The Pretty Things - S.F. Sorrow
- 2 hours ago
- 24 min read
S.F. Sorrow is rock-and-roll’s red-haired child. SF Sorrow
Phil May: vocals
Dick Taylor: guitar, backing vocals
Jon Povey: Mellotron, organ, sitar, percussion
Wally Waller: bass, backing vocals, wind instruments, piano
John Adler, AKA “Twink”: drums, backing vocals
Produced by Norman Smith
art by Phil May
If you know anything about the Pretty Things, my fucking god, it’s all so difficult.
The World Radio History Archive? Dead end. Their biography? Out of print. The book Phil spoke about late in his life? Still not out. The documentary? Stuck in production hell. The sheer lack of accessible resources on the Pretty Things is astonishing.
This S.F. Sorrow deep dive genuinely would not have been possible without Mike Stax at Ugly Things. Many thanks to Mike for having sent me issue no. 54 for use in my Gabor Szabo episode two years ago, and for his generous and mighty educational gift of the Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky box set liner notes.
The Journey
The Pretty Things started as art-school-dropouts turned-blues revivalists like their classmates, the Rolling Stones. They were a support act for The Animals, Graham Bond, and Jeff Beck’s pre-Yardbirds group the Tridents. But the Pretties had other plans.
These guys courted controversy from pretty much day one. For some perspective, let’s put the Pretties next to some other “long hairs” in 1964:
Shoulder-length tresses! Facial hair! Egads. If parents across the globe were up in arms over the Beatles’ and Brian Jones’s hair, you can imagine the hullabaloo over the Pretties! They earned a reputation as feral children of rock-and-roll in their early days, but hey. Any press is good press, right? sf sorrow
The Pretty Things hit bad luck just as soon as they had success. Their peers – the Stones, the Kinks pre-PunchGate – took America by storm as part of the British Invasion. Thanks to incompetent management, thePretties missed out. Instead, they focused on Europe instead. This benefited in other fields; European audiences were more tolerant of Dick Taylor’s out-there influences: Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and free jazz-era John Coltrane. While the Yardbirds were stretching out their live numbers in 1965, and the Stones put a ten-minute romp on their ’66 LP, the Pretties’ improvisations were their “platforms for whatever kind of musical anarchy they happened to be caught up in at that moment in time.” Sounds like psychedelia, right?
They became known for their all-night parties, sexually provocative lyrics, hooting, hollering, doing shoeies onstage, and generally whooping it up into a frenzy. The anarchy got out of hand when a chaotic run of shows in New Zealand got them banned from the country! The ensuing PR nightmare forced the band to fire their drummer and hardest partier, Viv Prince.
The band waterfalled through a host of lineup changes through 1966 and ’67. Their new drummer, Skip Alan, lied about his age and caused a whole host of problems. Since he was only 17, touring internationally got way more difficult. He left to marry some French woman he fell in love with on the road, to be replaced by “Twink.” About halfway through writing Emotions, Phil May reconnected with his childhood friend Wally Waller. As the story goes, they wrote three songs in one day, including The Sun. When Wally joined the Pretties, he brought his Beach Boys-ish harmonies from his previous group with him.
While the Pretties were too rough and rowdy for British R&B, they were just weird enough for psychedelia. They found themselves in the London underground scene purely by accident! No other scene was tolerant of their weirdness. This space with utmost chaos and an utter lack of rules turned out to be fertile ground for the Pretties’ next project.
S.F. Sorrow Is Born SF Sorrow
Like “A Quick One” was the Who’s trial run before The Who Sell Out and Tommy, the Pretty Things had a few trial runs before S.F. Sorrow. Thanks to Bryan Morrison bankrolling demo sessions, the Pretties able to put“Defecting Grey,” its b-side “Mr. Evasion,” and “Talkin’ About The Good Times” to tape. “Defecting Grey” is, as Phil described it, a “small maquette” of what was to come. (A maquette is a sculptor’s scale model before making the full thing.) There are crossfades, different time signatures, and four different narratives; one of which is the story of a “straight” man who suddenly realizes he isn’t straight!
