The Eyes - Biography
By Eric Brightwell
Although they recorded only four singles and a single album comprised entirely of Stones covers, The Eyes are prized among aficionados and collectors for their small output of lively, impeccable mod stormers that, whilst following The Who’s lead, made them sound like a pre-packaged boy band as they pushed pop-art anarchy far further. Despite heavy promotion and praise from noteworthy figures, they failed to crack the charts. When it became obvious that they likely never would, they did the sensible thing and called it a day.
The story of The Eyes opens with Chris Lovegrove, a young boy who lived in Ealing, London’s so-called “Queen of the Suburbs” and notably the one time home of Henry Fielding, Dusty Springfield, Pete Townsend and Fred Perry. Aspiring to be Ealing’s answer to Hank Marvin, he formed an instrumental combo in the vein of The Shadows, who went by a succession of generic names such as The Aces, The Arrows and then The Renegades. At this point, dressed in matching outfits with starched collars and western string ties, the band got most of their work playing weddings and the like. It was at one such matrimonial affair that a young shipping clerk suggested to The Renegades’ bassist that they needed a singer and that that singer was he. After an audition, Dave Russell was brought on board and the band were rechristened Dave Russell & the Renegades. However, just as with the band, Russell had a hard time settling on a name and when he started calling himself Gary Hart, the band became Gary Hart and the Hartbeats in 1963. Now clad in matching shiny waistcoats, The Hartbeats peddled songs of love at schools, weddings and the YMCA. Before long, they were considered to be unquestionably South Ealing’s top band and even boasted a fan club with seventy members run by Lovegrove’s father. As they moved in a R&B direction, drummer Kenneth Girwan decided to retire and was replaced by Brian Corcoran from nearby, industrial Hayes, a town described by onetime resident George Orwell as “one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck.”
By January, 1965, Dave Russell/Gary Hart was going by Terry Nolder and the band became The Eyes. In June, Geoffrey Marsh became their manager. Now making a mod/pop-art racket, The Eyes often played the Ricky-Tick, a British R&B club over in Windsor that had frequently hosted the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Yardbirds. Despite their status as unknowns outside Ealing, they quickly gained recognition for their peculiar sartorial sense, with all members wearing rugby shirts paired with garish trousers and covered boots, all with crudely-rendered eyes sewn in and topped off by matching pink parkas with scooter tracks on the back. But if they looked like harmless, goofy geeks with (mostly) good hair, their anarchic musical attack was a punishing mix of distortion, reverb, sound effects and rawness the band called “ESP” (or Expressive Sounds Production).
In London, they opened for the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch and The Pretty Things, but they really made their mark at the Tiles Club, located on Oxford. One night a friend of the band brought a representative from Philips who cautiously signed them to Mercury, which they’d acquired a few years previously. Over in Chalk Farm’s Rayrick Sound Studios, they recorded a set of four-track demos, including a cover of Johnny Kid & the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” and the originals included “When the Night Falls,” “The Immediate Pleasure” and “I’m Rowed Out.”
“When the Night Falls” b/w “I'm Rowed Out,” the first single, was released in 1965. The A-side is an amazingly catchy, snotty tune that ends with a blistering proto-shoegazer squall that was 25 years ahead of its time. “I’m Rowed Out” is the distilled essence of mod, an amphetamine-fuelled take on soul, and the band’s most obviously Who-pilfering song. Produced by Shel Talmy and championed by influential DJ Fluff Freeman, the song was, not surprisingly, something of a minor success within the mod scene but failed to chart. Even as they began to open for The Kinks and fellow mods like The Move and The Action, the theretofore semi-professional band quit their day jobs as electricians, civil servants and employees at ad firms and packing plants to devote themselves to their band.
In January 1966, when Philips plastered bus stops and Underground stations with posters proclaiming “The Eyes are smashed to fragments,” they became the first band to be advertised in those locations. The single they were promoting was “Immediate Pleasure,” b/w “My Degeneration.” The B-side simultaneously baited and honored The Who. The numerous, obvious sexual references no doubt helped it become a cult hit with their fans, although their derogatory references to “the tea set,” were met with threats of legal action from the Tea Board. The A-side is another piece with lazed vocals with a sprightly backbeat that was inexplicably banned from The BBC. Given a chance to audition for the station's The Light Programme, they performed a new number, “I Can’t Get No Resurrection,” which ended with them being banned from the BBC entirely. On the other hand, the notoriety helped them become a staple on the offshore pirate station, Radio London.
Still, with low sales the band decided another approach was in order, the old standby of uninspired covers. The band seemed unhappy but willing. “Man with Money” was released in May and followed fellow mods Wild Uncertainty and The Who giving audiences little reason to buy a third, similar cover. “Good Day Sunshine” followed. Although it was released weeks before The Beatles’ Revolver, it was the fourth recorded version to hit the market. The B-sides were better with the faintly merseybeat “Please Don’t Cry” and the fuzzed-out space rock of “You’re Too Much,” both far superior to the A-sides. Although “Good Day Sunshine” proved The Eyes’ biggest success, initially selling a modest 11,000 copies, the writing was on the wall. When The Arrival of the Eyes EP, (drawn from the previous singles) was released in late 1966, it sold so poorly that ironically it’s become highly collectable in part due to its extreme rarity. The band announced, weeks after its release, that they were breaking up.
First, Phil Healey quit and he was replaced by Steve Valentine, a guitarist from Heston. Philips offered the band 180 pounds to record an album of covers. In dire need of easy money, the visual cortex-fixated band disguised as The Pupils cranked out the album over several hours. Their anger and irreverence amazingly works in their favor; the out-of-tune, raw and heavy versions are better than the originals, which sound emasculated and restrained in comparison. At one point, you can hear the drumsticks being thrown across the room. Nonetheless, The Pupils Tribute to the Rolling Stones (1966 Wing) predictably failed to excite the record-buying public.
After the band folded, Terry Nolder announced he was going to form a band called Tonic Water. Instead he went on to spend a brief spell with a unit called Andromeda before forming The Entire Sioux Nation with future Pink Fairies/Motörhead guitarist Larry Wallis. The rest of the band, then still in their early 20s, announced their intention of returning to their jobs or looking for work as session musicians. In the 1980s, Bam Caruso (the coiners of the term “freakbeat”) discovered in The Eyes a band that perfectly encapsulated all that freakbeat was about and they released the compilations Blink (1984) and Scene but Not Herd (1987). It wasn’t until 2006, however, with Acme’s The Arrival of the Eyes that all of the band’s singles, The Pupils album, alternate takes and a radio promo were compiled in one place, making it the definitive collection for fans of The Eyes.
