The Liverpool Kids "Beattle Mash" (Palance, PST-777, 1964)

I've got a number of these "Beatle rip off albums" which emerged as the first wave of Beatlemania was hitting the US. Basically Beatle sound-alike (or in some cases, not so sound-alike) cash-ins that were designed to fool the less attentive members of the public (read: little kids or their hapless parents), they were released on budget labels with ambiguous and/ or misleading cover design that tossed in exotic buzz words like "Liverpool", "Mersey Beat" or just "England". Then when the consumer got home and dropped the needle down, they'd be confusingly greeted by a made-up group ineptly covering a song or two by the "fabs" and 20 more minutes of throwaway filler that ranged from "pretty close" to "guh?".

For my money, "Beattle Mash" has the best cover of the whole slew (I don't know if you can tell how out of focus it is, or how little this helps disguise the age of these guys), while the group themselves (referred to on the front as "The Liverpool Kids", in the liners as "The Liverpool Moptops" and on the label as "The Schoolboys") mostly stick to churning out lame recycled frat rock and twist riffs, pausing now and then to slip in a not-very-rewritten rewrite of an actual Beatle song. Or as the back cover puts it:

...these four men, who with a group of excellent musicians, have adopted the style of BEATLING, the hottest craze in show business on either side of the Atlantic. [snip] Our interpretation of the style by our own talented group will give you the great pleasure you are looking for.

So I hope the great pleasure you are looking for finds you today, because I have little doubt that it eluded the original purchaser of this record.




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