In interview with Richie Unterberger, Phil said, “...we had to find another way of making records or we would have stopped with boredom. We’d had enough (of) being a pop band. And we wanted to find something which we could get ourselves into, and would just be a different way of recording.” Fontana Records chose not to renew the Pretties’ contract after Emotions. The feeling seems mutual: The Pretties were sick of Fontana, andFontana were sick of them. Phil said,
“Once we got off the 45 hit single roundabout, for us it was incredible freedom, and we just made music and we were actually real.”
quoted from: Mike Stax, liner notes for Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky (2015.)
As the band were without a label and still under a truly ludicrous amount of contracts, they recorded “library music” to make some dough. Their Electric Banana project was, in effect, their S.F. Sorrow test kitchen. “Talkin’ About The Good Times” was the first song the band recorded at EMI. In September of 1967, the down-and-out Pretty Things managed to land a contract with EMI Records. Since their £3,500 advance went to pay off their debts, the album was over budget from day zero! They took advantage of their fresh start, completecreative control, and unlimited studio time to do something totally new. Phil said,
“I could never understand why an album had to be five A-sides and five B-sides with no connection. Pieces of music had been written for at least a 40-minute listen, and I thought the best way to do that was to overlay a story line and create music for the various characters and instances. It was the oldest concept in the world, but at the time nobody had done it before.”
quoted from: Neil Strauss, “THE POP LIFE; The First Rock Opera (No, Not ‘Tommy’)” The New York Times, 9/3/1998.
With a short story Phil wrote called “Cutting Up Sargent Time,” S.F. Sorrow – and the rock opera – is born.
(It’s important to note that, while none of the Pretties had the term “rock opera” in mind when making Sorrow, Phil was inspired by the structure of a classical opera. Richie Unterberger did ask in interview if [UK] Nirvana’s 1966 album The Story of Simon Simopath was an inspiration. Phil said no.)
The Story of S.F. Sorrow
Mr. & Mrs. Sorrow move from the North to a factory town. After a few years, the Mrs. gives birth to a son, who they name Sebastian F. “Nobody knew what the F. stood for, and nobody really cared.” S.F. has an innocent, if brief and lonely, childhood. He has an especially active imagination; his dreams of journeying to the moon keep him company. When he comes of age, he starts working at the same “factory of misery” as his father. Though the work tires his bones and blackens his lungs, he has a young love to warm his spirit.
Still longing for an escape – and out of a job after the factory closes – the naive young Sorrow goes off to fight in World War I. He experiences the harsh realities of war, and realizes he only wanted to play the part of a war hero. (Remember, this takes place decades before television ripped the wool from over our eyes.) After the war, Sorrow goes to America for a new life. He buys his sweetheart a ticket to join him, but she dies in a fiery Hindenburg-style accident.
Watching the love of his life die fast-tracks Sorrow’s spiral. Consumed by grief, he wanders aimlessly through the streets of New York until he bumps into one Baron Saturday. The Baron asks Sorrow to “lend him his eyes,” “but he didn’t wait for a reply, he just took them.” This triggers an intense vision of some kind, in which Sorrow and the Baron journey to the center of our hero’s mind. Sorrow thinks the Baron has taken him to the moon. Instead, it’s Sorrow’s own head they enter first. Then a hall of mirrors, the Well of Destiny, and finally, the Baron shows him “the most painful sight yet.” Unable to accept whatever he’s seen, Sorrow loses his mind. Embittered, he wanders New York; presumably homeless. He isolates himself into old age until he dies as “the loneliest person in the world.”
What a wholesome, uplifting story! Phil had a gnarly pessimistic streak, after all. Dick remembered Mark St. John saying, “Whatever happens, Phil will always see the worst of it.”
Like many rock operas, Sorrow’s story partly came from real life. Phil’s parents split up when he was very young. He was raised by his aunt and uncle as one of their own until all of a sudden, his birth mother and new stepfather were back in the picture. They came to take Phil from the only home he’d known. Wally said, “I still remember his haunted expression as our eyes met and we waved for the last time. I felt confused and alone. I had no idea how I was going to fill the next few day till the weekend arrived and we would see each other again!” He wouldn’t see his best friend again for 6 years. Like Sorrow, Phil retreated into his imagination. “I went into a shell,” he said in the Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky liners. “It fired my imagination, because I thought life was pretty bleak, so a lot of stuff went on in my head. I had a kind of secret life, I guess. It wasn’t real; it was a virtual world to keep myself going.”
