Silver Laughter 1975-76 – Mick, Ken, Jon and Paul seated below
Here is another song where I switched from bass to piano, and Ken switched from lead to bass. Jon played any lead or fills on guitar and Paul played drums. Once again, I am singing lead with Ken singing the lower octave of the “Evil Woman” chorus. All the other three doing the backup vocals on the rest of the song. If you listen closely to the intro, you will hear Ken use one of the “Silver Laughter Code” words and then me chuckling in the background.
It seems to me from all the mumbling and slurring of words that this was a “jukebox” song where we recorded from the machine to cassette, then hit play, stop, play stop, back up, play… with the four of us deciding what we thought the vocalist had sung! Sometimes we couldn’t tell, so we would just sing it phonetically like it sounded to us. However, we did have a nice tight ending!
I think this is a very good version of the Electric Light Orchestra song. Remember, we were only a 4 piece band with no extra gimmicks from Carl Frisch, our sound and light man. ELO was a 9 man band! The original Electric Light Orchestra members consisted of: Roy Wood (guitar), Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan (drums), Bill Hunt (horns, keyboards), Wilfred Gibson (violin), Hugh McDowell (cello), Mike Edwards (cello), Andy Craig (cello) and Richard Tandy (bass).
Mick Orton
Reblogged this on Silver Laughter and commented:
I heard this song on the radio today and thought I should re-post. We were a very good cover band as well as doing original material. The “prison blues” were one of our matching outfits we were occasionally required to wear by club owners.