Where did they get that song?

Sources of Australian Pop Records from the 50s, 60s and 70s plus some Aussie originals and some New Zealanders

Originals / Covers / Remakes / Songwriters / Chart Positions

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What have they done to my song?

Melanie Safka

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Obscure Originator Dept: The London Knights [The Four Sights]

Go To Him by Ray Brown & The Whispers (1965) may be the B-side of their hit Fool, Fool, Fool (#3 Australia), but a B-side like this was a bonus for anyone who bought the single.

Retrospectively, Go to Him has taken on a life of its own. As the Milesago website puts it, Ray Brown & The Whispers’ track is 2m 30s of pure sonic adventure, one of those rare and extraordinary B-sides that almost eclipses the main event … Alec Palao included it on the Ace Records/Big Beat collection Hot Generation! 1960s Punk from Down Under (2002).

Tracing the original of Go To Him, I found a version by American band The London Knights on Mike, a minor New York label. One respected source had placed it in 1966, but it turned out to be from 1965, about three months before Ray Brown’s cover.

I tried to find out more about The London Knights. They had released only this single and they left no traces of their history that I could find. (To be fair to the Internet of the early 2000s, I never did find any.)

Web searches unexpectedly led me to the website of British musician Tim Airey who had been in a 1960s Leicester band, The Four Sights, aka The Foursights. He recalled two recording sessions for Decca in London in 1963. The band released one unsuccessful single, and there were songs for another single that was never released in the UK.  However, as Tim explained, … [the single] was supposed to have been released in the States under the name of The London Knights … 

The Four Sights then heard nothing more about any American release.

Well, not until some 40 years later when I emailed Tim in 2003 to point out that there was indeed a London Knights US single, from 1965, with a track called Go To Him that credited Bess Coleman as co-writer. Bess was a sister of Four Sights guitarist Bill Coleman, and she had written both sides of the Four Sights’ Decca release.

When I sent an mp3 of the London Knights recording to Tim he was adamant that it was one of the lost tracks from the Four Sights’ London sessions. He identified the distinctive voice of Four Sights drummer and lead singer David Lindsay, and David himself subsequently had no doubt at all that he was listening to his own voice on the London Knights track. David later sent me further evidence that supported this.

The case made by Tim and David was compelling, and I had no reason to doubt them, but I still could not explain some aspects of the "London Knights" single.

The writer credits on the label are to Bess Coleman with Artie Wayne, Bess's American collaborator whom she met in the US early in 1964. Bess is also credited as producer, for Artie’s production entity AWK.

When I asked Artie about it, he recalled recording Go To Him in New York as The London Knights with Bess and her brother Bill Coleman from the Four Sights, and I assume the label credits on the Mike single mistakenly reflect that session.

The mystery remains around the exact pathway of Go To Him from the Four Sights in London to Mike Records in New York, with an unreleased re-recording along the way. My best guess is that there were two recordings, one from London and one from New York, and they were somehow mixed up at the New York end.

You can read the rest of what I know by clicking on the link below. Or you could just mentally file it under O for Obsessive Fans of Obscurity and move on.

Find out more...

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