“There was a lot of me in S.F. Sorrow, and during the making of it I realized that I was starting to leak some deeply hidden personal truths into the grooves of that record. For the first time in my life I was opening myself up in the writing of those lyrics and it became, for me, a cathartic experience.”
quoted from: Mike Stax, liner notes for Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky (2015.)
The music came from more than a few all-nighters at Phil’s folk’s place, with the guys’ instruments and “strange substances.” At the time, Dick was really into Love and their own cursed psychedelic masterpiece, Forever Changes. There was no way this project was going to stay in any record company box.
Fortunately, S.F. Sorrow had a guardian angel: producer Norman Smith. He had a pretty damn good resume by now, having produced Rubber Soul and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn! Wally said,
“We found in him a kindred spirit who allowed us to indulge our passions. Quite often, we found ourselves treading in the ‘virgin snow,’ both musically and technically. We burned lots of recording time...but fortunately most artists’ contracts of the day involved the recording company picking the tab for the recording costs. The bean counters in EMI did get a bit worried about the amount of money we were spending in Abbey Road recording time, but Norman took all the flak, and he had a track record through his connections with The Beatles and Pink Floyd, so nobody bothered him too much.”
quoted from: John Wisniewski, “PRETTY THINGS: Wally Waller interview” Perfect Sound Forever, 8/2020.
The Pretties entered EMI Studio 2 (then Studio 3) straight after the Zombies completed Odessey and Oracle. Their neighbors were Pink Floyd recording A Saucerful of Secrets and the Beatles working on the White Album. Since they’d only brought their guitars in, the Pretties simply instruments other groups left behind: a Tibetan drum, a Mellotron, even Ringo Starr’s drum kit! They wanted a dulcimer too, but EMI didn’t have access to one. They say lack breeds innovation; Dick and his dad built a similar instrument themselves.
Sorrow was not an easy record to capture. EMI didn’t have 8-track recording technology until well into 1968; the Pretties began work on Sorrow in November of 1967. Initial 4 tracks would quickly be filled by their basic backing track (guitar, bass, drum, maybe a guide vocal.) This would be mixed down to 2-track, leaving two empty tracks for more parts. With all the desired studio effects and necessary overdubbing, several rounds of mixdowns were needed. Wally said the process could be repeated four or five times until the track was complete. Sometimes they’d even add things live, during the final mixdown. These were impossible to reverse – you know, unless you wanted to redo the whole thing!
Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky
I believe an artist’s circumstances influence art they make. (That’s, like, the whole point of Vinyl Monday!) The Zombies knew they’d throw in the towel after Odessey and Oracle. That’s why you get happy music with such sad lyrics. S.F. Sorrow is a rocker, and it is bleak. A little boy dreams of the moon and is literally never happy ever again! The Pretties knew well by now that the odds were stacked against them. They were enemies of the press and hadn’t had a hit in years. Why not get into a story like this? Sorrow was the Pretties’ gritty, unfiltered slice of reality...or the worst of it. I truly don’t think the world is as bad as Sorrow resigns himself to believing it is. This kind of story wasn’t what the Boomer youth wanted to hear, but it did reflect a generational in "peace-and-love" attitudes as the counterculture collapsed under the weight of itself in the year-and-a-half after Sorrow's release. War and madness were also on the brain. It’s interesting that two rock operas released within one calendar year of each other (more on this later…) would both involve World War I in their plots. The Vietnam generation might’ve seen something of themselves in their grandparents, however deep the divide between young and old was in the Sixties.
