Fact #97600

Alan 'Wally' Waller (bassist) : That was just another little band, but we became very popular very quickly in our area. It was quite an exciting time. It was when the whole kind of explosion was happening of music in this country. We'd been doing quite well in this country and then we had a chance to go to Germany for a couple of months, and we saw bands like The Beatles and all these Liverpool bands. They were playing the kind of music we'd never heard of before. Being a port, a lot of American ships used to go to Liverpool, so they used to get a lot of really great American imported music which never came south where we lived. When we played in Hamburg, we saw these amazing Liverpool bands of the time and I heard music I'd never even thought existed before. One of the songs we heard was Money, and we did it on our recording test (for Decca). Later, when the guy at the recording test read the titles on The Beatles' second album and he saw this song called Money, he quickly dug out our tape and mixed it up and slapped it out. Within a week it was there!

It was amazing! One week you'd be bumming around your local Railway Hotel - we used to have a gig every week at the Railway Hotel - and the next week you're on national TV and women are tearing you to pieces. It was wonderful.

There was just two singles. Bern, he was gonna be a superstar, so he thought that he should take the lion's share of the dough and we should be on wages. We didn't like that idea too much! Anyway, he didn't become a superstar, as you probably well know!

We went on to make a few records. We suddenly found that we didn't want to get another singer, so we started doing vocal stuff, harmony stuff.
(Source : interview by Mike Stax at http://www.ugly-things.com/wally.html)