dr Feelgood's birth.