S.F. Sorrow is only 40 minutes long: 21 minutes on one side, 19 on the other. A single vinyl record can hold up to 24 minutes of music on each side. The Pretties could’ve used their eight minutes of wiggle room for at least one of the singles (with a story as loose as this, they absolutely could’ve shoehorned one of them in) andinterludes, with narration. One of the most difficult things about the rock opera is striking the balance between music and story. S.F. Sorrow isn’t told in the music. There are no leitmotifs like The Wall, or a repeated phrases like Tommy’s “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” Sorrow lives almost entirely in the lyrics. The story is concise, I will give the Pretties that! It’s about the miserable life and death of one man. This isn’t like Tommy, which desperately needs a red pen. Or The Lamb for that matter, my god! Sorrow is also a subtle critique of capitalism. The “factories of misery” are the malady that underscores our main character’s life from before he was born. He was born in the shadow of a factory, was chewed up and spit out, first by capitalism, then the war factory, and finally dies alone and penniless in the shadows of factories. All of this considered, for a story that lives in the lyrics, it’s pretty vague. Were it not for liners, we’d have no idea who Baron Saturday is or why he’s here! If we had one of the Pretties in their nice English accents or even a guest narrating, Sorrow’s story could’ve been as strong as its music.
"Then before too long
The street, it rang with the sound
From number three, there came a cry,
S.F. Sorrow is born!"
Sorrow’s birth opens side one, and it sounds pretty optimistic so far. This bouncing baby boy has a clean slate and is ready to take on the world. The song's "sieze-the-day" attitude comes from several tracks of overdubbed acoustic guitars, a subtle sitar for texture, and a steady rhythm from Wally’s bass. S.F. Sorrow Is Born is the only celebratory moment on the album, with a trumpet fanfare and a little Mellotron fill. This is another similarity to Odessey! Since the Zombies and the Pretties both operated on shoestring budgets, they had to really stretch the Mellotron. It's got lots of settings to mimic an orchestra – perfect if you can't afford one! Both bands innovated with and made masterful use of the instrument. Norman Smith pushed production of Sorrow as far as it could go, evident on “Sorrow Is Born” and lots of other numbers on this album. Notice when after Phil sings, “Before the sun had left the streets/They were living inside,” the arrangement pulls back to just the rhythm guitar track. Then, a smooth glide brings the rest back. The acoustic and electric guitar lines alternate nimbly through the instrumental refrain. Those guitars are gently pushed back and to make space for Phil when he sings the verses; applying reverb to boost up his soft tenor voice. With everything that’s going on, I’m impressed Norman was able to capture the harmonies and acquaint them in this soundscape. These guys sound like if the Who kidnapped the Beach Boys! With the final verse, Phil introduces that all is not right.
“The sunlight of his days
Was spent in the grey of his mind.
As he stole love with a tongue of lies,
The world was shrinking in size.”
We can safely chalk the last line up to some Baron Saturday foreshadowing, or classic psychedelic Sixties gobbledygook. As for the rest, Sorrow has already begun to isolate himself in early childhood.
We slip into Sorrow’s fantastical lunar dreams on Bracelets Of Fingers. Woozy, trippy a capella “love love love”s break into rolling, booming drums and accordion under the Pretties’ stately harmonies.
“Fly to the moon and I’ll get there quite soon if I wait a while,
Cradled in branches that stretch out their arms, I must wait a while.”
It sounds innocent enough; Sorrow daydreams of the moon while sitting in a tree. But he alludes to using what we might now call maladaptive daydreaming to cope with the oppressive ugliness and grime of his factory town.
“Bending my mind as I pick up the flowers in May,
Hearing the laughter that turns into tears every day.”
The verses are sang over a jaunty, almost inebriated waltz with military drums. I think Phil’s voice was run through a Leslie cabinet? It gives him a faraway sound, putting space between the narrator and us. Sorrow is physically here, but his mind is far away.
“Bracelets Of Fingers” some of the best production on the whole record. Norman and the Pretties use lots of phasing throughout Sorrow. On this song, it makes the Mellotron do crazy forwards-and-backwards things. The instrumental break with sitar (also one of many) with Mellotron and hand drums is wonderful already. But then, the Pretties just stick in one of the most futuristic sounding transitions of the whole decade. Excuse me?? I was blown away when I first heard it. And we’ve still got half a song to go! How can I get that song out of my mind and just go back to the verses as normal? I can’t. I think that’s what the Pretties wanted.
She Says Good Morning introduces Sorrow’s love interest, and some Beatles influence. The super trebley chiming riff, splashy drums, and harsher, more nasally lead and harmony vocal are all very 1966 Beatles. The riff through the verses and backbeat-focused drums are totally “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (the song) as well.
