John Carter

★★★★ My World Fell Down: The John Carter Story GRAPEFRUIT. CD

The unsung backroom boy’s tale: 105 tracks over four CDs.

In 1966, wearied by peddling The Ivy League’s bynumbers pop on the road, leader and former ICI metallurgist John Carter retreated to the studio. From there, he sang vocals on the New Vaudeville Band’s US Number 1 Winchester Cathedral, and a succession of faux groups such as Stamford Bridge and Stormy Petrel became vehicles for his thrusting but harmony-laden love songs, interspersed with curveballs such as the beguiling Conversation (In A Station Light Refreshment Bar) and Philwit & Pegasus’s wig-out Pseudo Phoney Mixed Up Croney (sic). He didn’t quite become the Phil Spector figure he aspired to be, but he struck gold twice. The Flower Pot Men’s Let’s Go To San Francisco, here in all its six-minute symphonic glory, was beautiful and elegiac, but the magical five-minute slab of harmonic, Brian Wilson-esque perfection that was The First Class’s Top 5 1974 American hit Beach Baby remains Carter’s towering achievement.