Okay, boys and girls — a lot of facts this time around...And they’re going to be coming at you fast, so sit up, pay attention, and ferchrissake try to look interested.

I mean: this is a thankless enough task as it is — three columns already and I ain’t got a red cent (and now I hear Edmonds has absconded to Marin County with the CREEM kitty, all last months free records and a pile of very valuable “Album Of The Century” decals RCA sent over in a vain attempt to assuage the wrath of Bangs before he reviewed Diamond Dogs).

Yawns and cries of “Give us the low-down on Olivia Newton-John” I don’t need.

Anyway.

Boring, complicated stuff first — which is: Splitsville. And — as Autumn cools up over here and tours and new albums a-go-go proliferate from the agencies and record companies of perfidious Albion — splits, quits, and musicalchairs amongst band-memberships fall as the scurf / of Jehovah out. of these tormented September skies.

Not that you’ve ever even heard them (but don’t worry about it), both Cockney Rebel and Bebop DeLuxe have sundered. Yeah, I know I told you that last time — but the succeeding ramifications have proven, if not actually fascinating, at least Grade-A confusing.

Firstly, guitarist-leader of Bebop Blah-Blah, Bill Nelson, gets asked to join Cockney Rebel. He refuses. Instead, ex-members of Cockney Rebel threaten to join him in a new version of B.b.D.L.

So far so good.

I seem to remember mentioning that Roxy’s capable, enfant terrible Eddie Jobson was then inveigled by C. Rebel’s angst-ridden genius Steve Harley into mucking in on a new version of that ensemble. No? Never mind — he didn’t go (ex-Cuived Air leader Francis Monkman did).

Nor did he join Yes or ELP or even the beleaguered David Bowie. He just stayed put. (Hm, maybe this isn’t so knotty after all.)

But ex-Bowie lieutenant Mick Ronson has joined Mott The Hoople (Ariel Bender departing for a glowing solocareer, the poor dupe), and ex-Mainman token Kulchur figurehead Annette Peacock was asked to replace Patrick Moraz (he joined Yes instead of Keith Emerson — remember?) in Refugee.. .until Refugee drummer Brian Davison decided to join David Essex and wrecked everything.

Stop YAWNING!!!!

Finally, Wings split up and then reformed, Ginger Baker joined Adrian Ben Gurvitz (ex-Gun and protege of Moody Blues percussion wall — ah Graeme Edge) in Three Man Army (of whom I trust we’ll hear no more), and Sharks.. .ah well, this is interesting.

First drummer Marty Simon and keyboardsman Nick Judd quit. Then the remaining quartet (Simon having been replaced by one Stuart Francis) are set to play Biba’s the swish epicentre of Kensington eleganza, a few weeks later.

Just hours before the lads are due to take the house by storm, Marty Simon phones up the New Musical Express office with the news that black bassist Busta Cherry Jones — having rehearsed the previous week with an ingenuous grin on his face — has allegedly absconded, with a couple of leader Chris Spedding’s guitars and the tapes of the band’s next album, to his hometown... New York, U.S.A.

“But don’t tell ’em,” chuckles the mischievous* Simon.

The jest, however, misfires. Sharks suss they’ve been played for suckers (quite why, nobody seems to know), cancel out, and instigate legal proceedings against the peripatetic Jones. During the pause, Spedding joins John Cale, leaving vocalist Snips clutching the mike-stand, and glaring paranoiacally out at all would-be attackers from a s^nd-bagged mail-box on the King’s Road. ,

On, now, to more constructive facets of rock ‘n’ roll gig-swapping.

Would you believe Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames have reformed? (Or is that too arcane a reference? “Yeah Yeah” mean anything to you? No? Ah, forget it — I’m tight on space this month. Just take it from me that matters are becoming progressively more bizarre over here, and leave it at that.)

Re-joining the outfit he began with is none other than Mitch Mitchell — although he wasn’t in time for the Flames second debut at the Reading Festival where, with all three thousand of them sporting snazzy blue T-shirts and rerunning their legendary performances of the Mose Allison song-book, they went down, if not a storm, at least a pleasant light drizzle.

The reformed Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich (see what I mean?) didn’t make Reading, but Chapman-Whitney’s Streetwalkers — the residue of Family also featuring ex-Beck vocalist/guitarist Bob Tench — did, and reportedly stole the show.