It’s sweet that a guy so into the moon would meet his lady when she tells him “good morning.” Now, he’s got something to love both day and night. She’s his sun, brightening his polluted grey days:
“Threading through a web of gas,
The rain precedes the storm.
Coughing on my way to work,
Her smile keeps me warm.”
The factory contaminates the environment and his lungs, but not their love. “Good Morning” kicks into double-time during Dick’s short guitar solo and the fade-out; which ramps up the action for the story’s first climax. Briefly, under some very Lennon-ish “Good-good-good-good morning!”s, we hear the couple chatting. Cute! This is the last cute thing that will ever happen in Sorrow’s life.
Private Sorrow cloaks the horrors of war with a peppy, folksy arrangement. Wally plays I believe a recorder (or maybe it’s a flute of some kind? A pan flute?) in the style of traditional English folk music, and “Twink” plays rat-a-tat-tat drums. It emphasizes the youth of boys in the trenches. It’s getting harder for Sorrow to bury his head in his dreams. “See shells whistle, let your mind drift away” shifts to “Let yourself hide away” as his physical survival instincts kick in. His mental survival skills strain under the weight of things he sees. “Twisting metal through the air/Scars and screams/So you might know his fury.” Whose fury? God’s, it seems. Phil frames this scene as fire-and-brimstone; “Heaven’s rain falls upon/Faces of the children who look skyward.” This is divine punishment for the ugliness of man. The naive, young Sorrow realizes he only plays the part of a war hero. He sees violence and destruction until he is forced to become it.
“Dressed in white silk of rain,
You marry the pain.
As you kneel in a church of bright steel,
A new morning arrives.”
The Mellotron and flute are gradually drowned out by heavy combat boot steps and a disembodied voice reading barely-audible names of the fallen. Who they are, we don’t get to know, and it seems nobody cares. Boots mesh with the drumming, that gets louder and more oppressive. The march slows down ever so slightly before kicking into Balloon Burning.
I can hear Love’s influence on “Balloon Burning.” The harsh, hot, trebley twin guitars remind me of “A House Is Not A Motel.” It’s plenty fuzzy and rocking, though bells are sprinkled in to sweeten things up. “Balloon” has the drumming on Sorrow. It’s varied, flexible, and powerful to propel the chorus. The Pretties sing haunting harmonies. They linger, as if suspended in time and air: “This balloon’s burning.” The fiery hell of war has followed Sorrow home, robbing him of the only person he ever loved. Dick plays a thrilling, screeching solo. Rhythm tracks are played way up the fretboard, and plenty of quickly-strummed acoustic fills things out. It raises the emotional stakes, leading to act one’s inflection point. I don’t know if any of Sorrow had radio potential. That’s the problem with most rock operas. It’s really hard to take a single out, have it make sense, and still have it resonate with general audiences. “Balloon Burning” had film score potential. It’s clearly doomed, and the lyrics are non-specific enough to feel cohesive with a non-Sorrow-related picture.
The tense chord at the end is never resolved. Sorrow is deep in grief on our act one finale, Death; another of the best-arranged songs on the album. Wally slides around the fretboard of his bass guitar underneath what sounds like a dulcimer or bouzouki. (This is probably the instrument Dick and his dad built.) It’s punctuated by gongs, Tibetan drums, dark chants and moans, and steeped in plenty of reverb. The listener is pulled deeper into the depths of Sorrow’s despair. It’s as if we wear lead shoes. Another wonderful moment for sitar with chugging electric guitar makes us feel untethered. We are shipwrecked in the middle of a black ocean, as deep as it is wide, with no land in sight. I can’t tell if Phil’s muffled lead vocal was an intentional choice or the result of toomany mixdowns, but it’s a stark effect nonetheless. After assumed years, Sorrow’s grief refuses to let up.
“As the slow pulse of sobbing
Dries from the sky,
My grief in red circles
Surrounding an eye.”
Side one of Sorrow ends with either a chariot pulling away (a horseman of the apocalypse, perhaps) or – even more cruel to our main character – a crackling fire.
