While exiled Liverpudlian Peter Mason was slogging away in a righteously obscure beat group called the Avengers, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich were effortlessly making the transition from local heroes to international superstars. Between 1966 and 1968, they racked up ten major hit singles, including the British chart-topper 'The Legend Of Xanadu'.
By 1969, though, a change was in the air. Pop had slowly mutated into rock, singles were becoming less important than albums, and unabashedly commercial acts like the Dozies (as they were affectionately known) and the Tremeloes were torn between continued commercial success and their desire for critical acclaim. When their two 1969 singles, 'Don Juan' and 'Snake In The Grass', failed to reach the UK Top Twenty (though both were major hits in mainland Europe), DDDBM&T's days were numbered.
Keen to pursue a more cabaret-oriented, big ballad sound, Dave Dee broke away from the rest of the band in September 1969 for a solo career. To this end, he recruited Peter Mason as his guitarist, backing vocalist and personal assistant. Dave had, in fact, already been involved in Peter's nascent career, brokering a publishing contract that saw the young songwriter's material covered by the likes of P. J. Proby ('Little Friend', on the album Three Week Hero) and the Magic Lanterns ('Brunette Lady', which appeared on the Shame, Shame album).
However, Peter's closest brush with fame during this period came in mid-1969, when he nearly joined the Bee Gees. With Robin Gibb having opted for a solo career, brother Barry asked Peter to replace Robin in the group's trademark three-part harmonies. Peter attended at least one Bee Gees recording session at the time, adding his vocals to a tape of 'Don't Forget To Remember' and a couple of other songs. However, Bee Gees manager Robert Stigwood was unhappy with the idea of replacing Robin, and Peter was out. 'Don't Forget To Remember' subsequently topped the British singles chart, but Peter is pretty sure his vocal contribution had been wiped from the song.
After becoming Dave Dee's PA at the end of the Sixties, Peter wrote or co-wrote a number of songs that appeared as either A or B-sides of Dave's solo singles, including 'Gotta Make You Part Of Me' (the flipside of Dave's only solo hit, 'My Woman's Man'), 'Kelly', 'If I Believed In Tomorrow', 'Sweden', 'Mary Morning Mary Evening' and 'Don't You Ever Change Your Mind'. The last-named song was the B-side of the October 1971 45 'Swingy', which turned out to be Dave's last solo release before he joined the Atlantic label as A&R man.
Meanwhile, DBM&T had continued without their erstwhile frontman. Eschewing their extrovert überpop past in favour of a more progressive, West Coast-oriented sound, they released 'Tonight Today' (No. 3 in the Netherlands) and the Vietnam-inspired 'Mr. President' (a minor hit in the UK), before following this brace of singles with their magnum opus - the superb album Fresh Ear, which came out in October 1970. Nevertheless, they found it difficult to escape people's preconceptions of how the Dozies should sound, and after a trio of post-LP singles, they broke up in early 1972.
Mick (Michael Wilson) and Dozy (Trevor Davies) left the music industry to run pubs, but guitarists Beaky (John Dymond) and Tich (Ian Amey) were keen to continue working together, and they approached Peter Mason - at that point still with Dave Dee - with the idea of the three of them forming a Crosby, Stills & Nash-style songwriting and harmony vocal trio. Peter was interested, but told them that plans were already underway for him to record a solo album. Beaky and Tich suggested that they help out with the recording of said album, after which the trio could proceed to make their own music.
Thus it was that work began on Peter Mason's projected solo set, with the three musicians working on arrangements of Peter's songs at Beaky's home rehearsal shed. They then moved to a rehearsal room in Salisbury, at which point they were joined by a handpicked pool of musicians, some of whom had played in the band that Dave Dee and Peter Mason had put together for Dave's live shows. These included drummer Martin 'Cuddles' Smith, a well-known figure on the South Coast music scene (he'd been with mid-Sixties R&B favourites the MeddyEvils before joining the Mojos and then Gentle Giant), and former Dick Heckstall-Smith sideman (and subsequent member of Leo Sayer's band) David Rose, who played keyboards on half a dozen tracks.
Having refined the vocal and instrumental arrangements, the team then moved to Advision Studios in the latter part of 1972, stretching into early 1973, to record ten tracks for Peter's solo LP. Here they were joined by a disparate trio of musicians making brief cameo appearances. Mox Gowland, a harmonica player who seemed to be a permanent fixture on the late Sixties/early Seventies underground scene, playing with such varied talents as Alexis Korner, Sam Gopal, Jo Ann Kelly, Marc Brierley and Shawn Phillips, performed on the track 'Lordy'. Former Family and New Animals man John Weider also contributed, although his eventual participation was more down to luck than judgement. "He turned up at the studio, told us he'd been booked to play fiddle on a session, and asked if we were the ones who wanted him", recalls Peter. "We sent him to the right session, but we did say that, if he cared to drop by after he'd finished at the other session, we could use him on a track. Anyway, some time later, he suddenly turned up again, ready and willing to do his bit. So he played on 'My Country Home'. But he was definitely the worse for wear by then, and we couldn't get him to stop playing! Eventually we had no choice but to fade the track!"
Possibly the most interesting name amongst the guest musicians, though, was Judie Tzuke, who sang backing vocals on 'It's All Gone Wrong'. Judie had a hit in 1979 with 'Stay With Me Till Dawn', but at the time that she contributed to the Mason sessions, she was only sixteen years old. "She was a schoolgirl in Weybridge at the time", remembers Peter, "but she was already showing a lot of promise as a songwriter. Dave Dee and I had been introduced to her, and there was talk of us doing an album together. It didn't work out, but she came down to Salisbury several times, and I introduced her to a musician friend of mine, Mike Paxman. She and Mike brought out a single in 1977, 'These Are The Laws', as Tzuke & Paxo, after which they signed to Elton John's Rocket label, at which point she was promoted as a solo act."
