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The Orchids
Forget the Spice Girls, forget Atomic Kitten, because girl power was alive and kicking in Coventry as far back as 1964. Yes folks, Coventry had the UK’s first real girl group and they still attain cult status some forty years on! Pete Chambers investigates.
It was the early sixties, and Stoke Park Grammar school girls Georgina Oliver, Pamela Jarman and Valerie Jones, like many other school girls had begun to take an interest in the pop charts of the day. Their interest however, went a little deeper than most, because under the sometimes-throwaway sounds of the time they were discovering a new soul sound, a black American sound not just early Tamla Motown but female vocal groups like The Ronetts and The Shirelles. “I can’t remember exactly the moment we got together as a singing group” ,explains Georgina,” I think it just evolved. We were friends in the same class and like any teenagers we enjoyed pop music. A bunch of us would sing the latest hits together as something to do on our lunch breaks at school and I guess after a while it just became the three of us that sang while the others listened. We also took cello lessons for a short time – a very short time! I guess you could say we just enjoyed making music together. We liked Tamla Motown at the time so we used to sing Da-Doo-Ron-Ron by the Crystals, Mr Postman and maybe Tears on My Pillow. We used to go dancing at the Locarno Ballroom every Saturday afternoon then for some reason after a while we changed to the Orchid Ballroom. One weekend Val and I didn’t go so Pam went to the Orchid by herself. On Monday morning at school she informed us that she had entered us in a talent contest. Needless to say we were horrified. Singing in the school yard in front of friends was one thing but singing on stage in front of strangers was another”.
That night at The Orchid Ballroom in Primrose Hill Street in Hillfields the three fifteen years old sang their way to victory and won a pound prize, (along with another Coventry great Shel Naylor). The legendary Larry Page who was manager of the ballroom secured them a recording contract with Decca Records and christened them The Orchids after the ballroom. Their first time on vinyl was singing backing vocals on the Johnny B. Great and The Goodmen single School Is In The first Orchids single was Gonna Make Him Mine (this time Johnny B. Great and the Goodmen were the backing musicians). Produced by the Shel Talmy (famous for his work with The Kinks), it was picked up by top TV pop show Ready! Steady! Go! Playing as dancer Patrick Kerr demonstrated the Hitch-Hiker. Although it didn’t chart. it was enough to give these three teenage girls a huge amount of publicity. The girls hated the schoolgirl novelty image however that Larry had given them. Val Jones remembers it like this. “We hated being presented as school girls. Our tastes in music were quite advanced so presenting us in school uniform and making us sing silly songs like ‘Don’t be like Mr Scrooge’ made us really angry. Once on Ready, Steady Go, Larry Page had some really horrible dresses made for us (they had orchid petals round the collar),so we refused to go on and Cathy McGowan had to come and persuade us to perform. It made us seem like brats when I think back now but we had very little control over how we were presented. We were incredibly naive and star struck when we were 14/15. We saw the Orchids as a way to meet our favourite pop stars often (although we all loved singing, soul and R and B) We referred to our manager as ‘Mr Page’ as we did to all other adults we met. We were once taken out to lunch by Andrew Oldham (Stone’s manager) We were so in awe of him I don’t think we uttered a word to him the whole time we were out. He took us to a posh pavement cafe in Soho. We didn’t know whether he was paying or not and as we didn’t have any money (we were still on pocket money and saw virtually no money from our record sales) we said we weren’t hungry (we were!) and had nothing to eat! He must have thought we were totally weird”. “Another time”, recalls Georgina, “we were taken to a dance hall in London somewhere to present a huge cheque to someone. I think it was a Pool’s win or something like that. We sat in on a Kink’s session one day and we were absent-mindedly tapping on some metal ashtrays in time to the beat. The recording engineer liked it and told us to carry on. I can’t remember which song it was but we’re out there somewhere in the background on one of the Kink’s early recordings.
Page even managed to get them featured in the film Just For You singing the song Mr Scrooge. Johnny B. Great was also featured in it, as was Peter & Gordon and Freddie and the Dreamers. The film was later Americanised and re-edited as Disk-O-Tek Holiday.With all this publicity it was fair to assume that their next single Love Hit Me would do well for them. Producer Shel Talmy insists that he & Larry were not going for a Phil Spector wall of sound on this. Who am I to argue with the great Shel Talmy, my view is this is a perfect mix of US female vocal song with a very English slant to it. It wasn’t over-produced, there was something very unique and English about the whole thing. I put that to Shel himself, this was his reply, “The Orchids were offered to me by Larry Page and I certainly wasn’t going for a Spector sound, just a great girl harmony sound, and I’m American so guess I can’t claim an “English” slant. The fact that they all came from Coventry never registered. And please believe I’m not trying to be presumptuous when I say that my “agenda” was as simple as trying to make as many hit records as I could. It was that uncomplicated in the sixties”.
Love Hit Me was their big hit, though it never was a hit (it was to become popular in America however). How it failed to chart I will never know, maybe some felt it sounded too much like Da Do Ron Ron, whatever the case The Orchids biggest chance of national fame sadly went-a-begging. Larry Page (manager of the Kinks & later The Troggs) and Shel Talmy were never shy in using their stars to help their other talent, so the next single was a Ray Davies song I’ve Got That Feeling. Once again they failed to chart. It was decided that they would try to monopolise on the American interest. So the US only release Oo-Chang-A-Lang (on London Records) saw them using the name The Blue Orchids. “The Orchids were so good for three little schoolgirls and the sound they came out with was tremendous, recalls Larry Page. “In America we had to change their name to The Blue Orchids because it clashed with an already existing band”.
In 1965 they changed their name once more to The Exceptions (The schoolgirl look that they so hated made way for a new ‘mod’ look, even Georginas’s glasses dissapeared) They released one last single What More Do You Want. The B-side Soldier Boy was however far more interesting because Georgina wrote it, quite a feat for a 17 year old girl, and it’s probably the best song they ever did. In fact when It was played on my Pop Into The Past slot on the Bob Brolly show on BBC it caused quite a stir. My demo copy of the song seems to give the indication that it was once considered as an A-side. If only it had been, it was a classic in the making. What More Do you Want was clearly aimed at the American market, many were surprised it was sung by three white girls! Despite The Orchids lack of chart success their legacy is a powerful one. Their output is highly collectable and they remain responsible for popularising girl singing groups during the 60’s in the UK. In 1999 a TV play about a singing group entitled Sex, Chips & Rock ‘N’ Roll was written by Debbie Horsefield, although not totally based on The Orchids story, Val and Georgina still became sort of technical advisers to the show. Georgina is now an artist living in Vancouver, Val a former Senior Lecturer in Art education for the University of Central England now an artist living in Devon and Pam was last heard of in Scotland. I had the pleasure to meet up with Georgina in June 2004 when she was over in Coventry and I got a chance to look at her fantastic scrapbook, a scrapbook full of memories. Georgina again, “It was fun while it lasted and on the whole our lives didn’t change that much. We didn’t miss much schooling and teachers and friends treated us much the same as they always had, although they were interested to hear about who we had met and where we’d been. Whenever I look back now it feels like it happened to someone else and when people find out about it they are so excited and interested to know more. I’m always a bit shy about it all and find it hard to believe the renewed interest and how our records have become collectible”.
Orchids Trivia
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