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| Totally wizard, man. |
The Hit
I’m pretty confident I’d heard “Love Grows (“Where My Rosemary Goes)” one-to-several times or another on the various local oldies radio channels I listened to down the years, but I couldn’t have connected them to an act called Edison Lighthouse, not even if that was the only way to rescue my kids from a hostage situation. As it happens there’s a pretty good reason for that, something I’ll get into below.
“Love Grows” is a pretty, catchy song from straight outta the late-stage bubblegum pop era and it takes liberal advantage of the ear-worm arsenal: e.g., the white-funky guitar riff, the soft, bright horns that swell into simple verses of nonsense (“she ain’t got no money/her clothes are kinda funny/her hair is kinda wild and free”) that opens up into a sticky chorus, and a basic toe-tapping rhythm that just about anybody can’t lose. It’s like somebody was tasked with writing a hit, so they listened to what was working at the time and got to work.
That’s not too far off, really, even if it jumps ahead of the main story by about an album and a tour.
The Rest of the Story
As much as I regret it happening on the 50th post in this series (who shits on a milestone?), I will not regret phoning in this one. On the plus side, I get to kill two birds with one stone courtesy of that editorial decision, thus saving me from having to listen to The First Class’ “Beach Baby” ever again. I mean, what sane man wouldn’t take that trade?
Unlike most of the bands discussed below, Edison Lighthouse was an actual band - even if the last one for the main person of interest to the larger story.
Tony Burrows started his career in pop music with The Kestrels, a band he formed between the English version of high school and a stint in the Army. Two of his bandmates - Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - went on to become London’s answer to New York’s Brill Building songwriting machine, writing a string of hits for a generation of English artists, plus a couple for Eurovision contests and, with your friends at the Coca-Cola corporation, one of the most famous ad pitches in history. They’d also write several more hits with/for Burrows…but I’m getting ahead on him again.
Burrows sang for a couple more acts between The Kestrels and Edison Lighthouse - first, with The Ivy League, a close harmony group arguably most famous for singing the backing vocals on The Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” and The Flower Pot Men, an actual rock outfit who jumped the gun on the later San Francisco craze with “Let’s Go to San Francisco” in 1967. They played “the home-country circuit” as the “soft rock band” Greenfield Hammer before becoming Edison Lighthouse during or around 1970 - which is where the real story begins.
A couple things happened in 1970. Burrows left Edison Lighthouse, for one, but only after the singles “Love Grows” became an international hit. After over half a decade of doing it, Burrows got burned out on the life - as he eloquently put it, “I’d been touring for 10 years and was tired of it: living in hotel rooms, out of a suitcase. I had a family” - and decided to become a studio/session performer. Which he did. And a very successful one. All at once.
Burrows would be involved in four separate “bands” that produced top 10 hits in the UK that same year. Besides “Love Grows,” there was Brotherhood of Man’s “United We Stand,” a song called “Gimme Dat Ding” by a one-off novelty act he created with Greenway called The Pipkins, plus a song written by Greenway, “My Baby Loves Lovin”, recorded under the name White Plains, only without an actual band attached to it, just a bunch of sessions performers, Burrows among them. All that lead to an odd, unprecedented situation where this happened:
“That’s when I had the hits with White Plains, Edison Lighthouse, Brotherhood of Man, and the Pipkins. [Those songs] were recorded during a six-to-nine-month period but all came out at about the same time. I actually did one episode of Top of the Pops where I did three different songs by three different groups on the same program.”
They didn’t do the Pipkins song that fateful day (it’s awful, but not worse than “Gonna Give Up Smoking and Take Up Loving You,” sung in what could be described as black-face, with Burrows taking the lower voice, Greenway, the higher, and you can guess how they handled “Pekin Ping Pong Sing Along Sing-Song Song,” only it’s a little less horrific than you’d expect). Top of the Pops, who had not researched any of those “bands,” didn’t expect “that Burrows would sing one song, go offstage and change clothes, then come back and do another, change and do another.” Embarrassed by having the same guy singing three songs in the same show, the wise-heads involved banned Burrows not just from Top of the Pops, but from BBC Radio altogether - which files just about right for corporate concepts of responsibility.