Though we don’t know for sure in lyric or song, it’s possible that Baron Saturday is an Anglicized version of the Hatian deity Baron Samedi; master of the dead and giver of life. In S.F. Sorrow he appears as a sort of trickster god, “White visions black, Mister Malady,” who visits the downtrodden and steals their eyes. He appears in the form of some “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”-like drumming which is heavy on the cowbell, silly Mellotron chords, and his own silly English baron accent. This has no reason being as catchy as it is, and one can’t help but wonder if in writing and recording this song the Pretties accidentally summoned a Hatian voodoo god and that’s what cursed this album!
The Journey is one of those songs the Pretties thought up in the studio to link the pieces of Sorrow’s narrative. It’s supposed to represent Sorrow and Barron journeying to the core of Sorrow’s psyche. Some varispeeded, heavily-echoing moments from past songs pop up, “Bracelets Of Fingers” is most recognizable. Some edits are crude. This was definitely an experiment.
The Pretties the best they can to relay the journey into Sorrow’s consciousness on I See You. I feel they could’ve gone a bit darker and more psychedelic to fully flesh out Sorrow traveling back in his memory. But the Mellotron does a fine job at conveying the drama. There’s a strange texture on the harmony vocals, big dramatic drums, and Phil gives an emotive vocal. Well Of Destiny delivers on that freaky, dark psych promise. A wordless, keening vocal slips into all kinds of varispeeding and phasing of plunked piano and guitar exercises. It’s the representation of Sorrow’s denial; which condemns him to his fate of madness.
Sorrow has shut down completely in Trust. The music is intricate and lush, like our main character’s optimism haunting him as his world view breaks down. “There’s no sorrow left to trust.” Not even other people’s ails can convince him of the world. During the “You’re seen going away” passage, there’s a nicely applied piano part, worked deep into the music. There’s plenty of stereo trickery to stretch and twist the wonderful harmony. The way “Trust” ends, with the full arrangement disappearing into descending acoustic guitar notes, reflects Sorrow simply running out of steam and giving up on life.
The final uptempo number of the LP, Old Man Going, rips into Sorrow. Phil’s delivery gets more embittered and snarling as Sorrow gets stuck on all the worst life has to offer.
“Wet faces lying in the street, they will not be saved.
Black house you’ve built, it will soon disappear,
Another corporation dig this year.”
To him, human life is expendable at the hands of the powers that be. “Streets filled with bouquets from a cloudy sky/They’ll soon forget the field in which you lie” hints at Sorrow’s own fate; lying in a pauper’s grave somewhere in New York. “Old Man Going” is broken in two by Dick’s thin, sharp solo over crashing cymbals and a relentless acoustic guitar. The song quickly ends in group vocals chanting, “Going going going going.” The Greek chorus is eager for Sorrow’s fall.
He does fall, on the stark finale Loneliest Person. After a full album of panning, phasing, layered guitar parts, interesting bass playing, and harmonies, all we have left is a strummed acoustic guitar and a comped vocal. Sorrow laments, “You might be the loneliest person in the world/You’ll never be as lonely as me.” Total resignation. Sorrow truly believes he’s been doomed since birth, that fighting fate and the powers that be is useless, and that the human race has surrendered any ambition to achieve. And that’s the note we end the record on. Just a real killer.
S.F. Sorrow was released in December of 1968, a year and a month after production began. And it went nowhere. Why did Sorrow fail? It was impossible to recreate on stage with technology available at the time, and doubly difficult after losing a founding member. “I left at the very final note of S.F. Sorrow,” Dick said in interview in 2000. “In the interim, I left to see what else was out there. It was no big blob with the band, I just wanted to see what else I could do. And to be honest, I got bored.” It feels like deja vu all over again saying this, but any album released in the last weeks of ’68 didn’t stand a chance against the White Album, Electric Ladyland, or Beggars’ Banquet. Sorrow received only a passing mention in the December 14th, 1968 issue of Melody Maker. This “review” (if you can even call it such) said the Pretties were “much-improved” and “exciting on stage and experimental on record.” Disc gave them a backhanded compliment: “Amazing album from, of all people, The Pretty Things.” EMI did very little to promote Sorrow. “It was a kick in the balls,” Phil said. “It’s one thing to let us make the bloody thing, but then all they gave us was little quarter-inch adverts saying, ‘The new album by The Pretty Things’ – nothing about the story, nothing about the narrative.” That same EMI contract that gave the Pretties so many creative freedoms gave them very little in royalties.
