Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

Nobody could hate the Blossom Toes first album, We Are Ever So Clean. It would be like clubbing a baby seal. Yet the band did. With the passing of the Summer of Love (and no album was a better soundtrack for grooving down Carnaby Street), the group torched their paisley shirts and strove for rock band credibility with the presciently-titled If Only For A Moment. Not even a sitar cameo from our pal Shawn Phillips could lift this from the tar pit.

What fans they had weren't too impressed by their new direction - all growly vocals and Jazz Odyssey-like live jams - and the band fell apart briefly before appropriately renaming themselves BB Blunder, and cutting their dullest album, and candidate for dullest album ever made, Workers' Playtime. The cover showed them satirically attired as working class blokes down the boozer with arch-snob Julie Driscoll slumming it as a barmaid. What larks! And they had the gall, the cheek, the brazen effrontery to pose with that sublime first album stuffed into a trash bag. Fuck them, frankly. They should have changed their name one album earlier.

Included in today's Blossie Bonanza are the extra tracks versions of the first two albums, a very enjoyable rarities collection, What On Earth, which catches them making the painful transition into Grown-up Rock, and a needlessly expanded Workers' Playtime.

That second album has its fans, and its moments (SWIDT?), but the first blooms forever in our hearts. Giorgio Gomelsky - we thank you!