Friday Girl - lost & found
musical treasure rediscovered
In 1978, my schoolmate David Croft and I made our debut album, Friday Girl. This was it, the big time beckoned, but sadly we were too late to the party. Singer-songwriters were out, punk had stolen the thorny crown, and our opus vanished in the light of the new dawn as dreams do.
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Fast forward nearly half a century, we've gone our separate musical ways when a stranger contacts us out of the blue. He’d found our album on YouTube (who knew?) and wanted to buy a copy. Sadly, he could not; the multi-tracks, masters, and the few vinyl copies that ever existed were consigned to landfill, but it made us wonder; could this lost musical treasure be recreated?
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Reunited for the project, we brought our intervening half-century of musical experience to bear, and this is the result. A warm hug from the golden age of rock music, each song lovingly deconstructed, reshaped, re-recorded, and reassembled to unleash their magic. We loved doing it, and we hope you enjoy listening to it!
How we got here
track by track
Friday Girl
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​
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For the life of me I can't remember why "Friday Girl". It makes no sense. I didn't know a girl called Friday, there was nobody I only saw on that particular day of the week and the original lyrics provide no clues. A lot of the lyrics I wrote for these songs were a stream of consciousness with no editorial oversight, but there it was, a completely unexplained Friday Girl. I do remember why it became the title track. The studio had a very good grand piano, a friend (whose name escapes me at the moment) had a friend called Paul Nuttall who was a brilliant piano player. When he recorded the piano part it set the song apart from the other guitar, bass and drum arrangements so we all felt it was the most likely song to get some radio attention. (We needn't have worried about that as it turned out!) A quarter of a century later in 2003, I decided to recorded a new version of the song for an album called Paintbox and this made me rethink the lyrics to provide at least some plausible explanation of the title.
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The arrangement for this recording is different again, featuring my nylon strung Taylor. It's far more mellow than the original, more Burt Bacharach than Bruce Hornsby but the 2003 revised lyrics sounded cool so I didn't mess with them again.
Love On a Long Hot Summer Night
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar and backing vocals - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​
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There are several songs on the album with lyrical references to the weather, specifically hot weather. Using weather as an emotional metaphor is a common trick for me but these are unusually literal. 1976 was (then) a record breaking hot summer in the UK and this would have been fresh in my memory so that's probably the reason. The events described are actually from the summer of 1972, the year I turned 18, got my first car and my first proper girlfriend. Happy days!
Our original recording features a lot of instruments that had been hired by Godley and Creme for their recording so there's a lot going on. With my producer hat on I felt the most important thing was to make the most of the energy. As usual, we'd made the track too long with too many pauses which took the wind from its sails so I cut out a verse a chorus and a couple of the breaks to keep the momentum. It's an up tempo rock thrash, less is more!
I Didn't Really Love You Anyway
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​
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This is a revealing story, direct from my teenage self. It majors in romantic self pity, popular in the Country Music world. The fact is I had a great teenage love life but good times don't make good songs so romantic downer it is. It's short and to the point with a clear lyrical message and a simple melody. At the time I thought it was toe curlingly cheesy, maybe it is but is still a good song and it was always my Mum's favourite so I've played it in my live set quite a bit and recorded it several times.
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I didn't see any reason to change much for this recording, it just needed to be played more confidently. We were both good players back in 1978 so I don't know why we didn't take more trouble to get better takes, most of the original record sounds rushed. I borrowed the vocal from my 2017 recording for the album About Love but everything else is new. I didn't see any reason to change the structure at all so it's just a slightly more mellow recording of a familiar song. Familiar to me anyway.
Only You and Me
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​
Electric sitar - James Pusey
Backing vocals - Yannick Van-Riet
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With my producer head on it seemed to me the original recording of this track had a major problem. It was in 2 parts; the chorus was magical, up tempo, nice hook, simple lyrics and we made full use of the drums, bass and guitars left in the studio by our illustrious co-workers including an electric sitar reputedly owned by Phil Manzanera. I should say at this point that almost every instrument on the original recording other than my acoustic guitar was played by David. Heroic work from him and the first time he'd ever played bass guitar which eventually became his main instrument. So anyway the chorus was great but the verses were a dirge. The tempo died, my guitar part was ponderous and dull, the vocal much the same and the lyrics were dreadful. I'm sorry to be so mean to my younger self but sometimes you need to be brutally honest.
So, for this recording I kept the chorus and dumped the dirge altogether. basically it's a whole new song built on the chorus hook which is conveniently the title; only you and me. I leave you to judge but I think it worked. The track now has a bright and breezy feel and the lyrics, now a story about 2 young people in love trying to survive, at least make some kind of sense. I was struggling to work out how to reproduce the electric sitar part which was central to the original recording. These are rare instruments, I don't own one and there didn't seem to be any way of faking it without spending crazy money. Then I remembered I know a great guitar and sitar player called James Pusey and it turned out he does own an electric sitar so the solo and all those wonderful bits and pieces you hear are from him.
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One more thing. My voice and David's voice are not what they were in 1978. There's no way we could sing the big harmony chorus hook the way we did back then, I made several attempts and it never sounded convincing. Enter Yannick Van-Riet. I've known Yannick for ages, he's a really talented singer songwriter and guitar player. Our paths crossed recently when we shared the stage for one of those Nashville style songwriters rounds and I persuaded him to sing the parts for me so a huge thanks to him for stepping in to rescue the situation.
