The Human Instinct – Day In My Mind’s Mind - Deram Records 7” - 1967
The Human Instinct were optimistic when they hit Auckland in April 1968 after twenty months in Great Britain. They’d had five singles released on major labels in the old country and toured with The Small Faces, Cat Stevens, Spencer Davis Group, and the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart. No other New Zealand sixties group could claim that level of success and exposure in the heart of the pop revolution.
After a week’s rest they reconvened as a trio - guitarist and composer Dave Hartstone having chosen to remain in England - borrowed some equipment from Jansen Electrical and arranged a Sunday Showcase performance at the Shiralee.
Two weeks later they rushed down to the shipping company freighting their new Marshall PA and amps to New Zealand. There was some gear there all right but no band equipment apart from drummer Maurice Greer’s timpani drum. They checked the bill of lading. There was no Marshall gear listed.
Bill Ward, the band’s guitarist, was soon on to the London shipping company. “It never left England,” he was told. The gear was stolen from the warehouse.
Ward was shattered: “That was the end of the band for me. I had no savings apart from a little bit of money we’d brought back. I said to Maurice, “That’s it, I quit. I'm going back to Tauranga.”
Greer and bass player Frank Hay decided to carry on. Meanwhile Dave Hartstone set up an equipment rental company in London.
Then finally some light. The Human Instinct’s English manager had been onto Maurice Greer. Renaissance Fair had climbed into the American Top 100. Get back over here, he said, and I’ll get you to America. Maurice approached Bill Ward. But the disillusionment had hardened. When Greer returned later that year it would be with a totally different Human Instinct with Maori Hendrix Billy TK guitaring.
Cut to Tauranga. A sun soaked city on New Zealand’s East coast, sometime in 1964, where the city’s top rock n roll band, The Four Fours, have just finished their set at drummer Trevor Spitz’s waterfront Inferno Coffee Lounge. With a handful of singles out on Allied-International Records and Bay of Plenty area fame assured, they're looking forward to a move to Auckland; New Zealand’s biggest city.
For six years they'd been riding a wave that begun back in 1958 with a jazz-inclined quartet. Rock n roll and pop became the band’s standard fare as the 1960s dawned and entrepreneurial Spitz started running dances in the St John’s Ambulance Hall and the YMCA before opening The Inferno.
The Inferno was the fiery pits as far as parents were concerned, but for kids, the flame-walled club was the hottest place in town to go.
Spitz was an original Four Four. Guitarist Bill Ward an early recruit. Fellow guitarist Dave Hartstone joined after abandoning Auckland and a career as a Police constable.
They'd already made inroads into the richer Auckland market through well-received live and recorded performances. Christmas 1964 they were there with new bass player Frank Hay. Hay couldn’t play then, but that didn’t hinder his first appearance as a Four Four miming third single Barrow Boy on Auckland Television. He learnt his instrument quickly.
The move proved good timing. The NEBOA (National Entertainment and Ballroom Operators Association) strike had stripped the town of performers who’d decamped with promoter Graham Dent to Australia. Hitting town on spec The Four Fours scored a regular spot at Fred McMahon and Dave Henderson’s Platterack in Durham Lane.
It was an eye opener for the provincial boys. Bill Ward: “The Platterack was a seedy scene where we met prostitutes, sailors, strippers, pimps and queers, and got to know some of them quite well. They were good people when you got to know them.”
Better still Henderson and McMahon came up with a permanent eight to midnight Friday night slot at Phil Warren’s Monaco Ballroom. It soon became a Friday and Saturday slot. It was quite a dash with instruments getting from the Monaco Ballroom up on Federal Street the half mile or so to Durham Lane to the Beat Room under the Platterack, scramble onto its small stage and play the week’s Top Ten hits (faithfully learnt each week) as DJ Keith Adams counted them down. Then it was upstairs lugging gear through the descending patrons to play.
It was a hectic schedule, practice every day, expanding and refining their sets with material culled from the pre-release singles Fred Noad received at Allied-International.
Ward and Hartstone were the band’s songwriters. Hartstone the instigator. Ward the melody man. They had a big New Zealand hit in 1965 with an instrumental called Theme From An Empty Coffee Lounge.
The song’s most notable feature was a Hartstone whistle which somehow survived from a demonstration melody line to the final product. A national tour followed in September 1965, but the band were unable to follow-up their first big hit.
Theme .. was one of eight singles, all original songs, released on Allied-International Records. One notable release being the raw R & B of She’s Gonna Get Me. Ward, more a ballad and harmony singer, wasn’t comfortable with Hartstone’s enthusiasm for The Rolling Stones and R & B, but it’s in that direction the band went after switching to Zodiac Records in 1966.
