THE MIKE STUART SPAN / LEVIATHAN STORY

It's probably stating the obvious to observe that there aren't many groups whose critical reputation is based almost exclusively on the merits of a handful of unreleased recordings. Nevertheless, the esteem in which the Mike Stuart Span are currently held by collectors of vintage British psychedelia is palpably out of proportion to the overall quality of the band's vinyl output during their chequered exsistence: of the four singles issued in the Span's name, two are ignored whilst a third is actively avoided. In the last few years, however, a selection of superior studio outtakes and radio broadcasts has slowly surfaced courtesy of the nefarious activites of certain individuals intent on replacing the counter-culture of the 1960s with an under-the-counter culture for the 1990s. This exploitation of the group culminated in the release in Germany of an unauthorised compilation album (actually credited to post-Span band Leviathan) that compounded a blatant abuse of trust with execrable sound quality and shabby packaging. However, this unsavoury episode merely galvanised the band (and drummer Gary Murphy in particular) to find a more appropriate epitaph for their past musical endeavous. After an interim EP project with a short lived psychedelic fanzine, the 'Timespan' album was pieced together from the band's own extensive archives and released in vinyl-only format by Tenth Planet in February 1995. Following the rapturous reception that this issue received, a CD equivalent boasting five extra tracks (including the band's highly regarded session for John Peel's Top Gear show) has now been assembled. The fact that such a venture is considered to be both financially and aesthetically viable surely provides a graphic illustration of the Span's standing amongst collectors more than a quarter of a century after the four musicians went their separate ways.
The Mike Stuart Span evolved out of a Brighton-based youth club group called the Mighty Atoms, who included vocalist Stuart Hobday and bassist Roger McCabe in their ranks. By 1965 Hobday's early attempts at songwriting had secured a publishing contract, and the Mike Stuart Span (a name credited by reversing the singer's Christian names) were formed as an outlet for the budding composer's material. In addition to Hobday and McCabe, the embryonic Span included Nigel Langham (guitar), Ashley Potter (organ) and a teenage drummer by the name of Gary 'Roscoe' Murphy. A liaison with local promoter / manager Mike Clayton resulted in the replacement of Potter with Jon Poulter and the addition of a horns section (Gary Parsley on trumpet and Dave Plumb on saxophone) as the band concentrated their efforts on American-derived soul music. Extensive rehearsals ensued, with the local press memorably dubbing them 'the band behind closed doors', before the Span emerged to claim their share of the local spotlight at the dingy Chatsfield Hotel in Brighton. However, any sense of euphoria was quickly and cruelly shattered: tripping on LSD, guitarist Langham fell to his death after leaping through an upstairs window. The band were left in a profound state of shock and the Mike Stuart Span subsequently became a resolutely drug-free zonedespite the blandishments of the encroaching psychedelic era.
Langham's death left the Span without a guitarist, and for a while they elected not to replace him. Despite this self-imposed handicap, the band secured a recording contract with EMI after cutting an acetate of Stuart Hobday's 'Work-Out' coupled with a version of the Drifters 'Follow Me' However, it was another Drifters number 'Come On Over To Our Place' that was selected as the A-side for the band's debut single on the Columbia label in November 1966, backed by another Hobday original entitled 'Still Nights'. A second single followed in June 1967, but the Span's rendition of the Cat Stevens song 'Dear' (supported by Mike D'Abo's 'Invitation') was equally unsuccesful, and EMI decided to drop the band. Perversely enough, this is where the Mike Stuart Span story really starts.....
EMI's decision forced the Span to take artistic stock, and their immediate response was to dismiss the increasingly anachronistic horns section, with keyboardist Poulter also departing shortly afterwards. An advertisement in Melody Maker recruited guitarist Brian Bennett, who had previously been a member of Tony's Defenders alongside drummer Roger Siggery, by this stage wielding the sticks for Jason Crest - an outfit whose career would subsequently progess with uncanny similarites to the Span's. The new guitarist fierce but fluid style accelerated the transition from soul to rock, with Sam & Dave material giving way to Cream and Hendrix covers that were bolstered by a quantum leap in the quality of the band's self-penned material, which both lyrically and instrumentally reflected the new cultural backdrop provided by the burgeoning Summer of Love.
