Chad (Stuart) and Jeremy (Clyde)? They even turned up in a couple of episodes of Batman in the 60s!

 

Thats Them Their biggest US hit was A Summer Song, 11 charted hits stateside in all and not one dented the British charts.

 

electric prunes?... big psychedelic group in the mid-late 60's.

There are so many garage/psychedelic bands from the 60s that could come into this category.

 

Most of the bands on the Nuggets compilation had American hits but did nothing over here.

 

A really obvious one is The Seeds especially as Can't Seem To Make You Mine was used as music for a Lynx ad.

 

Another could be The Hombres' Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) which I think was sampled on somebody's single in the 90s as well as being used in a Foster's ad campaign.

 

Then movies are responsible for a lot of these kinds of tracks and surely Little Green bag by The George Baker Selection has to be one of the most well-known non-hits around.

I'm going to mention Nick Drake;

 

Nick Drake would have been a great one for the list, though he managed to have a couple of hits in about 2002, with some previously unreleased material which [i think] was found in Gabrielle Drake’s attic. I think the album and remastered boxset were released on the 30th anniversary of his death, with the boxset featuring a DVD that included a documentary of his life. I would have liked to buy this boxset but I thought it was too expensive and so just bought a sampler of the tracks instead.

 

Even though I know Nick Drake has charted a Top 40 single, I am not too sure about Richard Thompson or John Martyn. I think Martyn may have had a Top 30 hit with Faithless, covering the old Beloved song “Deliver Me”, though I am not 100% sure about this fact as it could have been Robert Wyatt instead [who many of you will know from his hit “Shipbuilding”]. Nevertheless I would expect that Thompson and Martyn would have been the kind of ‘Whistle Test’ artists from the 1970s that would have been respected for the albums they released but never managed to chart a single chart hit.

 

I think there will be many artists from the ‘Whistle Test’ show in the early 1970s that you will never see in the UK singles chart hits book. I guess that this would have been because most of the acts on that show would have been the kind of prog-rock act who would not want their tracks truncated into three minute ‘throw-away’ pop songs and so did not bother with releasing singles. I think the group with the most hit albums and no hit singles have been Tangerine Dream who I think have charted about 27 albums [Leonard Cohen would have also been a contender for this honour but received his first single hit when “Hallelujah” charted alongside Jeff Buckley and Alex Burke, the Christmas before last].

 

Loz

 

The moment you said Whistle Test I thought: Doh! The New York Dolls. Not a sniff of a hit.

i started a thread on ds about forgotten 60's classics, its doing quite well, i could lift quite a few examples from that thread but tbh i seem to be the only one here who knows acts like the action, poets, spanky and our gang..

 

The Action and the Poets are amazing :wub: I never heard any Sparky, I figured they were a bit Mamas and Papas...

Nick Drake would have been a great one for the list, though he managed to have a couple of hits in about 2002, with some previously unreleased material which [i think] was found in Gabrielle Drake’s attic. I think the album and remastered boxset were released on the 30th anniversary of his death, with the boxset featuring a DVD that included a documentary of his life. I would have liked to buy this boxset but I thought it was too expensive and so just bought a sampler of the tracks instead.

 

Even though I know Nick Drake has charted a Top 40 single, I am not too sure about Richard Thompson or John Martyn. I think Martyn may have had a Top 30 hit with Faithless, covering the old Beloved song “Deliver Me”, though I am not 100% sure about this fact as it could have been Robert Wyatt instead [who many of you will know from his hit “Shipbuilding”]. Nevertheless I would expect that Thompson and Martyn would have been the kind of ‘Whistle Test’ artists from the 1970s that would have been respected for the albums they released but never managed to chart a single chart hit.

 

I think there will be many artists from the ‘Whistle Test’ show in the early 1970s that you will never see in the UK singles chart hits book. I guess that this would have been because most of the acts on that show would have been the kind of prog-rock act who would not want their tracks truncated into three minute ‘throw-away’ pop songs and so did not bother with releasing singles. I think the group with the most hit albums and no hit singles have been Tangerine Dream who I think have charted about 27 albums [Leonard Cohen would have also been a contender for this honour but received his first single hit when “Hallelujah” charted alongside Jeff Buckley and Alex Burke, the Christmas before last].