Their third release, Go Go, a sinewy R & B rocker about the Go Go girls at the Monaco Ballroom, backed with Don’t Print My Memoirs, featured a hyperactive teenage drummer. Maurice Greer of Palmerston North. Trevor Spitz had split.
Greer was a cherub-faced pop kid, who’d drummed with Palmerston North’s top showband, The Flares, on the regional ball and openings circuit playing extensively throughout the middle and lower North Island, until he and two fellow Flares got other ideas, and The Big Three with Peter Knowles (guitar) and Trevor Harrison (bass) appeared.
Next up were The Saints with Dave Hurley (guitar) and Doug Rowe. They were a merseybeat band with a regular gig at the Greer brothers’ Flamingo Coffee Lounge in King Street, behind the Regent Theatre. The Saints were hard to miss in their gold Beatle suits, a very visual act enhanced by Maurice singing and drumming, upright with raised drums, a rare sight. When The Saints played Auckland's Shiralee Ballroom Frank Hay was watching.
Bill Ward: “Maurice was a stand-up drummer, a real showman. He was a draw with his multi-coloured hair. A star with the girls. He was young and good looking and a good singer. He brought a freshness to the band which we needed.
“We’d never done any Beach Boys stuff, and suddenly there’s Maurice with a falsetto. We could do falsetto harmonies. We were a four singer line-up.”
Maurice splashed out on new clothes and Chevvy Bel Air, and the band upgraded their gear and talked about England. They’d canned Oz. Too predictable. Everybody was going there. Nah, Hartstone said, England was it. They’d come this far, why not a bit further?
The stability and vigour of the new line-up was mirrored in their new recordings. One Track Mind, a song Hartstone brought to the group as an original riff, is a copy of The Knickerbockers’ song of the same name. No-one noticed at the time, and until recently Bill Ward was convinced it was a Hartstone original.
In February 1966, The Four Fours landed the plum support spot for The Rolling Stones on their second New Zealand tour, much to the dismay of their competitors. They opened in Wellington, top of the local bill, behind The Searchers. The show was wild. Greer remembers the officials having to quiet the fans down even before The Four Fours came on. They were watching the Stones play from the side of the stage when a guy from the audience jumped up and started hammering Mick Jagger. Two security guys ripped him off and swung him one-two-three back into the crowd.
As the riot broke out, Bill Wyman and Keith Richards dropped everything, flicking their guitars off and running off to the side of the stage, where they watched the chaos. Later that evening, a girl plummetted from the balcony onto the stage, dislocating her legs. The Auckland show was calmer.
In August 1966, on the heels of a big farewell concert at the Auckland Town Hall, The Four Fours set sail on the Fair Sky to England. They were well ready by then. Promotional kits printed, letters of recommendation from Phil Warren and Fred McMahon pocketed, and savings stashed for possible bad times. As they boarded the ship, Hartstone was stopped by a bailiff who demanded the guitarist honour a debt of several hundred pounds. Hartstone balked. He didn’t have it. Everything was going to shit. So the others chipped in and paid the debt. Hartstone said he’d pay them back. Press reaction to The Four Fours departure was muted. Playdate’s Johnny Mann in Pop News bade them an acid farewell, noting "Pity the Four Fours left the country leaving a bad taste in many mouths."
It took five weeks to get to England. The band kept busy playing the ship’s back bar to large crowds as part of an agreed discount on their fares. They also changed their name to the more contemporary sounding Human Instinct. A good move as time would reveal.
The Human Instinct arrived in Southampton on a dreary wet night in September. Next day they arrived in London on the train, and the enormity of their gamble came home. They had nowhere to stay and no contacts.
Hay, Greer, and the Hartstones found digs in West End Lane in West Hampstead. The Wards were further afield down south London in Thornton Heath. The hunt for work began straight away. They updated their image (no more suits) and started rarking up their set, hassling agents, and pestering Mercury Records (Zodiac Record’s UK agent) to release some new songs.
The work was slow coming. It wasn’t until Christmas Eve that they got their first show at the black and white striped Zebra Club in Soho. After a bare first three months and a pauper’s Christmas it was a welcome sign that their luck had turned. Better was to come in the new year.
After a gobsmacking audition in front of promoters at the Starlight Ballroom in Wembley with a rousing version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, their four part harmonies setting them apart, they found a good agent in the proprietor. Work offers picked up radically and now “the band with the stand-up drummer who sung Good Vibrations,” as they were often requested, were playing three times a week, supporting top line acts' The Small Faces, Spencer Davis Group, Jeff Beck Group, Roy Orbison, Spooky Tooth, The Move, Moody Blues, Long John Baldry, Manfred Mann, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Cat Stevens. Just about everyone who was or would soon be anyone in British pop. The Human Instinct, having come to England to be at the heart of the rock revolution, were undisputedly there.
