Propects

The New Musical Express was the music paper of record for a long time. The late, great Pat Long wrote a very good book about it, so good that people wanted to ask him about it all the time. I know I certainly did. Freddie and the Dreamers were... well... I'm not sure they were the band to take us into the jet age but someone clearly had to do it.


33 comments on “Propects

  1. Maybe not a rocket scientist, but you may become cosmic in other ways, George.

  2. The Dreamers look weirdly like background characters in a John Allison comic…

  3. Lucky old telly indeed ♡. What a beautiful effect do this ’60 flavored artstyle ♡♡♡.

  4. This is giving me fever dreams of Yellow Submarine banter.

    1. I’ve got a hole in me pocket.

      1. And I can hear my beard growin

  5. The Fab Four are such a great quartet I this. It almost makes me not want to watch them get sullied by global superstardom. Then again I want to see Shelley work her magic.

    BTW Freddie and the Dreamers look…ummm. Odd… The lead singer looks like Michel Foucault in a toupee and the rest look like German salesmen.

    1. The guy in the upper right hand corner looks like a founding member of DEVO.

      1. Lol. He does look very 80s New Wave.

    2. And the guy in the upper left is played by Will Ferrell in the movie.

  6. I’ve been wondering why the white balloons on cream backgrounds look so odd, and I’ve realised: it’s the opposite of an old comics page where the bristol board has stayed white and the pasted-on thin paper of the balloons and captions has yellowed.

    1. It’s good, right? I love the “punched-out” effect.

      1. It’s another parallel world, where the king of comics is neither the artist nor the writer, but the letterer, who gets all the best materials.

        1. …or a terrible world where the letterer has to paint on the balloons with white-out

      2. I like it (fwtw). Without those white balloons I wouldn’t have noticed that the background is… off-white.

  7. After breaking with the Dreamers in 1970, Freddie continued to “jet” into a wildly successful career, most notably fronting his new band, Freddie’s Flappers. They topped the charts in 1976 with the Paul Pena cover, “Jet Airliner [More Specifically, an Airbus A300]”.

  8. You can’t fool me, those photos are of the finalists for a regional accountancy award from 1959.

  9. Just a couple of weeks ago, I ran across a video of Freddie and the Dreamers doing “I’m Telling You Now” on some TV show or other. Freddie is really short (Wikipedia says 5’3″) and his moves are ridiculous. He makes Mick Jagger look like Roy Orbison and early Elvis Costello look coordinated. The Freddie is like a pre-teen schoolboy who can’t quite grasp the basic moves of calisthenics in gym class.

    1. Oh, may God, I had forgotten all about that! Now that you mention it, I remember my brother and I as very small kids laughing hysterically at the ridiculous dance moves that went with that song!

      And Freddie was all over TV back then.

      Here’s a link to him on the Merv Griffin Show in 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUqjuAUus5Y.

      And here are Frankie and Annette on Hullabaloo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lIup-Dma1I

      1. I meant Frankie and Annette dancing with Freddie on Hullabaloo.

      2. I have no idea what I’ve just watched. *This* is what passed for a dance?

  10. I get the impression that Freddie and the Dreamers were pretty much a comedy act. Of all the bands from that time that I sort-of-remember (I was very small) or subsequently identified as having one or two good songs or at least being “good for their time”, they just… weren’t.

  11. Freddie reminds me of Buddy Holly.

  12. Only noticed at second glance that her handbag is Nemulon! 😀

    1. Damn! How did I miss that?

  13. Ha-ha! The guy on the lower left of that picture couldn’t be a more stereotypical bass player.

    That said, he actually does look like our drummer from back in high school.

  14. So…enough time has elapsed for Shelley to infiltrate and establish herself as Paul’s girlfriend? How long would that even take….? Weeks? Months?

    1. Fifteen minutes. Shelley is very effective.

      1. Few know that it only takes a woman 15 minutes to become the girlfriend of a single man, if that’s what she’s up to. This is the reason why older, wiser men, are suspicious of sudden girlfriends.

        “She took a liking to you immediately? How likely is THAT?”

    2. My guess was going to be that “girlfriend” was a mocking term — that Paul had seen her (a budding actress) on the telly and had a crush on her. And now here she is in the shop! On the telly!

  15. The dialogue in these definitely feels inspired by compulsive rewatching of A Hard Day’s Night.

  16. Is that Brian Epstein talking to Shelly?

  17. Mr. Allison does a great job of catching the banter I remember from A Hard Day’s Night and Help. I’ve long wondered what his characters would actually sound like.

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