 

Loz

Robert Wyatt has a new compilation album released tomorrow, fittingly entitled 40 Greatest Misses. He has just two top 40 hits, both cover versions - I'm A Believer (written by Neil Diamond, made famous by The Monkees) and Shipbuilding (Elvis Costello). His former band, Soft Machine, never had a hit single.

 

electric prunes?... big psychedelic group in the mid-late 60's.

I Had Too Much To Dream and Get Me To The World On Time were boith hits I'm sure (if minor)

 

Great band though and a great track on Easy Rider

The George Baker Selection song I know but the rest is really no hit wonder even for me! :mellow:

 

What is "ds" (or was it "ts"?) - I want to join that (I love hearing and talkin' about unknown Oldies)!

 

 

My favourite example for no hit wonder is Canadian band "Saga"!

All their songs are sounding like big hits to me but they never had a hit in US or UK!

Why "On the loose" (the following song from 1982) didn't made the Top 10 is a mystery to me...!!!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2glFe0sY_y4

Edited June 6, 201015 yr by boys allowed

ds = digital spy. google it, youll find it easy :)

ds = digital spy. google it, youll find it easy :)

Oh, I see. I already heard about that. ;)

 

 

Edit: Oh no - "ds" want me to pay a fee on my registration only because I have an anonymous email address... (no thanks). <_<

Edited June 6, 201015 yr by boys allowed

Do Led Zeppelin count ?

 

Probably the greatest rock group ever, influenced an entire genre and never had a Top 20 hit and even never had a hit at all until a decade after splitting

Do Led Zeppelin count ?

 

Probably the greatest rock group ever, influenced an entire genre and never had a Top 20 hit and even never had a hit at all until a decade after splitting

Very good one!!!"

"Whole lotta love" and "Stairway to heaven" - two classics which weren't hits in their times...

 

Robert Wyatt has a new compilation album released tomorrow, fittingly entitled 40 Greatest Misses. He has just two top 40 hits, both cover versions - I'm A Believer (written by Neil Diamond, made famous by The Monkees) and Shipbuilding (Elvis Costello). His former band, Soft Machine, never had a hit single.

 

Yes, that would be a very good example too. Soft Machine are one of those bands that still receive a lot of press in magazines such as Uncut and Mojo, not only because of Wyatt’s solo/band work but because of Kevin Ayers too.

 

I think that Ayers has just had some compilations of his work released recently as I remember glancing over an article in one of those magazines, a few months back, which had caught my eye. I was thinking of buying one of the original albums, that Kevin Ayers first released back in the 1970s, as I saw a few copies in a CD sale a couple of weeks ago. In the end, I thought that a Be Bop Deluxe album might be a safer bet, as I had previously heard a record by Bill Nelson, thinking that Ayers might be too ‘progressively weird’ for my liking.

 

I hope when talking about Ayers, I am not getting myself confused with that of Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew’s band The Soft Boys, as this was a problem that I used to have when first getting to know the work of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. I cannot remember who the other band members in The Soft Boys were, or if I got to know Hitchcock through REM [i had a copy of “Stand” in 1989] or due to “The Yip Song”, which was a favourite song of mine when it first released in the early 1990s.

 

Looking at many of the previous responses to this thread and in particular the bands of the 1960s, I would expect that Hitchcock and Ayers would be the kind of acts that people here would be interested in. I do not actually know what those 1960s bands would sound like but I think it will not be too far away from that of Hitchcock and Ayers. I am guessing that these 1960s acts will be similar to The 13th Floor Elevators, a band I have heard of due to the current re-issue campaign and because I have heard tracks from the new Roky Erickson/Okkervil River album.

 

I am surprised that so many bands from the 1960s have been mentioned. I thought that most people on here would be at an age where they would have grown up with all the Indie bands of the 1980s. Obviously there are loads of acts that people could mention [i suppose you could get a large list just from back catalogue of Sarah Records] though personally I am surprised that I have not seen Momus and Felt in the list yet.

 

I would have thought that either one of those acts would have been one of the first to be mentioned by fans of ‘retro indie’ music. In fact I wanted to mention both earlier but I could not see how I could relate either of them to that of the recordings by soul singer Ephraim Lewis.

