FIVE DAY RAIN
The TRUE Story
The sixties ended with a man on the moon and the seventies saw a music business that was leaning more to the sales potential of albums than the not so profitable single. Bands were spending more time creating their music but they all needed good writers. Recording engineers BRIAN CARROLL and DAMON LYON SHAW of HOMEGROWN MUSIC found one in GRAHAM MAITLAND, a talented musician from Scotland who wanted to record his songs with his own band. This was a group of musicians he knew locally and his cottage in the country was a meeting place as they put together enough material for an album.
I
got to know GRAHAM through a friend of mine from Haywoods Heath, a town in
Sussex England. He has played in numerous bands including SCOTCH OF St JAMES,
HOPSCOTCH and GLENCOE but it was with FIVE DAY RAIN that we got to know each
other.
FIVE DAY RAIN was basically a studio band. They never toured or did any gigs but spent their time with HOMEGROWN MUSIC writing songs either at GRAHAMS cottage or in the studio. The line up was GRAHAM MAITLAND (keyboards/organ/Mellotron) RICK SHARPE (lead guitar) CLIVE BURGESS (bass) the drummer who’s name was KIM. I have forgotten his name over the years but I do believe that at the time he was going out with a singer called SHARRON TANDY. Added to this line up was JOHN HOLBROOK who was another engineer at IBC at the time of the recordings.
The
tracks recorded for the projected album were “TOO MUCH OF NOTHING”, “MARIE'S
A WOMAN”, “LEAVE IT AT THAT”, “DON’T BE MISLED”, “ROUGH CUT MARMALADE (aka
“OUTRODUCTION”) “GOOD YEAR”, “SEA SONG”, “LAY ME DOWN”, “REASON WHY”, “FALL
OUT”. We also recorded two other tracks “WANNA MAKE LOVE TO YOU” and “SUNNY”
but these tracks have been lost in time.
GRAHAM wrote most of the tracks and JOHN HOLBROOK (see picture above) played lead guitar on "SEA SONG” and “ROUGHCUT MARMALADE” This track was recorded as a jam after a heavy session at THE DOVER CASTLE, the pub at the back of IBC. JOHN went on to work for BEARSVILLE STUDIOS in Woodstock NY where he engineered on sessions for TODD RUNDGREN and THE ISLEY Brothers. He went on to produce/engineer projects for the in-house BEARSVILLE, including two solo albums under the alias BRIAN BRIGGS.
We had the album finished within a few months and we made up 25 test pressings that we were going to send to various record companies. These test pressings now fetch in the region of £1,000 to record collectors. Only 2 or 3 were sent out before POLYDOR records showed interest. (10 copies of this album were thrown away in error by Brian Carroll in the early 1990’s which has made this a rare album and Brian Carroll felt like an idiot!!!.).
The man from
POLYDOR who wanted the album was running around for weeks as the band settled
down for a long wait while negotiation were taking place. No one really knows
what happened but the out come was that after 6 months of getting nowhere
the band decided to spilt when GRAHAM was offered a chance to become a member
of a band called GLENCO. With the deal dead BRIAN and DAMON decided to get
into producing their own songs (see ONE WAY TICKET )