With a line-up of Stuart Hobday (vocals), Brian Bennett (guitar), Roger McCabe (bass) and Gary Murphy (drums), the revised and revitalised Mike Stuart Span played their first gig on the final day of September 1967 to a rapturous reception. The new combination rapidly became a popular live attraction, and were no doubt aided by manager Clayton's links with a London booking agency. However, the previous incarnation of the Span had also boasted a hectic live schedule, and healthy attendances hadn't translated into sales figures for the accompanying vinyl product. With this in mind, the band paid more attention than before to the importance of studio work, starting with an October 1967 session at Decca with Dave Paramor, who had produced their EMI singles (Paramor had also worked extensively with Simon Dupree & the Big Sound, who had been one of the Span's main rivals on the South Coast soul scene). Three tracks were laid down: a suitably revamped version of Fontella Bass hit 'Rescue Me', the magnificent Murphy / Bennett original 'Second Production' and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, a mysterious instrumental that was christened 'As Close As We Can Get It' due to Paramor's insistence that the track should last exactly two and a half minutes! Inexplicably Decca decided that the recordings were insufficiently commercial and declined to persue their interest in the band.
Without record company support, the Span and Mike Clayton boldly took matters into their own hands, funding a privately issued single that appeared on 16 February 1968 on the band's Jewel label. 'Children of Tomorrow' and 'Concerto of Thoughts' - two tracks that effortlessly confirmed the Span's credentials as tunesmiths and musicians - were recorded at R.G. Jones studio in Morden, home of the now fiercly collected Oak custom label. The single was apparently pressed in a quantity of 500 copies, thereby condeming 'Children of Tomorrow' - now widely acknowedged by psychedelic collectors as a masterpiece of the genre - to an extremely limited potential audience.
Although the single failed to attract the attentions of an established record label, the Span were beginning to widen their horizons, attracting some valuable publicity both at home and aboard. A cameo appearance in the film, Better A Widow, successful tours of Germany and Belgium, jamming with Jimi Hendrix at the Speakeasy (Brian Bennett was so nervous at the prospect of performing with his idol that he dropped his plectrum!) and the performance of a 20 minute science fiction fantasy entitled 'Cycle' for the Brighton Arts Festival - sadly not perserved for posterity - were all indicative of the favourable reception that the band were enjoying in their attempts to make that vital commercial breakthrough. Following an excellent session for the John Peel's Top Gear programme in May 1968, such a breakthrough seemed closer than ever when the Span were chosen as the featured group in a BBC television documentry called A Year In The Life (Big Deal Group), an expose of the music business as experienced by a young and unknown pop group. A Year In The Life would assiduously chart the band's progress over the twelve months, and as such would eloquently capture their corruption from optimistic, freshfaced innocents into bitter, jaded cynics.
The first step in this process was inadvertently achieved by Mike Clayton's ill-judged attempts to 'set-up' a hit single in conjunction with the Fontana label and those past masters of the bland, formularised pop pap, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. 'You Can Understand Me', backed by equally risible 'Baubles and Bangles', was issued in August 1968 and duly received thepre-arranged patronage of Radio Luxembourg, but despite the behind-the-scenes machinations the single plunged into the instant obscurity that it undoubtedly warranted. The Span bitterly resented the way that 'You Can Understand Me' had been foisted upon them, and following Clayton's equally disastrous attempts to establish the band's own record shop Exspansions in Brighton, they parted company with their manager in acrimonious - not to mention penniless-circumstances. With Fontana off the scene and Clayton also about to disappear, the Span were able to eschew artistic compromise in favout of intrinsic musical merit. A series of high quality demonstration recordings were made at R.G.Jones, including new material of the calibre of 'Through The Looking Glass', 'World In My Head' and 'Blue Day', which had been inspired by the rapidly-devolping UK blues boom. Clayton's final managerial act before disappearing into the wide blue yonder was to present these demos to Clive Selwood, head of the UK branch of Elektra. Selwood was sufficiently impressed to notify label president Jac Holzman of the band's potential, and the Span were duly signed to Elektra in early 1969. Holzman immediately commissioned an album, but insisted on a change of name for his new charges. Thus it was that the Mike Stuart Span were rechristen Leviathan.
Elektra officially launched Leviathan's recording career in April 1969 with the simultaneous issue of two singles. Three of the chosen tracks - 'Remember The Times', 'Second Production' and 'Time' - had been initally been conceived as Span recordings, with the newly-composed 'The War Machine' completing the quartet. Elektra's media assault was strengthened by the support of the influential John Peel and a live performance of 'Remember The Times' on the television show Late Night Live Line-Up, but with the benefit of hindsight, the label would probably have been better advised to concentrate on promoting one track rather than 'The Four Faces of Leviathan' as the campaign had been rather portenously titled.
