Intense Records

Sinful Skinful

MORGAN BLUE TOWN
BT5015
Pop, Record Store Day, Rock
12"

£24.16 (£28.99 incl. VAT)

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It's always tempting to compensate for an artist's commercial or critical obscurity by making outrageous claims on their behalf - an idea spoofed by self-deprecating album titles like Wizz Jones's The Legendary Me and the TV Personalities' They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles. While nobody is suggesting that Fickle Pickle were ever likely to eclipse the Fab Four, they were certainly one of the more interesting acts operating in the early '70s post-Beatles Britpop wasteland. Boasting four writers, singers and multi-instrumentalists who, between them, also handled production, engineering and arrangement duties, Fickle Pickle had the wit, cynicism, hooks, harmonies and technical dexterity to bridge the barren years between the demise of The Beatles and the eventual arrival in late 1972 of their kindred spirits 10cc. As it turned out, Fickle Pickle did score a couple of hits in The Netherlands, and it was those minor successes that gave these studio-bound pop polymaths the impetus to assemble an entire album. Almost criminally, however, Sinful Skinful failed to gain a release outside of Holland - and, even then, only on a tiny independent label, Explosion. Sinful Skinful duly sold about seven-and-a-half copies before disappearing into the ether, and when follow-up singles also missed the mark, the members of Fickle Pickle vanished once more into the backroom, just another dropped stitch in the unknowable, unending tapestry of British pop. Nearly half-a-century after the Dutch public had largely ignored its release, this first-ever vinyl reissue of the Sinful Skinful album is joined by a four-track EP that features a trio of non-LP single tracks from the era as well as the November 1970 outtake 'Through The Days' - the belated appearance of which will at least thrill its writer (and vocalist) Cliff Wade, whose McCartney impersonation on a cloning of 'Maybe I'm Amazed' went some way towards giving a largely non-existent outfit the chance to sire the album that you're now holding in your impeccably manicured hand...