The Equals are THAT band! (at the moment)
holmes
3,532 Posts
What is it with these dudes, seems whenever I've play their stuff out at gigs recently people have come up to the turntables & want to know who it is. It's happened with Viva Bobby Joe, Baby Come Back & Soul Brother Clifford in the last 3 gigs I played. Best is when I say the Equals to the enquirer & they come back with "the Eagles????" Also after playing Viva Bobby Joe, some guy came up & wanted to know the band & the name of the song (just after Eddy Grant had finished singing "Viva Bobby Joe" about 20 million times in the outro...). I haven't even played the best 45s "I Can See But You Don't Know" & "Brown Skin Blue Eyed Boys" out in ages either.
Comments
is a monster, and the Born 'ya! album has some heat.
From the 60's, "I Can See But You Don't Know" is a scorcher!
SOFTLY, SOFTLY
MICHAEL & THE SLIPPER TREE
POLICE ON MY BACK
BLACK SKIN BLUE EYED BOYS
GREEN LIGHT
ETC.
Unfuckwithable, basically.
Seems like a few years back I saw a Scorpio-ish repressing of Born Ya making the rounds. Maybe it's my own anti-disco bias talking (and the fact that Eddy Grant was gone by then, I think), but of all the Equals albums they coulda reissued, why choose that one? That'd be like if the only Who album you could get was Face Dances.
It's also an anachronism - it's from 1970! Sounds like 1966, don't it! Mercy, I love that song!
Well, the fact that it thematicaly rips-off the Who's "I Can See for Miles"
from 1966 doesn't hurt either!
Well, Scorpio would reissue it because the LP and "Funky Like a Train"
in particular are rare and sought after by funk/beat collectors, which
is certainly the crowd Scorpio caters to. The question is why the labels
that reissue 60's freakbeat type-stuff aren't doing deluxe reissues of
"Equals Supreme" etc ...
I think you are being a little too harsh on the mid-70's Equals ...
although technically "disco" there is enough of a rock pedigree and
island funk influence to make them pretty unique and really quite good.
Harder to find and more expensive than the 60's-era President (and RCA)
LP's, too. Eddy Grant is definitely involved, completely in charge, doing
production, songwriting, etc.
good points...
also, the "beat group" era Equals were very very famous in Europe, specifically Germany, where you can buy any equals LP or 45 from 67-71 for 5 bucks or less...
wheras by the time they did their two "disco" records "Born Ya" and "Mystic Sister", they were no longer top of the tops material. those records sold much less, and thus the need for the reissue. "Born Ya" has a couple dope cuts besides F.L.A.T. ("stone cold cat" is a fav of mine...) as for Mystic Sister, i ordered one off ebay like a year ago and it never came, so damned if i could tell you anything about it...
certain disco/boogie heads sweat that period (as well as the Eddie Grant Ice singles) more than you sweat "baby come back"...
"Stone Cold Cat" is