Georgie Fame & the Harry South Big Band - Sound Venture

2016 European CD reissue.

Georgie Fame was just beginning to settle down into a more comfortable, and certainly less hell-raisingly energetic mood as he hit his fourth album, and Sound Venture -- his second successive British Top Tenner -- does slow down accordingly. But only in comparison with its barnstorming predecessors. Any album, after all, that includes covers of King Curtis' "Lovey Dovey" and James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" is scarcely going to lie quietly on the turntable, while the wealth of Fame originals that follow were restrained only in the absence of his Blue Flames to truly stir things up.

Certainly there is little indication that this was the same man who recently hit the charts with an innocuous version of "Sunny," although the album's success certainly rode on the back of that hit. And, if his subsequent albums did fall more fully into the realm of pop easy listening (presaging Fame's decade-end partnership with fellow reformed pounder Alan Price), Sound Venture at least stands at the harder-hitting end of the bridge its maker was crossing -- a sound venture indeed.

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