Description

After leaving Sydney at the height of their success, The Cleves arrived in London renamed Bitch, with a pile of new songs written on their ocean voyage to reflect their new, rockier direction. With no plans or contacts it became apparent that Bitch – with the line-up now comprising Ron Brown (guitar, vocals), Gaye Brown (keyboards, vocals), Rob Aickin (bass, vocals) and Ace Follington (drums) – would more likely than not starve to death within a few months of arriving in London if they waited for people to come to them. The group funded a gig at London’s Speakeasy Club and invited representatives from most of the major record companies. Bitch hired the biggest PA system they could find and set out to blow the roof off the Speakeasy. This paid instant dividends when several labels started bidding for them before they had even finished their set. In the end Warner Bros. made the best offer and quickly signed them to a NZ$50,000 contract. Warners sent them to Spring Cottage in East Sussex with instructions to take their time, write more material for an album, and – just as importantly – to write a hit record. “I would quite often play short guitar riffs between songs during our sets, recalls Ron Brown. “The riff for ‘Good Time Coming’ started as one of those live riffs, with Rob Aickin supplying the music and words.” The single ‘Good Time Coming’ and tracks for the album were recorded at Morgan Studios in London with Carly Simon’s guitarist and song collaborator, Jim Ryan, in the producer’s chair. ‘Good Time Coming’ was a regional Top 10 hit in Germany and Holland and spawned a cover version from UK EMI band Mustard the following year (1974). Two decades later, in 2008, UK group Unkle (with Josh Homme) sampled the guitar riff from ‘Good Time Coming’ for their track ‘Restless’. This has since been used on several TV shows including Top Gear, Misfits and CSI New York. It’s also featured on the soundtracks of numerous video games. With the album in the can and the relative success of the first single, the group was booked into George Martin’s famous AIR Studios in Central London to record the follow-up single ‘Wildcat’, with Tony Ashton (of Ashton Gardner & Dyke) producing. Gaye recalls the sessions, “Tony Ashton had a bit of a budget so he brought in Madeline Bell and Doris Troy to sing backing vocals, I was sitting on a stool and nearly fell off when they started singing – just sheer power”. Around the middle of 1973, when the Bitch album was all ready to go, the bosses of each of the three labels in the US became worried that the next Led Zeppelin would walk through the doors in the London office and promptly get signed to one of the other two labels. Consequently, they agreed to wind up WEA and proceed to operate as three separate labels in the UK. Former CBS UK boss Robbie Robinson, an accountant by trade, was put in as caretaker at Warners until a proper MD could be found. Robinson, singularly lacking in imagination, was not prepared to action anything that involved company expenditure. This included distributing the Bitch album. Things dragged on for months and culminated in the Bitch recording deal being scrapped and the album ditched.”

Track list:
1. Good Time Coming
2. At The Party