 

I think I first came to attention of Momus at the end of the 1980s, when he would have appeared on BBC 2’s Snub TV show singing “Hairstyle Of The Devil”. In those days he was very much like a ‘synthpop Neil Hannon’ and I guess I would have got into his music as he would have reminded me of Marc Almond, especially in the days when he was in Soft Cell or when he recorded the works of Jacques Brel [at that time Snub TV was broadcast, Almond would have been working with Anne Hogan from Cactus Rain, releasing records like “The Stars We Are” which sounded more like Love than of the synthpop of the early 1980s]

 

Back in the 1980 I think Lawrence from Felt would have definitely been another name to mention for those indie music fans who thought that Morrissey was too much of a ‘mainstream’ artist to be bothered with. I was a big fan of Morrissey at the time and so I have many more records by him [and The Smiths] than Lawrence, as my Felt collection only numbers a couple of releases.

 

I think I bought my Felt albums in the early 1990s, as in the 1980s I would have only ever bought records when I was out shopping with my mother, from shops that would not normally stock Felt [Woolworths or my local newsagents], whilst I know it was before the Britpop era as Lawrence was in Denim by then [i was thinking of changing my log-in to ‘Lawrence in Denim’ but I thought it sounded like it should be in a ‘dodgy’ personal ad].

 

In the 1990s, I bought many records by Pulp, St. Etienne and The Auteurs, but never got around to buying anything by Denim. I do not know why as I liked the singles and their releases were not the most obscure of recordings, as Denim was signed to a major by then [i think it was either London or EMI]. I think Denim’s album was one of those ‘I’ll get that next week releases’, a record that you always planned to get, but in the end you never did because some other special edition ‘caught your eye’ first [for me, “Outernational” by Billy Mackenzie would be another album of this kind, as I have been wanting to buy it for about 18 years now, but have never got around to doing so].

 

Nevertheless, even though he did not have any big hits, it was good that there was quite a cool artist called Lawrence that I knew about, as when I was younger I hated the name and wanted to be called something else. I never liked the name Lawrence as a child because I never thought it was a very ‘Rockstar’ name. As a child I always thought of people like Sir Laurence Olivier [i suppose today it would be Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen], the kind of people who would be ‘lovey darlings’ and to this day, I cannot think of any other 1980s rock or pop star who would have the same name as me, whether spelt with a letter ‘U’ or ‘W’ [if you can think of any other example please suggest them].

 

Lawrence [who is not back in ‘Denim’, just in nice comfy work pants]

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, I used to listen to a bit of Denim back in the day - and The Auteurs. I played the Auteurs album, New Wave, just a few months ago and it still sounded pretty good. I'll have to dig the Back In Denim album out and listen to that. They were a strange band with a lot of 70s almost glam-rock style influences.

 

There's always Larry Mullen Jr :lol:

Do Led Zeppelin count ?

 

Probably the greatest rock group ever, influenced an entire genre and never had a Top 20 hit and even never had a hit at all until a decade after splitting

That wasn't really what I was after when thinking of this thread. Led Zep although not having any hits - their choice - were massive and there songs well known.

 

I was really after acts that went under the radar or were cult during their career only to have a track become well known many years later (for whatever reason athough preferably without being hits)

 

People who really fit are like Love, The Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, NY Dolls, Tom Waits etc

Edited June 8, 201015 yr by Severin

Yes, I used to listen to a bit of Denim back in the day - and The Auteurs. I played the Auteurs album, New Wave, just a few months ago and it still sounded pretty good.

 

“Lenny Valentino” was my personal favourite and should have been a big Top Ten hit, especially when it was a better record than a lot of the Top Ten hits Suede had in the mid-to-late 1990s . By any chance would you have bought the book that Luke Haines has written? I have seen it for sale in HMV but not got around to buying yet.

 

Loz

[well, the name Lawrence is too long to keep typing every time and I dislike ‘Larry’ even more]

 

“Lenny Valentino” was my personal favourite and should have been a big Top Ten hit, especially when it was a better record than a lot of the Top Ten hits Suede had in the mid-to-late 1990s . By any chance would you have bought the book that Luke Haines has written? I have seen it for sale in HMV but not got around to buying yet.