That’s more or less the story: the guy who owned the name “Edison Lighthouse” swapped in some new musicians for the departed Burrows and the rest, but they only lasted for a couple half-flopped singles (“It’s Up to You, Petula” did all right) and one more tour. Burrows had another hit several years later with 1974’s “Beach Baby” - e.g., that song that you always assumed was by The Beach Boys, but it was only a tribute (though I hear Brian Wilson likes it) - but The First Class wasn’t a real band either, even if they threw one together for a tour, much like they did with White Plains. (Fun fact: that’s still Burrows vocals in the videos linked to above, but they got stand-ins to lip-synch even for those.)
Burrows stuck to his guns throughout, refusing to tour through it all. He still performs, internationally too, but entirely on his own terms. He comes off as a very nice, unassuming guy, for what it’s worth. Of all the songs that he touched, “United We Stand” ultimately had the biggest legacy, becoming an anthem for the Democratic Party for a while, as well as a standard among the gay rights community. A reformed, and more dedicated Brotherhood of Man became a going concern with new members and later won 1976’s Eurovision Contest with “Save Your Kisses for Me”…which I just heard for the first time. Yeah, more of the same…
About the Sampler
It was hard to care about this one, frankly. While these weren’t the first “pre-fab” acts I’ve covered in this series, knowing that a body of music belched out of one of the world’s hit factories trips some of the wiring in my head. I’m just kind of predisposed to…disregard it, basically, if not outright hate it. As such, my personal effort for this dried up after dropping a couple representative songs for each of these “bands” onto the sampler: for Edison Lighthouse, I added “It’s Gonna Be a Lonely Summer” and “Every Little Move She Makes”; “What Became of Me” and “Funny How Love Can Be” for The First Class; “Sunny, Honey Girl” for White Plains; and “Prologue/These Heavy Times” for The Flower Pot Men (only I skipped "Prologue" on the sampler, because I could).
If I had to recommend any of these as interesting, I’d go with The Flower Pot Men. It’s not pure disposable hit-factory bubble-gum, and at least that was an actual band. Or maybe The Pipkins, but only because it’s one of those fucked-up cultural accidents that would never fly today. The end.
I’m pretty confident I’d heard “Love Grows (“Where My Rosemary Goes)” one-to-several times or another on the various local oldies radio channels I listened to down the years, but I couldn’t have connected them to an act called Edison Lighthouse, not even if that was the only way to rescue my kids from a hostage situation. As it happens there’s a pretty good reason for that, something I’ll get into below.
“Love Grows” is a pretty, catchy song from straight outta the late-stage bubblegum pop era and it takes liberal advantage of the ear-worm arsenal: e.g., the white-funky guitar riff, the soft, bright horns that swell into simple verses of nonsense (“she ain’t got no money/her clothes are kinda funny/her hair is kinda wild and free”) that opens up into a sticky chorus, and a basic toe-tapping rhythm that just about anybody can’t lose. It’s like somebody was tasked with writing a hit, so they listened to what was working at the time and got to work.
That’s not too far off, really, even if it jumps ahead of the main story by about an album and a tour.
The Rest of the Story
As much as I regret it happening on the 50th post in this series (who shits on a milestone?), I will not regret phoning in this one. On the plus side, I get to kill two birds with one stone courtesy of that editorial decision, thus saving me from having to listen to The First Class’ “Beach Baby” ever again. I mean, what sane man wouldn’t take that trade?
Unlike most of the bands discussed below, Edison Lighthouse was an actual band - even if the last one for the main person of interest to the larger story.
Tony Burrows started his career in pop music with The Kestrels, a band he formed between the English version of high school and a stint in the Army. Two of his bandmates - Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway - went on to become London’s answer to New York’s Brill Building songwriting machine, writing a string of hits for a generation of English artists, plus a couple for Eurovision contests and, with your friends at the Coca-Cola corporation, one of the most famous ad pitches in history. They’d also write several more hits with/for Burrows…but I’m getting ahead on him again.
Burrows sang for a couple more acts between The Kestrels and Edison Lighthouse - first, with The Ivy League, a close harmony group arguably most famous for singing the backing vocals on The Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” and The Flower Pot Men, an actual rock outfit who jumped the gun on the later San Francisco craze with “Let’s Go to San Francisco” in 1967. They played “the home-country circuit” as the “soft rock band” Greenfield Hammer before becoming Edison Lighthouse during or around 1970 - which is where the real story begins.