Ocean Of Sorrow (live)
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Backing vocals - Psymon King & Xan Tyler
Drums - Paul Murphy
Electric guitar - Tony Lopez
Keyboard - Jim Gilchrist
Trombone - Dave Holt
Saxophone - Richard Exall
Trumpet - Gerard Atkins
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Mike Cobb, the publisher that had sponsored the original recordings, having shown a general enthusiasm for my output, encouraged me to write something with a chorus, maybe a hook, something that might get played on the radio and this was the result. I was quite sniffy about it at the time. For some reason I seemed to think that writing a catchy song was tantamount to selling out. Kids, what can you do? When our attempt at rock stardom failed David and I took refuge in a decade of cover gigs in clubs, pubs and wine bars and this was the only original song we ever played which shows it must have worked at least on some level. This live recording is taken from a gig we did in 1994 at the George and Dragon pub in Acton some 16 years later. David had joined a Blues Brothers tribute band called The FBI and I occasionally stood in as the vocalist. I needed an event to launch my new novel "Sing and Shout", recently re-edited and published under the name "The Euromission Impossible", so I persuaded the guys to rehearse some of my original songs including Ocean of Sorrow. The show was recorded on a mobile 24 track studio and this was the opening number. It is a faithful reproduction of the original recording except that it's played with 1000% more energy.
Guessworks [Elizabeth]
By Jim Cozens and David Croft
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Guitar and general synth weirdness - Jim Cozens
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​​This is a very peculiar track. First of all it betrays a general confusion over our musical direction. I started out in the Beatles tribute vein. I was never quite so enthusiastic when they morphed into psychedelic rock but I went with it and briefly embraced Prog Rock in the early 70s, specifically the band Yes and that's where this track finds its inspiration. One day we arrived for a session at Surrey Sound Studios to find an irresistible Moog synthesiser. There's a track on the Yes Album called Starship Trouper which ends with an infinite repetition of a single chord pattern slowly re-enforced with other instruments getting louder and louder until it explodes into a solo at the end of side one. This is what we were trying to emulate. There were many other instruments we could use as re-enforcement including orchestral timpani, drums and cymbals which we used freely to build the track progressively as it travelled its 6 and a half minute running time. Neither of us could carry off an explosive guitar solo so instead I played a solo classical guitar piece. In the end it became a huge instrumental confection, wholly self indulgent, utterly pointless but made us deliriously happy at the time.
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For this recording I decided simply to recreate it as faithfully as I could. It's much easier to construct loops these days and those vintage synthesiser sounds are readily available. The only change is that I made it shorter by about a third. The classical guitar part was tricky. Basically I had to learn it all over again which turned out to be harder than I imagined, then record it in short sections until I had a convincing performance of the whole piece. This maybe the most peculiar track I have ever written and recorded but recording it again, I remembered how much fun it was the first time round and that, in a nutshell, is the point.
Nowhere To Go
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​​​​
This is another one of those weather related tracks. It's an old style R&B tune telling a story about unbearable heat without air conditioning. Not exactly complex but David and I played a lot of those old R&B tunes in The FBI and this wouldn't be out of place. The steamy heat of Alabama viewed from slightly less steamy Surrey. It's another example of genre uncertainty, there are no other tracks on the album remotely like it but, given our subsequent history of playing R&B on the tribute circuit, it was easy to repeat with a bit more conviction that the first time. Some of the original lyrics were a bit lame so I wrote some new lines here and there, otherwise, it's more or less the same.
Round and Round
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​​​​
This was much more recognisable in the style that I eventually settled on. It's based on a steel string acoustic guitar progression using the Travis picking style with a lyric that is once again descriptive of the weather. The structure was simple, essentially, play the progression, sing over it, repeat. The vocals were a challenge. Again those long sustained open harmonies were beyond the contemporary us but instead of outsourcing a replacement I used a very recent AI technique to separate the original vocal from the backing track on the original recording. (This part is for geeks only!) As I've said I don't have access to the original multi tracks, all I have is an original vinyl album. From this I made a digital recording of the finished track, scratches, wows, flutters and all, and processed the result using Logic's stem splitter. As for all of these recordings, we re-recorded the instruments and laid the old vocal on top. This wasn't an easy fit. First of all the tempo of the original was freehand so it breathes in and out a bit. Secondly the original key was not precise. Maybe because we didn't bother to tune our instruments to concert pitch at the time or maybe the pressing is a bit too fast or slow but it came out somewhere between G and F#. It seemed closer to F# so we went with that for the new recording but it required a lot of tweaking to get the pitch and timing right. In the end the vocals don't sound too out of place in the context of the new recordings and I feel it was worth it just to put a little piece of the original recording into the new one.
Cry Your Tears On Me
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​​​​
This was more of a jazz tune. I've never been associated with jazz in any form but I occasionally write in this style to this day. No weather references in this one, just a love song along the lines of You've Got a Friend. I re-recorded the vocal for this and I confess I fixed one line I thought was a bit lame but otherwise it's more or less the same song it was in 1978.
The Music Maker (Dusty Road Boogie)
By Jim Cozens
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Guitar and vocal - Jim Cozens
Bass guitar - David Croft
Drums - James Walker​​​​
If I'm honest, the last track on the original album was awful. I'm guessing we were in a rush to finish, possibly the final session because, in the absence of a song that was ready to go, we decided to wing it with another instrumental. This time a straight, no frills 12 bar blues so David could play electric guitar over it. It starts out fine but we clearly ran out of ideas because, for some reason, we thought it would be a great idea to slow the tape down to half speed, play the solos over that and then speed it back up. The result is a frantic, squeaky guitar that sounds like Pinky and Perky on acid. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.
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With my producer head on, having given my younger self a stern lecture about professional standards, I decided to write lyrics for it that would turn it into a song and justify the title. So I wrote it about David's subsequent life on the road as a musician, it seemed appropriate. In the end I didn't even keep the title, so it is in fact a completely different song. If you play them back to back they are identical for the first 12 bars and after that they differ completely and all for the better if you ask me!