The Tommy Thing
As if all of that wasn’t enough, S.F. Sorrow languished on Rare Earth’s shelf until well into 1969. It didn’t see an American release until months after the Who’s Tommy; the album many consider “the first rock opera.”
“(Roger) Daltrey and Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend kept saying, ‘For christ's sake, don't let us come out in America before you, it'll be a disaster. You've got to get it out.’ So I would then tell EMI, EMI would telex Tamla, ‘Yeh yeh yeh it's coming out.’ It came out three months after Tommy.”
quoted from: Richie Unterberger, “PHIL MAY INTERVIEW: PART TWO.”
It was, in fact, a disaster.
“...we got slaughtered in America for ‘jumping on the Tommy bandwagon.’ I think that cast a sort of, almost made history be sort of scrambled. Because at that point in America, the concept was that S.F. Sorrow was after Tommy. And I think in a lot of people’s psyche, even though (Sorrow) was made 14 months before Tommy, it will never change. It’s just something like a really bad fact you learn in history turns out to be false, but you're taught early enough, and it stays.”
quoted from: Richie Unterberger, “PHIL MAY INTERVIEW: PART TWO.”
Pete Townsend has flip-flopped on whether or not Sorrow actually inspired Tommy. (You have to consider Pete’s one of rock-and-roll’s biggest contrarians; see that insane Rolling Stone interview from 1968!) But when you listen to “The Journey” and “Old Man Going” with “Pinball Wizard”...interesting.
The 1969 US release of Sorrow put the Pretties and their record in a wonky in-between period. They were after psych, before prog, and right in the middle of the back-to-basics period. The Rolling Stone review by – who else, Lester Bangs, this guy is always at the scene of the crime! – reflects this awkward phase for Sorrow. “One looked forward to this one because (The Pretty Things) are a thrillingly ragged blues band with none of the usual snobbery. What a surprise, then, to find an ultra-pretentious concept album, complete with strained ‘story’ (A Man’s Life from rural birth to Prodigal’s Oliver Twist freakout), like some grossly puerile cross between the Bee Gees, Tommy, and the Moody Blues, who should be shot for what they’ve done to English rock lyrics…” Damn.
A later reissue during the prog explosion of the early Seventies might’ve helped Sorrow along, or maybe after Pink Floyd hit it big with Dark Side of the Moon and reissued their early LPs. But the Pretties couldn’t even do that! They finally settled the legal disputes over the rights to their catalog in fucking 1998, 20 years after Sorrow’s release. Only then could it be reissued.
For all of the above reasons, S.F. Sorrow never stood a chance. Phil concluded in the New York Times,
“The album has never really had a proper release. To some extent, it died at birth.”
quoted from: Neil Strauss, “THE POP LIFE; The First Rock Opera (No, Not ‘Tommy’)” The New York Times, 9/3/1998.
Loneliest Album In The World
S.F. Sorrow has one huge plot hole: neither the music nor the liners tell us exactly what “most painful sight” Baron Saturday reveals to Sorrow. We do have a hint: “The waves break and part for me/As my mind slips into sand/The water returns with the warmth of your hand.” These lines imply Sorrow having a vision of hisgirlfriend. He might feel responsible for her death. He was the one who bought her that zeppelin ticket, after all. But it’s not for certain. Was this vision the true identity of his mother or father? The secret of the universe? Has he actually been dead this whole time and life as Sorrow was purgatory?
…okay, so there’s actually an elaborate theory online that Sorrow was killed in action and the Baron takes him through purgatory. But we don’t know for sure!
And we’ll never know. Phil’s been gone for six years. In all the interviews and liner notes I’ve read, it seems no one thought to ask him what Sorrow’s “sight” was. That might be the great tragedy of S.F. Sorrow. Its creators can’t tell us what made Sorrow such a special person, why he was taken on reverse bildungsroman. With the Pretties having taken the McGuffin to their graves, Sorrow is an unremarkable everyman; save only for history he saw and the tragedies it dealt him.