A couple things happened in 1970. Burrows left Edison Lighthouse, for one, but only after the singles “Love Grows” became an international hit. After over half a decade of doing it, Burrows got burned out on the life - as he eloquently put it, “I’d been touring for 10 years and was tired of it: living in hotel rooms, out of a suitcase. I had a family” - and decided to become a studio/session performer. Which he did. And a very successful one. All at once.
Burrows would be involved in four separate “bands” that produced top 10 hits in the UK that same year. Besides “Love Grows,” there was Brotherhood of Man’s “United We Stand,” a song called “Gimme Dat Ding” by a one-off novelty act he created with Greenway called The Pipkins, plus a song written by Greenway, “My Baby Loves Lovin”, recorded under the name White Plains, only without an actual band attached to it, just a bunch of sessions performers, Burrows among them. All that lead to an odd, unprecedented situation where this happened:
“That’s when I had the hits with White Plains, Edison Lighthouse, Brotherhood of Man, and the Pipkins. [Those songs] were recorded during a six-to-nine-month period but all came out at about the same time. I actually did one episode of Top of the Pops where I did three different songs by three different groups on the same program.”
They didn’t do the Pipkins song that fateful day (it’s awful, but not worse than “Gonna Give Up Smoking and Take Up Loving You,” sung in what could be described as black-face, with Burrows taking the lower voice, Greenway, the higher, and you can guess how they handled “Pekin Ping Pong Sing Along Sing-Song Song,” only it’s a little less horrific than you’d expect). Top of the Pops, who had not researched any of those “bands,” didn’t expect “that Burrows would sing one song, go offstage and change clothes, then come back and do another, change and do another.” Embarrassed by having the same guy singing three songs in the same show, the wise-heads involved banned Burrows not just from Top of the Pops, but from BBC Radio altogether - which files just about right for corporate concepts of responsibility.
That’s more or less the story: the guy who owned the name “Edison Lighthouse” swapped in some new musicians for the departed Burrows and the rest, but they only lasted for a couple half-flopped singles (“It’s Up to You, Petula” did all right) and one more tour. Burrows had another hit several years later with 1974’s “Beach Baby” - e.g., that song that you always assumed was by The Beach Boys, but it was only a tribute (though I hear Brian Wilson likes it) - but The First Class wasn’t a real band either, even if they threw one together for a tour, much like they did with White Plains. (Fun fact: that’s still Burrows vocals in the videos linked to above, but they got stand-ins to lip-synch even for those.)
Burrows stuck to his guns throughout, refusing to tour through it all. He still performs, internationally too, but entirely on his own terms. He comes off as a very nice, unassuming guy, for what it’s worth. Of all the songs that he touched, “United We Stand” ultimately had the biggest legacy, becoming an anthem for the Democratic Party for a while, as well as a standard among the gay rights community. A reformed, and more dedicated Brotherhood of Man became a going concern with new members and later won 1976’s Eurovision Contest with “Save Your Kisses for Me”…which I just heard for the first time. Yeah, more of the same…
About the Sampler
It was hard to care about this one, frankly. While these weren’t the first “pre-fab” acts I’ve covered in this series, knowing that a body of music belched out of one of the world’s hit factories trips some of the wiring in my head. I’m just kind of predisposed to…disregard it, basically, if not outright hate it. As such, my personal effort for this dried up after dropping a couple representative songs for each of these “bands” onto the sampler: for Edison Lighthouse, I added “It’s Gonna Be a Lonely Summer” and “Every Little Move She Makes”; “What Became of Me” and “Funny How Love Can Be” for The First Class; “Sunny, Honey Girl” for White Plains; and “Prologue/These Heavy Times” for The Flower Pot Men (only I skipped "Prologue" on the sampler, because I could).
If I had to recommend any of these as interesting, I’d go with The Flower Pot Men. It’s not pure disposable hit-factory bubble-gum, and at least that was an actual band. Or maybe The Pipkins, but only because it’s one of those fucked-up cultural accidents that would never fly today. The end.
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