The Rockin' Berries were formed in the early '60s when guitarist Brian "Chuck" Botfield was performing with the Bobcats, a Birmingham band, at the Star Club in Hamburg. Several Bobcats broke off to form their own band, and Botfield brought in some Birmingham friends to regroup as the Rockin' Berries, with bassist Roy Austin, drummer Terry Bond, guitarist Geoff Turton, and singer Clive Lea. Vocal arrangements were the Berries' forte, with Lea taking the harder-rocking stuff and falsetto-voiced Turton pacing their most famous, Four Seasons-influenced material. After a couple of flop singles for Decca in 1963, the Rockin' Berries signed with the Pye subsidiary Piccadilly, and after a mild hit with a cover of the Shirelles' 'I Didn't Mean To Hurt You' in 9164, their cover of the Tokens' 'He's In Town', penned by star song-writing team Gerry Goffin and Carole King, took them to number three in the British charts in late 1964. 'He's In Town' was a gentle harmony number, like a less shrill Four Seasons, and the group turned to another cover of an American record, the Reflections' 'Poor Man's Son', for their follow-up. More sombre than 'He's In Town', this made number five in the U.K., while around the same time the band released a cash-in album, 'In Town', with a manic variety of material encompassing operatic ballads, R&B, harmony pop/rock, comedy, and the German 'Ich Liebe Dich', which was a fair success in Britain, making number 15.
The Rockin' Berries' versatility, though a boon to their live work in enabling them to play more mainstream theatres and cabarets than some British Invasion acts, worked against them on record. They would frequently insert comic routines into their live shows, and their second album, 'Life Is Just A Bowl Of Berries', was half-occupied by terrible novelty/comedy numbers. They continued to record pop/rock by professional tunesmiths on their singles, including Goffin-King's 'You're My Girl', and material by British hitmakers John Carter, Ken Lewis, and Perry Ford, as well as a little-known tune co-written by a pre-Blues Project Al Kooper, 'The Water Is Over My Head'. Both 'You're My Girl' and 'The Water Is Over My Head' were minor British hits in 1965, but they couldn't seem to match the success of 'He's In Town', and so they continued to work on the cabaret circuit and record singles for Piccadilly and Pye through to 1968, when Turton left for a solo career, getting a Top 30 hit in the U.S. in early 1970 under the name of Jefferson with 'Baby Take Me in Your Arms'. Some of their singles should have been more successful, and they always took them more seriously than their live shows, so they could have collected the best of them together in 1968, added in a few out-takes from the vaults, and produced an album that would have surprised most people with its professionalism. However, by that time they'd pretty much given up with studio work, and so it wasn't to be....but if it had then it could have sounded very much like this.
Track listing
01 The Water Is Over My Head
02 If You Find Somebody To Love
03 Sometimes
04 When I Reach The Top
05 Across The Street
06 Barterers And Their Wives
07 Money Grows On Trees
08 From One Who Knows
09 Mr. Blue
10 Land Of Love
11 Needs To Be
12 What Can I Do?
13 She's Not Like Any Girl
14 Pain
15 Yellow Rainbow
16 Goodnight
