watchable

A thoroughly deserved personal retrospective on one of the 60s much-maligned Beat groups - Manchester's own Freddie and the Dreamers.

Yes, they looked like bricklayers. And most of their music was lamer than the lamest lame thing in Lameland. 

And then there was singer Freddie Garrity. It's highly likely the the young Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and David Lee Roth took notes of bespectacled Garrity's highly energetic and manic stage persona.

Paul McCartney later admitted that the Beatles decision to concentrate on writing and performing their own material was largely of a result of singer Freddie Garrity "stealing" the Beatles arrangement  of "If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody", that the Dreamers made into a huge hit during 1963. There was a respect between the groups - the Beatles invited the Dreamers to support them on their Christmas UK tour in 1964, and rumours persist that Garrity was very close to being signed to Apple Records in 1968. 

Like a lot of the first-wave Beat groups, the hits dried up by 1966 and careers were extended by moving into the lucrative, but completely unfashionable, cabaret circuit. To a certain extent, the Dreamers fell into this "trap" but, aided by a high public profile in America, wisely moved into television work - hosting their own networked childrens' show on ITV called "Little Big Time" which lasted until the early 1970s. A regular segment of  "Little Big Time" was "Oliver In The Overworld" - which involved Garrity and bandmate Pete Birrell as his clock, Oliver, travelling to a land of machinery - much of this eventually took over the show and the band recorded a highly-collectable pysch-styled album of the same name.

I think Freddie and the boys deserve a lot more credit than they've been grudgingly permitted. There's millions of forgotten 60s groups who will remain forgotten, but Freddie and the Dreamers aren't one of them. Highly original, hugely entertaining and still, after half a century, compulsively watchable.