LOST TREASURES

THE MARBLES

“The Marbles”

By Peter Marston

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The Marbles are best remembered, if at all, for their connection to the careers of two very different bands. The first is the Bee Gees. All of the Marbles’ singles and their sole, self-titled LP were produced by Barry Gibb, and seven of the fourteen songs that the Marbles commercially released were written by the Barry, Robin and Maurice. The other band is Rainbow, as it was in the Marbles that lead singer Graham Bonnett got his start as a recording artist. And even though Bonnett and the Bee Gees were brought together primarily by sharing management with Robert Stigwood, it turns out that Bonnett and the Bee Gees were, in fact, distant cousins.

The Marbles were a vocal duo consisting of Bonnett and (yet another cousin) Trevor Gordon. The two had sung together in a previous band, the Blues Sect, which broke up when Gordon’s family relocated to Australia. There he appeared on the Bees Gees’ television show and recorded a pair of singles with the Bee Gees as his backing band. A few years later, Gordon returned to England and reteamed with Bonnett. Exploiting his Bee Gees connection, Gordon arranged for an audition with Stigwood and he and Bonnett were signed to a management contract with RSO. It was Barry Gibb who suggested the Marbles as a band name and who agreed to oversee the duo’s recordings. In September, 1968, the Marbles’ first single—“Only One Woman”—was released and the LP followed in 1970, several months after the duo had broken up.

While the album bears a distinct Bee Gees influence, it is actually a little closer to blue-eyed soul than to the Bee Gees’ sound of the late-sixties. The arrangements are generally broader and the vocals very emphatic and dramatic, drawing comparison with Scott Walker, Chris Farlowe and even Tom Jones. The opening track, a cover of the Bee Gees’ hit “I Can’t See Nobody,” is a good example of the general approach on the album: soaring strings, punchy brass, dramatic breakdowns and unbridled, almost histrionic vocals. It’s a great track and a solid opener. Next is a version of “A House is Not a Home” that combines elements of the types of arrangements typical of the Walker Brothers’ hits with the slow burning rhythm section of Lulu’s :”To Sir with Love.” It is, at times, over the top, but still impressive. “Storybook Children” reigns things in a bit, but is still quite similar to the Walker Brothers’, with vocals than alternate between soulful and near-operatic. “Daytime” comes perhaps the closest to the type of psych-pop sound mastered by the Bee Gees in the late ’60s, although it was penned by Gordon rather than the Gibb brothers. One of the highlights of the album is a cover of the old soul standard “Stay With Me, Baby” (also known simply as “Stay with Me”), in another over the top production. Side two opens with the single “Only One Woman,” one of the best tracks on the album. Dramatic, pleading vocals lay over a soulful piano part and a continuously building string arrangement punctuated near the end with a series of simple brass stabs. An incongruous, but cheerful cover of Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” follows and is not dissimilar to some of Sedaka’s own early ‘70s work with the nascent 10cc (though it is nothing like Sedaka’s own mid-‘70s cover of the same tune). “Elizabeth Johnson” (another Gordon original) is the type of sad character study so common in late-’60s British pop, a trend unleashed by the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It is saved by a catchy chorus with a clever set of chord changes. The closing track, “The Walls Fell Down,” reminds me of the late Easybeats, sharing some of the sensibilities of the latter’s “The Shame Just Rained.” It’s another highlight and a suitably progressive conclusion to what is at times a fairly traditional album.

Four singles were released prior to the appearance of the LP in 1970: “Only One Woman,” “The Walls Fell Down,” “I Can’t See Nobody” and “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” The first of these was by far the most successful, reaching the top five in England. The failure of the latter singles to repeat this success led to the break-up of the band and the LP was released by Polydor in an effort to cash in on the success of the one hit single, though it too failed to chart, no doubt to its very late release. Bonnett went on to record two solo albums in a pop vein before achieving greater as the lead singer of Rainbow (replacing Ronnie James Dio) and then later, in the 1980s, with his own hard rock band, Alcatraz.

The Marbles was reissued by Repertoire in 2003, along with six bonus tracks, and is currently in print. It has not yet been released in the digital domain. Fans of the Bee Gees and Rainbow should definitely track down this curiosity!

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Pop Pioneer and “Lost Treasures” writer, Peter Marston is the leader of long-running power pop band, Shplang, whose most recent album, “My Big Three Wheeler” has been described as “the Beatles meet Zappa in pop-psych Sumo match.”  You check it out at this link:  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/shplang

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LINKS:

THE MARBLES on Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marbles_(duo)

GRAHAM BONNET(T) on Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Bonnet

THE MARBLES ON AMG:  http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-marbles-mn0000673746/biography

INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM BONNET:   http://thebigfootdiaries.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-bigfoot-diaries-interview-with.html

VIDEOS:

“ONLY ONE WOMAN”

“THE WALLS FALL DOWN”