Despite the commercial failure of both singles, work continued on the band's album at Trident Studios. As a taster for the LP, a further single coupling 'Flames' and 'Just Forget Tomorrow' (a cryptic title?) was recorded in the summer. By the time that it surfaced in October 1969, however, Leviathan were no more (although as Gary Murphy wryly notes, had the single been a spectacular success the band would have no doubt have hastily reformed!). The final straw had come when Jac Holzman pronounced himself dissatisfied with the completed album, suggesting that the band should follow Traffic's example by retiring to a cottage for several months in order to immerse in the process of creating original music. Elektra were prepared to support the band financially during this period, but Brian Bennett, who had continued to work during the band's attempts to make the big time, felt that he could make more money labouring on building sites (as opposed to labouring in pop groups, presumably). Without the support of all four band members the project floundered, and by the time that the documentry A Year In The Life was broadcast in late September 1969, the group had gone their separate ways. Roger McCabe would withdraw from the music business completely, while Stuart Hobday embarked on what was to prove a highly succesful career with the BBC as a music producer. Brian Bennett joined the final incarnation of Jason Crest (who would shortly mutate into High Broom), where he was reunited with Roger Siggery, his fomer colleague in Tony's Defenders. Despite his bitterness at the failure of the Span / Leviathan, Gary Murphy was persuaded to join a local blusey progressive outfit called Hellmet, who recorded sufficient material for an album. As with the Leviathan LP, this project also failed to gain a release.
The Mike Stuart Span / Leviathan story may well have ended at the juncture, but by the mid-1980s the band had become a cult name amongst collectors of obscure British psychedelic 45s, and this blated reappraisal was intensified by the BBC's decision to broadcast an updated A Year In The Life in December 1989 (subsequently repeated in early 1991). With the Oak custom label (on which many of the Span's acetates had been cut) fast becoming a parallel phenomenon of the record collecting world, the band found themselves attracting attention on two separate levels. Although this has so far proved insufficient to induce Elektra to exhume the lost Leviathan album, the band's own achives have proven extensive enough to enable 'Timespan' to stand as an impressive testament to their undoubted excellence. No less than nine tracks including 'Children of Tomorrow' and 'Concerto of Thoughts' have been extracted from Oak acetates. 'Evil Woman' (also recorded to far lesser effect, by Spooky Tooth) and 'Through The Looking Glass' are studio outtakes recorded by Leviathan in 1969, while the compilation is completed by the four tracks recorded for Top Gear in May 1968.
The obvious conundrum presented by the indisputable excellence of 'Timespan' concerns the band's apparently inexplicable lack of success during their exsistance. Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that one of their strongest compostions, the quintessential psychedelic nugget 'Second Production', didn't appear until April 1969, a full eighteen months after the track had first been recorded. A release in late 1967 at the height of the psychedelic era may have resulted in an entirely different conclusion to the Mike Stuart Span story, but by mid-1969 the music scene was irreparably polarised between the underground progessive movement and the increasingly successful bubblegum sound. The fate of 'Children of Tomorrow', possibly the Span's most fully realised creation but frustratingly buried away on an obscure and very limited private label issue, would appear to confirm that the band were advised weak or inadequate management at a point in their development when they were most in need of a guiding hand: instead they were forced to record a single for Fontana that was not only at odds with their normal style but a palpably bad record even by standards of the mainsteam pop genre. However, it should be pointed out the sub history of the late 1960s British rock music is littered with psychedelic-based acts who, at the time, failed to receive the acclaim and attention that they are now being afforded. Perhaps the simple truth is that, despite its current high profile, the British approximation of psychedelia was essentially a cult attraction even during the era in question: arguably only the Pink Floyd (and to a lesser extent, Procol Harum and Family) can be said to have substained a career on the initial impetus gained during the psychedelic era. Ultimately, of course, speculation regarding the Span's lack of success is pointless. Sadly 'Timespan' is incapable of rewriting history or righting all the wrongs that befell the band during their ill-fated existance, but at least its appearance - initally on vinyl, now on compact disc - ensures that their recordings are now legitimately available for the sizeable audience that has belatedly come to value the band. At this stage of the game, that's probably as much as anyone can ask.

Copyright : David Wells, March 1996. A BIG thank-you for David for the use of the 'Timespan' sleeve notes.

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