State of Mickey & Tommy

It's not well known, but long before he joined Foreigner -- and even before he was in Spooky Tooth -- Mick Jones made quite a few records with Tommy Brown, the pair working in France for much of the period. This French CD collects 24 tracks in which they were involved between 1965 and 1971, encompassing recordings billed to several different monikers, including the State of Mickey & Tommy, the Blackburds, Nimrod, the J&B, and Thomas F. Browne. It may be that the singles they released as the State of Mickey & Tommy, obscure as those 45s are, are the best known of the lot, especially "With Love from One to Five," which has shown up on a few relatively high-profile U.K. psychedelia compilations. That does happen to be one of the better numbers, but generally this CD has fair, though not exceptional, music that reflects the British mod, pop/rock, and psychedelic trends of the time with occasional hints of French and Continental influences. "With Love from One to Five" is typical if classy 1967 orchestrated psychedelic pop; "Nobody Knows Where You've Been" strongly recalls the arrangements on Sgt. Pepper's cuts like "Within You, Without You"; and "Frisco Bay" is nice dainty, dreamy pop with beatific Summer of Love lyrics and the lightest hints of raga-rock. All of those songs were found on singles credited to the State of Mickey & Tommy; the ones billed to the Blackburds are more like soul-flavored British mod rock that could serve as incidental film music, while Nimrod's 1969 single "The Bird" (previously included on several collector-oriented comps of rare British psychedelia) is a fairly strong relic bridging psychedelia with early progressive rock. The best track, however, is the relatively unheralded 1966 single "There She Goes" by the J&B, a quite haunting, dramatic song that's a bit like a mini-soundtrack to a story of Swinging London heartbreak. As a whole, this will hardly qualify Jones and Brown as lost masters of mid- to late-'60s British rock, but there's pleasant period music of the genre to be heard, virtually all of it from extremely rare recordings (including soundtracks). ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide