THE FORTUNES 1965

THE FORTUNES 1965

BY Pete Clemons

The Fortunes, who have had strong Coventry connections through the year, are to this day still thrilling audiences. Incredibly they are on a second tour of America as part of the 'Happy Together' tour which acknowledges 60 years since the invasion of British pop into the US. The following article goes right back to 1965. Not when The Fortunes formed but when they finally became a unit and the hits started to flow......... Considering all the well publicised praise that's been lavished on them, The Fortunes remain unusually unaffected. 

Leafing through their credentials I see that - long before they ever made anything remotely resembling a hit record - they were being hailed by a recording manager as the best vocal harmony pop group in Britain, by a television producer as 'too good for his show', by Johnnie Ray as 'wonderful fantastic, etc and billed breathtakingly, as 'the group who stole the show from The Beatles'. Well if they'd inspired all that gush before, you can imagine how I expected them to be after, after two solid hits, that is - for 'Here it Comes Again' looks like duplicating the success of 'You've Got Your Troubles'. But perhaps because The Fortunes had a solid two years of troubles until the good times started to roll, they've stayed totally level headed about their good fortune. When they began they were three - Rod Allen, Barry Pritchard and Glen Dale. 

But three didn't turn out to be a luck number: the musicians they used as accompanists had a habit of turning ugly and saying they weren't getting paid enough. And, although the boys were working steadily enough, they just didn't seem able to pull in the big money with their records. This, despite the fact that few groups have been launched with such careful planning as The Fortunes. The threesome lived together at Clifton Hall, Rugby (the massive mansion bought by manager Reg Calvert as a potential headquarters of a Midlands commercial radio station: when commercial radio was not legalised by the government Reg set up Radio City instead in the Thames estuary and used the Rugby house as an incubator for The Fortunes). 

Anyway, this year The Fortunes tiring of squabbling with backing musicians decided to become a complete unit and so they added a drummer - Andy Brown, and singing organist - Dave Carr, and turned themselves into a quintet. They also had a change of A & R man and began an association with arranger Les Reed. Said Rod: 'Troubles was certainly the best record we'd made by a long way. But we weren't sure we'd made a hit'. Glen said: 'But we've only just got our foot in at the moment. We've got to get to the top and stay there'. But who were those accompanying musicians? Well for that I tapped into the memory of Tom Long who also worked for Reg Calvert. It seems that Chris Capaldi played keyboards and Gary Fletcher drums but 'he left very early on' remembered Tom. Another musician was Tony Britnell who later featuredwith Jigsaw. 'He was a phenominal sax