Other Reading acts included last year’s heavy-metal Jacques Loussier stand-ins, Focus (from Holland, not Denmark, as some American reports would have you believe) who bombed — plus the increasingly enigmatic Traffic, and Brooker-Reid’s reliable old warhorse Procol Harum, who had them spasm-dancing in what would doubtless have been the aisles if God and promoter Jack Barrie had created any — which they didn’t

Nor did Barrie seize the day by booking the proferred Ry Cooder (on the grounds that he’d “never heard of them”), but even such blatant malpractice could not dampen the audience’s ardour or prevent them booing off the average white band of bluebeat, G.T. Moore And The Reggae Guitars, who are at least trying to pass off some new licks.

TURN TO PAGE 77.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47

Of the remainder of the bill, 10CC and Alex Harvey (lifted lock, stock, and barrel from the battlefields of Knebworth) acquitted themselves honourably, and Chilli Willi And The Red Hot Peppers lost to The Winkies (Eno’s ex-backing-group) in the pub-band stakes — if only marginally.

Meanwhile, just a way up the road, the annual communion of British hippies — otherwise known as The Windsor Free Festival — was being busted up by the Thames Valley Constabulary: six hundred truncheon-happy cops wading into the sodden, cannabis-crazed ranks ’of two thousand Heads and Old Ladies who had merely been trying to get a little inaction and listen to,the music of a selection of splendidly obscure semipro combos (amongst which were numbered the admirably-monikered Halifax Qn The Outside, Kinda Smooth On The Inside and Do You Want This Table?).

The fuzz not only declined the offer of the table, they also ripped down the stage, arrested around 500 kids, and beat the living shit out of anyone who so much as breathed the words “civil rights.” Even the famed anti-drug-bust set-up Release was infiltrated by plainclothes police. It was a wonderful operation and the youth of this country now admire their law enforcement officers even more than they didn’t before.

No sense in brooding on it though. At least the Metropolitan branch of the same mighty organization laid off the crowds who turned out in Hyde Park (our equivalent of Ceiitral Park) to listen to the Roger McGuinn entourage itself — a screaming negro being seen to fly out of the band’s tent back-stage at one point.

Chilli Willi also turned up here, along with a disappointing Toots And The Maytals, a no-more-stoned-than-usual Roy Harper, a throughly anomalous Julie Felix, and yet another pub-band out on a weekend — Kokomo, a group formed from the debris of the semilegendary Arrival (if you never heard their single of many years back, “I Will Survive,” you owe it to yourself and your school to go look the damn thing up).

But the real Big One was Wembley. So big in fact that the appearance of The Grateful Dead at Alexandra Palace in the preceding week went almost unnoticed. The bill featured Jesse Colin Young (faceless), The Band (ragged or rugged, depending on your tolerance of beards ana history), Tom Scott and the L.A. Express (spritely), Joni Mitchell (sang “Woodstock” querulously, more recent material magisterially, but went on too long), and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (alleviated national sugarshortage, played four hours, got tiresome).

Hero of the day — and, apparently, of most of London’s rock journalism fraternity — was Neil Young. We think he’s just gear, whack.

Finally, a buch of antics and cheerios:

Biba’s (once again) the scene of non-triumphant returns on the part of The Ronettes and The Troggs — though Ronnie and Reg respectively still enjoy much camp admiration.

New albums in the first phase of the pre-Yuletide rush have so far included John Cale’s faintly disappointing Fear (with a Cale-produced Nico outing soon for the browsers); Mike Oldfield’s do-itagain Tubular Bells sibling, Hergest Ridge (with the boy newly-commissioned to raise rock’s credibility quotient by providing sound-track stuff for Roger Vadim’s next snooze-in, as if you hadn’t known all along); Traffic’s erratic, post-Herbie Hancock epic When The Eagle Flies (plus a bunch of chic Brazilian dates for the band to promote it to The Second-And-A-Half-World); Rod Stewart’s Smiler:; and — lastly — Ron Wood’s I've Got My Own Album To Do, about which title no comment..

Jethro Tull are on the road again and have ^et another album in the pipeline (War Child), and The Who have an interesting package of old out-takes lined up for release under the brand-name of Odas fn ’ Sods — these to include the recent (and rather redundant) “Long Live Rock,” the old stage-fave “Naked Eye,” the Tommy prototype “Glow Girl,” and the only single, “I’m The Face,” cut by the band when they were still called The High Numbers.

Keith Moon, you’ll be horrified to know, has finally resolved to make the United States his home. But relax — he’s going to destroy South California, not Detroit.