115. The Pretty Things
The Borderline
11 December 2015
The Pretty Things were always the almosts of rock ‘n’ roll. The nearly-men. The guys who could have been The Stones, but somehow ended up a footnote, the band that the record nerd at the party talks about, but I may be projecting a bit there. They had the chops. They had the looks, sort of. They certainly had the drugs. But whilst The Stones swaggered into stadiums, the Pretties took a left turn into the lysergic soup of psychedelia and never quite found the map back.
Their transformation from scrappy, sweaty blues rockers to psychedelic adventurers gave us S.F. Sorrow, the first ever rock opera, a full year before Pete Townshend had Tommy pinballing his way to messiah status. Pete himself admitted the debt. But whilst The Who used that blueprint to Wembley, the Pretties couldn’t even get through a live performance of S.F. Sorrow without the tapes warping, the sound guy tripping his bollocks off, and the whole affair collapsing in a mess of tangled acid flashbacks and dead air. If the Stones were the victory parade of sixties rock, The Pretty Things were the roadside crash, fascinating, messy, and just a bit dangerous.
By the time I saw them, any prospect of redemption had long since evaporated. The Borderline in Soho, itself now gone, gentrified into oblivion, was the setting. A sweaty basement, the kind of place where the walls had their own respiratory system. The band, in their late seventies, took to the stage with all the wear and tear you’d expect of men who’d mainlined the sixties and never quite stopped. Phil May, the scowling, wiry frontman, kicked off with “We were at art school with Keith Richards!” to which someone in the crowd brilliantly volleyed back: “Show us your yacht then!”
There was no yacht, obviously. Just Dick Taylor, the man who “Pete Bested” life by leaving The Rolling Stones before they were The Rolling Stones, and a band that still knew how to work a grimy stage like it was the Marquee Club in 1964. They ripped through “Honey I Need” and “Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut”, raucous rock ‘n roll numbers from the era that had them compared to The Stones. Then came the S.F. Sorrow detour: “Loneliest Person” and “Balloon Burning,” songs that sound like someone describing a bad trip, which by all accounts, they were.
When we hit “Defecting Grey” and “LSD,” it was less of a gig and more of a time machine. They weren’t just playing their psychedelic period, they were reanimating it, one creaky chord at a time. And just when it all threatened to get too introspective, they slammed into Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner” like a slap across the face.
Naturally, someone shouted for “Rosalyn”, their biggest hit, their “Satisfaction” moment, the only track that people under fifty might half-recognise. Phil May, ever the contrarian, barked back, “You want Rosalyn? We’re not doing it.” So of course, they ended with “Rosalyn.”
A few years later, May was gone. The Pretty Things finally shuffled off the stage for good, never having quite escaped the shadow of what could have been. But that night, in that grimy little venue, they showed why they mattered. Why they could have, maybe should have, been huge.
They didn’t sell out stadiums, but they left behind something stranger, messier, and arguably more interesting: a legacy of what-ifs and nearlys, all wrapped up in snarling R&B and technicolour freakouts. And for one final night, it was glorious.