In the nearly 60 years since its release, S.F. Sorrow has received its (belated) flowers as the first rock opera and one of the great UK psychedelic albums. The Pretties planned to play the album at the Roundhouse’s 30thanniversary “Summer Of Love” festival. In a rare stroke of good luck for this band, they got a way better deal! Instead, the Pretty Things performed S.F. Sorrow in full for the first time at Abbey Road Studios. Skip Alan’s son filled in on percussion, special guest David Gilmour played guitar, and Arthur Brown was the narrator. It was live-streamed online – an impressive feat for 1998! And the Pretties did it again at the Royal Festival Hall in 2001. Mike Stax and his wife, Anja, were in attendance. In Ugly Things no. 54, Mike remembers,
“In October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks, Anja and I flew to London to see the Pretty Things perform the entire S.F. Sorrow album at the Royal Festival Hall. It was a momentous and moving occasion for any number of reasons, not least that the band’s work was finally getting some of the wider recognition it deserved. Midway through “Balloon Burning,” I found myself weeping a few tears of joy. Maybe more than a few. Backstage afterwards I confessed this moment of vulnerability to Phil. ‘Don’t laugh, but during “Balloon Burning” I was crying like a little girl.’ ‘Why?’ he shot back with a grin, ‘because Dick was so out of tune?’”
To this day, so few fans of the Pretties’ peers are aware of them or S.F. Sorrow. Aside from cults of psych rock enthusiasts like us, a crucial link between psych and prog languishes in obscurity. It was a studio concoction of the Sixties, through-and-through; among finest of what Sixties British psych had to offer. Its creators were industry outsiders, its advocates had access to the purse strings. They delivered this album to its greatest form; a fate so rarely seen for ambitious projects like this. In this sense, it was blessed. But it was totally out-of-step with peace-and-love. The negativity of Sorrow’s story seemed to seep into Sorrow’s story.
It can’t easily be situated in any one era, contemporary or afterwards. It has no equal, in the canon of rock operas or otherwise. S.F. Sorrow is an orphan; rock-and-roll’s red-haired child.
Personal favorites: “S.F. Sorrow Is Born,” “Bracelets Of Fingers,” “Balloon Burning,” “Death,” “Baron Saturday,” “Loneliest Person”
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Bangs, Lester. “S.F. Sorrow” Rolling Stone issue 51, 2/7/1970. https://gloriousnoise.com/2007/even_more_lester_bangs_in_roll?__cf_chl_f_tk=4xKRpsftBKNmKI0w0Jk49IZ.NB.WCIcJb2bT4xwiTao-1782846194-1.0.1.1-gaPkbL96OpBq9IknRXkK89JDADFhDx8EhuJ.FW3LMs8
Hann, Michael. “‘Being on a trip was stimulating… you weren’t covered in blood, but you’d experience it as if you were’: Of their many mistakes, The Pretty Things know which one derailed S.F. Sorrow, the first rock opera.” Louder Sound, 1/28/2025. https://www.loudersound.com/features/pretty-things-s-f-sorrow
Mabe, Ed. “ALL THINGS PRETTY…The Pretty Things.” Perfect Sound Forever, 3/2000. https://www.furious.com/perfect/prettythings.html
Stax, Mike. Liner notes for The Pretty Things, Bouquets From A Cloudy Sky. Madfish, 2015.
Stax, Mike. “Dick Taylor remembers Phil May.” Ugly Things issue 54, Summer 2020.
Stax, Mike. “Wally Waller remembers Phil May.” Ugly Things issue 54, Summer 2020.
Strauss, Neil. “THE POP LIFE; The First Rock Opera (No, Not ‘Tommy.’)” The New York Times, 9/3/1998. https://web.archive.org/web/20200410035054/https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/03/arts/the-pop-life-the-first-rock-opera-no-not-tommy.html
Unterberger, Richie. “PHIL MAY INTERVIEW: PART ONE.” http://www.richieunterberger.com/may1.html
Unterberger, Richie. “PHIL MAY INTERVIEW: PART TWO.” http://www.richieunterberger.com/may2.html
Wisniewski, John. “PRETTY THINGS: Wally Waller interview.” Perfect Sound Forever, 8/2020. https://www.furious.com/perfect/prettythingswaller.html
“Melody Maker LP Supplement.” Melody Maker, 12/14/1968. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Melody-Maker/60s/68/Melody-Maker-1968-1214.pdf
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