Queen Anne’s Lace Album

The only album by Queen Anne’s Lace, Queen Anne’s Lace was released in 1969 on Coral Records, a label already in severe decline and very much of the old school, where it was the song and not the singer that was important.  Four of the five songs on Side 1 are covers, and familiar ones at that:  “The Fool on the Hill” opens the album and is a fine if spare rendition of the Beatles song that was almost lost among the torrent of creativity that was the Magical Mystery Tour album of 1967 – besides the songs from the ill-fated Beatles TV movie of the same name, Magical Mystery Tour, some of the band’s best singles were also included:  “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Hello Goodbye”, “All You Need is Love”, and others.  It probably would have had a shot at being a successful single, except that “The Fool on the Hill” had already been a Top 5 hit in 1968 for Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 (a self-defeating band name that had already been renamed once from Brasil ’65).  Though Mendes was basically piggy-backing onto the success of Herb Alpert, the co-founder of his label A&M Records, the Latin-lite sounds were better than nothing for a pop-music mainstream that, for too many years, had been just a little too white-bread, at least in retrospect.  The sole original song on the first side, “No Worry Tour” appears almost to have been named after the title of the Beatles album. 

Side 2 is more interesting, both in terms of the choice in covers – Paul Simon’s largely overlooked “Dangling Conversation” is the only high-profile song on this side – and in the original material.  There are two cool “flower power” songs written by singer-songwriter Peter Cofield (whose first album came out on Coral Records the previous year), “Thank the Beautiful People (Thank the Young)” and “The Power of the Flower”.  These songs celebrate the best of the hippie spirit at least as well as the Tin Pan Alley-ish “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (written by John Phillips – no relation, once again apparently – of the Mamas and the Papas and beautifully sung by Scott McKenzie).  My favorite song on the album, “The Happiest Day of My Life” is a wistful, almost melancholy song taking a view from a considerable distance that is not at all the sugary confection that one might expect.  This song was included on a garage rock compilation album called Soft Sounds for Gentle People, Volume 2 that came out in 2003.