 

Loz

[well, the name Lawrence is too long to keep typing every time and I dislike ‘Larry’ even more]

I haven't read the Luke Haines book. If I find a copy in the next few weeks I might buy it and add it to the reading pile for my holiday next month. I ought to get round to getting the Alex James book as well.

 

I shall forgive you for your blasphemous statement that some of Suede's top ten hits might have been anything less than brilliant :o

I haven't read the Luke Haines book. If I find a copy in the next few weeks I might buy it and add it to the reading pile for my holiday next month. I ought to get round to getting the Alex James book as well.

 

I shall forgive you for your blasphemous statement that some of Suede's top ten hits might have been anything less than brilliant :o

 

 

Suede were my favourite band when I was in the later years of school [i think I would have been in the 6th form when they arrived on the scene] and I think I was the first person in my year to get into them as most people were still obsessed with Northern ‘Baggy’ music at the time.

 

I think Brett & Bernard set a very high standard with their first few releases, a standard that Suede never eclipsed. I would not say their mid-period singles are bad, in a way that many of the ‘wannabe’ Britpop bands were [the ones who came in the ‘second wave’ of Britpop around 1997 and after appearing once on The Chart Show, have now been largely forgotten] or as mediocre as some of the songs from ‘A New Morning’, singles of which I cannot actually remember.

 

Like The Pet Shop Boys, Suede are also an act whose songs [at least in the early days] are such a high standard that even their B-sides should have been released as singles. I wish I had bought their B-sides collection ‘Sci-Fi Lullabies’, which like the ‘Alternative’ Pet Shop Boys album, does not seem to have been stocked in the shops that I go to, anytime in the last decade. If all the tracks on ‘Sci-Fi Lullabies’ were as good as the additional tracks on my random collection of Suede singles, then surely it should have been one of the ‘greatest indie albums of all time’ as well as their ‘regular’ albums.

 

Another act that I think produced a high standard in bonus tracks was Pulp, a band which replaced Suede as my favourite act during the Britpop era. If you had asked me, during these years, who were the biggest British indie acts, the kind of acts you would have as headliners to a massive festival, then I would have said “Blur; Oasis and Pulp”, whilst a few years earlier, Suede would have been in a league of their own [though at a push, I might have said James as well].

 

After Suede, Bernard Butler had a few solo hits and recorded “Yes” with David McAlmont, a singer who is currently collaborating with Michael Nyman on an album called ‘The Glare’. Even though he has released collaborations with these people, and others like David Arnold, I do not think he has had any solo hits in his own right. I might be wrong, but if that is a fact, then I think that McAlmont should go on the list.

 

On the other hand, if there is a small chart hit that I have forgotten about, then his early 1990s duo Thieves should be nominated as a ‘non hit wonder’. I would recommend the act to anybody who liked McAlmont when he recorded with Butler and who would be a big fan of the Cocteau Twins as well.

 

I would like to recommend an album as well but unfortunately the pair [David & Saul] fell out with each other and split up before this could be released. However most of the songs for the proposed album can be found on an album just entitled ‘McAlmont’, though I would expect that you would need to find it online or in the second hand shop these days [though by now, it may have been re-issued by Cherry Red, as everything else seems to be].

 

Loz

 

[Please also note: If you want the book by Alex James, then it is on sale in HMV for £3. I have bought it but not read it yet]

 

on the pop front theres spanky and our gang, in 66-68 they had several 'airplay hits' which never transfered to the charts.

 

Also from this period were Gary Lewis & The Playboys

They had loads of hits in the US but only a #36 UK hit - My Heart's Symphony on reissue back in 1975 during the Northern Soul boom.

Another was The Association only just had a #23 UK hit with Time For Livin'

 

Then there was:

Electric Prunes - 2 minor hits - I Had To Much To Dream (Last Night) #49 and Get Me To The World On Time #42

 

? & The Mysterians - #37 hit with 96 Tears.

 

No hits include

Soft Machine just missed out with Love Makes Sweet Music in 1967

 

The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard

 

Rupert's People - Reflections Of Charles Brown

 

Ivan's Meads - Sins Of A Family

 

Edited June 17, 201015 yr by euro music