Sessions for the album went so well that it was agreed that, rather than being issued as a Peter Mason solo LP, the results should be adopted by the post-Dozies trio for the joint project that they had been planning. Dave Dee, who was acting as project co-ordinator, would hawk the ten completed tracks around the record companies. However, before that could be done, a group name and title for the release were needed. Peter suggested Amey Dymond Mason, but Beaky and Tich were keen to deflect attention from their musical past, and instead suggested that the trio simply use Peter's surname. "We tried to keep our names out of the spotlight", Tich recently confirmed, "because we didn't want to do things on the strength of our success with Dave Dee."
Once Beaky and bassist Bob Taylor had come up with both a title for the album of Starting As We Mean To Go On and the artwork concept, Dave Dee went into battle, quickly securing a deal for the debut Mason album with Pye. More specifically, the agreement was with Pye subsidiary Dawn, which had been set up by the parent company back in 1969 as a dedicated 'underground' label. Specialising in progressive rock, Dawn had initially been aimed fairly and squarely at the burgeoning album market, albeit with little success (their one signing that had seen significant commercial success had been 'In The Summertime' hit-makers Mungo Jerry). By 1973, the label had not only lost its way, but also its identity, with new signings around this time including those noted countercultural rockers the Brotherhood of Man.
Against that backdrop, Dawn probably wasn't the right home for an albumoriented act like Mason. Sure enough, having signed the band on the basis of their album, Dawn's first act was to tell them that they wanted to issue a couple of singles before releasing the LP – which, in their opinion, didn't contain anything sufficiently commercial to interest radio programmers. Thus it was that Mason returned to the studio to cut four tracks for possible single release. In April 1973, parent company Pye issued the country rock lament 'When Freedom Comes' (b/w 'It's All Gone Wrong'), with Dawn issuing the rollicking, Hollies-style 'Fading' (featuring a lead vocal from guest drummer Chas O'Brien) b/w 'It's Alright' in September 1973. Also issued in Europe, neither release attracted too much attention, a situation that the band blames on the record company's lack of promotion. (Certainly the Pye stable were notorious within the industry at the time for their inability to break singles. Between September 1973 and August 1974, Pye/Dawn released 146 singles in the UK. Four of them were Top Twenty hits.)
Despite the singles' lack of success, Mason went out on the road, with the basic Amey/Dymond/Mason line-up augmented by musicians who'd contributed to the album. They toured the Netherlands across January/February 1974, before acting as the support band on a UK tour by legendary Welsh underground rockers Man (who were so taken with what they considered to be Mason's Poco-style sound that they briefly incorporated it into their own repertoire - check out 'California Silks And Satin' from the next Man album, Rhinos Winos & Lunatics). Both Mason tours were extremely successful in terms of audience response, but they had primarily been arranged to promote the album. Dawn, however, had lost interest. "They admitted that they didn't know what to do with us", reflects Peter Mason. "With neither of the singles making an impact, they decided that there was no point in releasing the album. Which, of course, killed the Mason project stone dead…"
After being released from their Dawn contract, Mason signed with Atlantic, who issued two new recordings, 'Follow Me' b/w 'Peacefully', through their Antic subsidiary in July 1974 (sadly, these tracks are not available to us). But Mason's momentum had been lost, and later that year the group folded. Nevertheless, the trio continued to work together. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich came together once more on the Peter Mason song 'She's My Lady', which the Antic label issued as a single in October 1974. After that, Ian 'Tich' Amey and Peter Mason linked up with Robin Gair (Peter's occasional songwriting partner, and a former member of mid-Sixties Salisbury group the Mundanes) in the winningly-named Amey-Gair- Mason, who briefly trod the boards in 1975. But Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich continued to regroup at fairly regular intervals, often with Peter also in the band. Indeed, another Peter Mason song, 'You've Got Me On The Run', appeared in November 1979 as the A-side of the latest DBM&T single.
By this stage, Peter was an established writer, with 'Sad Song' covered by both Rachel Sweet (on her excellent album Fool Around) and former Meatloaf associate Ellen Foley. He also embarked on a country rock-oriented solo career that brought him European success, more recently issuing the solo album A Long Haul on the Folkwit label...
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And that pretty much wraps up the Mason story. Even so, there are a couple of loose ends to tie up.
First of all, did the Mason album actually come out in any territory? "I'm pretty sure it didn't", says Peter. "Dawn certainly readied it to come out – the front and back sleeve artwork was all done, and we gave a white label test pressing of the album(see illustration) to Fred Tollenaar, the guy in Holland who was organising our Dutch tour. But we were unhappy that they'd sequenced the album without consulting us, and there were numerous errors in the text on the back sleeve. Those things could have been sorted out, of course, but Dawn decided that there wasn't sufficient interest to issue the album."
So how did an Apple label acetate of the album turn up in Japan?! "I was signed to Carlin Music. Back in the early Seventies, Carlin's office was at one end of Savile Row, and Apple was at the other end. If Carlin needed any copying done, they would send it down to Apple. If any of the technicians at Apple liked something, they would run off an acetate copy for themselves. Presumably that's what happened – one of the guys at Apple liked the album, and made a copy for himself." Many years later, that copy found its way to a Japanese collector/dealer, who in turn sold it in his shop to a well-heeled American collector, who was sufficiently impressed to share the music with one or two friends. And, finally, here we are…
DAVID WELLS, February 2010