John Carter - 1990's Demos (Demo) (2023)

Born John Shakespeare in 1942 in Birmingham, England, Carter began writing songs at the age of 15 with classmate Ken Lewis. Inspired by the first wave of rockers like Elvis and Buddy Holly, they worked up a batch of songs and in 1959, left their hometown for London to make a start in the music business. They were lucky find a publisher right away in Noel Gay Music. In 1960, they moved over to Southern Music and along with writing songs, they began singing them under the name Carter-Lewis. They found work at the BBC providing background music for radio shows, and after adding some ace session musicians to the mix and changing their name to Carter-Lewis & the Southerners, they began releasing singles. Between 1961 and 1964 they issued seven singles for labels like Ember, Oriole, and Piccadilly, scoring a minor chart hit with 1963's "Your Momma's Out of Town.''

Their sound was firmly rooted in the tradition of the Everly Brothers, though on 1964's "Skinny Minnie" they showcased a tougher, almost garage rock sound thanks to some fuzzy guitar riffing courtesy of fellow session player Jimmy Page. Though the band was a popular live act, the two songwriters quickly figured out that it made more sense financially to stay behind the scenes instead. Carter in particular exhibited no interest in becoming a pop star (something he proved again and again over the years). They soon shifted to cranking out demos cut in various Denmark Street studios, playing numerous three-hour sessions in a day, and they hit the big time when "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" hit the top of the charts for Herman's Hermits in 1964. They also had a hit with Brenda Lee called "Is It True?" that same year.

Taking on fellow studio singer and producer Perry Ford, Carter and Lewis started another group called the Ivy League in late 1964, issuing a debut single, "What Do You Want," and providing backing vocals for the Who on "Can't Explain." The relative lack of success of the single led the group back to the studio, but when the Rockin' Berries turned down the song "Funny How Love Can Be," the group released it themselves and had a Top Ten hit. Their sound was pitched somewhere between Del Shannon and the Beach Boys with lush vocal harmonies and the occasional falsetto lead. After recording a few more singles and an album, 1965's This Is the Ivy League, Carter left the band to head back to the friendly confines of the studio, writing at a furious pace with new partner Geoff Stephens. Along with songs penned for the Ivy League, including the 1966 Baroque pop classic "My World Fell Down," the pair had hits with Manfred Mann, Mary Hopkin, the New Vaudeville Band, and Herman's Hermits. Carter even ended up singing lead vocals on "Winchester Cathedral," the New Vaudeville Band's Grammy-winning single from 1966.

At the same time, he was also working in the studio with a pair of songwriters, Robin Keen and Mickey Shaw, who he had signed to his newly formed music publishing company. Every week the pair would meet with Carter and play him the songs they had written. He'd pick his favorites and they would assemble a crack team of musicians to record them. Though they continued to work in this fashion for almost two years, they only issued one single, 1966's "White Collar Worker," which came out under the name the Ministry of Sound. The project wound up when Lewis left the Ivy League in 1967 and paired up with Carter again. Right away one of their songs became a hit -- "Little Bit of Soul" for the Music Explosion -- and the duo were off and running. Their soft psychedelic confection "Let's Go to San Francisco" was released under the Flowerpot Men banner and became a Top Five hit on the U.K. singles chart. Once again, Carter and Lewis decided not to go on the road and hired a band to go out and perform as the Flowerpot Men, though they did stay active behind the scenes writing and recording. At the same time the duo were recording songs at their usual brisk pace, and their style evolved with the times. Two singles released under the name Friends in 1968 showed their skills at bubblegum trifles ("Piccolo Man) and moody psychedelic balladry ("Mythological Sunday"), demos released in later years revealed inclinations toward heavy Byrds-style country psych ("Blow Away"), and their affiliation with the Kasenetz/Katz bubblegum empire yielded some songs for the Ohio Express. Over the next few years, Carter and Lewis continued to release records under different names, including the Carlew Choir, the Haystack, the Wheels, Sweet Chariot, and the Running Jumping Standing Still Band. In 1970, Carter provided vocals for the Mark Wirtz-produced group Philwit & Pegasus and he and Lewis formed Stamford Bridge. Their two albums, 1970's Come Up and See Us Sometime and 1971's The First Day of Your Life, were filled with a mix of novelty songs and bubblegum singalongs. After they folded, numerous one-off acts Red Line Explosion, Scarecrow, Stormy Petrel, the London Boys, Monsoon, Sequoia, Kentucky Freeway, Butterwick, and Frogg followed. None of them caught on with the record-buying public, but Carter's 1972 project kincade did. With lyrical help from his wife Gillian, the gentle glam rock song "Dreams Are Ten a Penny" did booming business in Germany. Carter, of course, sent other musicians out to perform for audiences while he stayed in the shadows. Though follow-up records didn't yield any hits, he kept releasing songs until 1976. In the meantime, he teamed with Gillian and former Flowerpot Man Tony Burrows to form First Class, a group designed to soak up the nostalgic rays of the California sun. Their first song, 1974's "Beach Baby," was a worldwide smash and the best Beach Boys record of the decade. Once again, Carter refused to go on the road, and once again, no hits were in the offing -- not long afterward both kincade and First Class wrapped up and Carter shifted his focus to other work. He spent the rest of the '70s working on commercial jingles, scoring films under his birth name of John Shakespeare, and eventually devoting all of this work time administering his vast back catalog. To that end, many collections of his work surfaced throughout the years, along with reissues of the Ivy League recordings: a selection of demos appeared on 1998's As You Like It, Vol. 1 (The Denmark Street Demo's, 1963-67). Measure for Measure: The John Carter Anthology 1961-1977, a double-disc overview of his work, hit shelves in 2003, and songs by a variety of one-off bands were gathered on 2004's A Rose by Any Other Name. The man himself reappeared in 2012 when he joined Brazilian musician Saloamo Hamzen in the band Hamzen. They released three albums, 2016's A Friend in Need, 2017's Coming Home, and 2018's Time Will Tell. A few years later, in 2022, his work was once again anthologized. This time the Grapefruit label spread a mix of singles, album cuts, demos, and rarities over four discs under the name My World Fell Down: The John Carter Story. © Tim Sendra