For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song by a forgotten band, as he tells us in his post, Brush With Fame. I’m betting that most won’t ever have heard of my featured act, though maybe one of them might be more familiar from his later solo days. I’m playing you some songs by a band I loved back in the 70s: Brinsley Schwarz.

The band was formed in 1969, having evolved from the remains of a 60s pop band called Kippington Lodge – the very definition of obscure! The Brinsleys were only around for four years but managed to give us six albums in that time. I’m playing two from their first album, one from their second, and then closing with one from their final album, which you may well know better from a more familiar cover version.

Let’s get started. This was the second track on their eponymous debut album, released in April 1970:

That was Shining Brightly, which I have chosen for today’s title. It feels like a lively way to get things going: I would give you its lyrics but I can’t find them anywhere! That’s definitely a first for me, but I think it backs up my choice of the band as being ‘forgotten’ – if you ever knew of them in the first place! But I have found some lyrics for one of their others that I’m playing, so I’ll give you those instead. The band comprised its namesake, Brinsley Schwarz, on guitar and vocals, Nick Lowe on bass, acoustic and slide guitars, as well as vocals and writing most of their songs, Bob Andrews on keyboards, bass and vocals, and Billy Rankin on drums and percussion. I bought this album not long after it came out, on the recommendation of a friend, and loved it instantly. Nick Lowe went on to have a successful solo career, and it is fascinating to see how his songwriting talents were there from the start.

Here’s another example of that – he always had a good sense of humour and this wry little song shows it well:

A little gem, I think. Brinsley Schwarz were labelled a ‘pub rock’ band at the time, which I always felt was very unfair. They had much more to them than a lot of bands of that genre, good though many of them were. Rock And Roll Women was also a track on that debut album, and I think you might see why I loved it so much. This one even made my Mum laugh when I first played it to her.

The track for which I managed to find the lyrics was Country Girl, the opening track on their second album, Despite It All, which came out in December 1970 – a busy year for them! This is another upbeat little number:

And yes, I have lyrics, courtesy of genius.com:

I want to go where my country girl goes
Back where my green-grass roots are growing
I feel at ease with my country girl, yeah
She knows how to groove me

I’ll take you back ’bout a year ago
She was born of earth, fire, and water
She stays alone in a house by a waterfall
Living herself to death

I want to go where my country girl goes
Back where my green-grass roots are growing
I feel at ease with my country girl, yeah
She knows how to groove me

We said goodbye and she sailed away
Back to the land that she loves so
Don’t pay no heed to the light beaming in the bay
It’s only my soft ship shining

I want to go where my country girl goes
Back where my green-grass roots are growing
I feel at ease with my country girl, yeah
She knows how to groove me

That was also a Nick Lowe song, and the start of another album I played to bits back in the day. So many happy memories of the times before I went to uni, after we had moved to Folkestone and the sea was within walking distance of home. I made some good friends there, and these albums were part of the soundtrack to that: they were good to play when we were having fun times together (chemically induced? no comment!).

I don’t normally play more than three songs for an SLS post but I couldn’t really finish this one without the song for which they may be known, albeit in a cover version. This is their original – the video that someone has attached to it is a nice piece of nostalgia for those days:

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love And Understanding was the opening track on the band’s final album, The New Favourites Of…Brinsley Schwarz, which was released in July 1974. After the band broke up Nick Lowe went on to a solo career and also became a record producer, which is how the best known version of this song came about: he produced Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces album, and his cover of the song was recorded in those sessions. It wasn’t included on the version of the album we got here though it did appear on the US release. It has since become one of Elvis Costello’s signature songs, and has been adopted by many US acts, both as a political anthem and in many other cover versions.

So now you’ve heard of Brinsley Schwarz, definitely a forgotten band from the 1970s. They were fun while they lasted 😊