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Founder member of The Purple Gang Joe Beard, kickstarted his musical career with a rudimentary guitar lesson from none less than ‘The Godfather of British Blues’, John Mayall who went on to put together the legendary Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton as guitarist.
“I was a butcher’s boy and John’s house in Cheadle Hulme was on my delivery round.” remember Joe. “His dad built him a treehouse and he used to practise up there.”
In 1965, inspired by his influential mentor, Joe formed The Young Contemporaries Jug Band with his fellow art students at Stockport College. With Joe on guitar, the line-up included vocalist Pete Walker, organist Geoff Bowyer, jug/banjo player Ank Langley and mandolin/harmonica player Gerry Robinson. Some of their first live appearances were at The Masque and The Sinking Ship in Stockport.
In 1966, a demo sent to Transatlantic Records resulted in a record deal and a manager in the shape of influential American record producer Joe Boyd. The band set off for London in a battered van filled with their instruments, where they also slept as they couldn’t afford a hotel. Their first performance was to the tourists outside Buckingham Palace!
Joe Boyd was working with a young band from Cambridge called Pink Floyd which influenced a change of name for the Jug Band to the more enigmatic ‘The Purple Gang’, taken from the 1920s Detroit gangsters immortalised in Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock. A stylish image followed, with sharp suits and short haircuts and the band were signed to the same agency as The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.
The Purple Gang’s quirky style soon attracted attention in novelty-hungry ‘swinging London’ and they found themselves on a modelling shoot with actress Raquel Welch! Paul McCartney showed up during their photo session at the trendy King’s Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip in Chelsea, which was chosen as the name of their debut single.
The Purple Gang recorded the song at Sound Techniques in Chelsea, in the same studio that Boyd had produced ‘Arnold Layne’ for Pink Floyd just the day before. Joe remembers: “Syd Barrett [Pink Floyd’s enigmatic singer] was there when we were recording. He loved ‘Granny’ and said we would be No 2 in the charts when they went to No 1. He even offered us a song of his, ‘Boon Tune’, for our follow-up single.”
The band quickly became a fixture on the emerging underground psychedelic scene and played alongside Pink Floyd, Pete Townsend and Yoko Ono at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, the seminal counterculture festival held at London’s Alexandra Palace on April 29, 1967.
John Peel championed “Granny Takes A Trip’ heralding it “one of the all-time great records” and Joe Boyd later commented that “the London scene in the summer of 1967 was greatly enriched by their contribution”. Transatlantic expected a massive hit and even formed a new label to release it, Big T.
“We were getting well known,” says Joe. “We were booked to appear on Top of the Pops and Juke Box Jury. Then the record company got a letter from the BBC referring to ‘Granny’ as “a song with a dubious title designed to corrupt the nation’s youth”. Someone had noticed the word ‘trip’ in the title and decided it was about acid. We were banned from the airwaves and all the big things planned were dropped overnight.”
The BBC also stated that “a band that boasts a warlock for a singer will not be tolerated by any decent society” referring to Pete Walker whose stage nickname was Lucifer. Although ‘Granny’ was a cult hit, it didn’t translate into sales and like so many enthusiastic but naive young musicians of the time, discovered that they owed their record company money.
A follow-up single ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sally Green’ and album, The Purple Gang Strikes!, came out in 1968, but as Joe says, “the momentum was gone. There were disagreements, it all got a bit heated, and before long we were back home up north.”
In 1970, The Purple Gang were playing student gigs and found themselves on the same bill as David Bowie at the Poco A Poco club in Heaton Chapel. The band were approached by Bowie who asked them to play backing for him as he was without his own band. They politely declined as they didn’t feel they had enough time to learn the songs.
Still active today, The Purple Gang has continued to live on with different line-ups guided by Joe. In 2012, a song he wrote about Stockport – ‘Sunset Over The Mersey’ knocked Britney Spears off the No.1 spot in Hungary!
Joe Beard has documented the highs and lows of being in the band, in his biography ‘Taking the Purple’ published in 2024. Having seen so many of their contemporaries become global superstars, The Purple Gang have been nicknamed “one-miss wonders” for being in the right place at the right time but still without success.