They did the rounds of the London Clubs and dances playing the Marquee (with Jeff Beck Group), a Monday residency at the Tiles Club, and several weekly slots at the Playboy Club in Park Lane after which they’d smuggle their bunny girlfriends out to Grumbles for an illicit breakfast. They took over The Peddlers residency at The Pickwick Club while they were overseas, but didn’t go down well with the jazz-inclined audience.
Then there was the Ram Jam Club. Ward: “It was run by blacks with an all-black audience. I’ll never forget going into the loos and there was a guy shooting up with a needle, and you’d smell this funny smell.”
They zig-zagged there way up and down England, Scotland, and Wales playing halls, out-of-the-way clubs, university balls at Oxford and Cambridge.
They played Motherwell, where everyone was searched at the door. Cornwall, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, a submarine base in Northumberland, Wales with Cat Stevens, and a violent show where the band were driven from the stage by a bottle barrage between mods and rockers. They grabbed their gear, backed the van up to the door and peeled out double-time to the sight of a young mod getting the shit kicked out of him on the road outside as youths took to each other with fence palings.
On the way home, they'd encounter other acts on the road that weekend, huddled over an early morning meal at one of the cafes favoured by rock n roll bands. Imagine Jimi Hendrix in an old army overcoat munching baked beans.
With their live profile up, and plenty of work coming in, The Human Instinct secured a recording deal with Mercury Records. First up in March 1967 was Rich Man backed with Illusions, as covered by The Tunespinners in New Zealand. Like all The Human Instinct’s releases it received good press but few sales.
After two more failed singles - Can’t Stop Loving You, and a lame re-recording of Go Go from June 1967 - The Human Instinct hooked up with producer and A & R man Mike Hurst, former guitarist and singer with The Springfields (as in Dusty).
Hurst was an innovative producer, and with The Instinct, he had the perfect raw material, a pop band who could play and sing four part harmonies, qualities he knew well and that fitted snugly into the whimsical-pop-with flowery-edges that was Britain’s psychedelia.
First up for new label Deram Records - Decca's psychedelic imprint - which also released David Bowie and The Buzz, Cat Stevens, and The Moody Blues - was Day In My Mind’s Mind, recorded at Olympic Studios, and released in December 1967.
Day In My Mind’s Mind was described years thirty years later by English critic Jon Savage as “a blurring of the real and the fantastic, aurally reproduced by de-tuned raga-style guitars and fey voices.” With driving clapped rhythm and eerie flute, no less. The Human Instinct may never have tripped (not then anyway), but they had the new drug-influenced sound down.
It was deft pop single, but that wasn’t always enough, as The Human Instinct knew only too well after three failures. Their manager had an idea. If the right amount of money (fifteen hundred pounds) were to reach the right hands, your record will chart, he said. The money changed hands, but nothing happened. The band were upset, but were told to hang on because "the first one never does it, that’s getting it known amongst the people who matter. The next one will chart.” It didn’t.
Then there was the notorious Visions Of Flowers; Hartstone’s attempted flower power cash-in recorded between their two Deram Records singles. Mike Hurst wheeled in session pianist Nicky Hopkins and finished the song with a bizarre psychedelic melange of harp, motorbike sounds and sound effects fade. It was never released.
Renaissance Fair was a Byrds b-side from March 1967 that The Human Instinct made their own. Mike Hurst got the London Symphony Orchestra in to embellish the mystical beautifully sung upbeat psych-pop chugger. Again there were good reviews, but the single stiffed in February 1968. That was it for Ward. He wanted to go home to join his wife who’d left in mid-1967. Frank Hay too was homesick. The experience had run its course. It was time to go home.
Dave Hartstone tried to convince Maurice to stay. He was getting into management, he said. Maurice had had fun while they “kept on the gain, creeping up,” but he too decided to leave. He could (and would) come back. But it was hard, Hartstone was like a big brother to him.
Hartstone stayed. He’d seen money making possibilities in London. Even so it must have hurt. All that work for nothing, certainly not the fame he desired. He’d written songs, driven the band, and put up with the same deprivations as his fellow musicians. But there was nothing he could do. They divided the gear up. The band got the PA and amps. Hartstone the Transit van. They trucked the gear down to the wharves, insured it, and left it in the warehouse for freighting home. Then caught the plane back, returning on Anzac Day in 1968.
