In December 1972, I had a call from Larry Page at Penny Farthing Records, the label that my band "OCTOPUS" had recorded for. He told me that they had a hit record in Europe by a group called "KINCADE" who didn't actually exsist. The record, called "Dreams are Ten a Penny", had been made by John Carter who was formerly a member of "THE IVY LEAGUE" and who did not now want to go out as performing artist. Larry asked if I could put a group together to perform in Holland on The Dutch equivilent of "TOP OF THE POPS" in about ten days time. All we had to do was mime to the record. I said OK and recruited my brother Nigel and Rick Williams one of the ex members of "OCTOPUS".

On 18th December we flew to Holland and appeared on TOP POP miming to "Dreams are Ten a Penny". Also on the show was Jonathan King and Hurricaine Smith. We had a guy called Terry Noone from "Penny Farthing Records" with us who said that there would be more work the following year.

In February we travelled to Groningen in Holland to perform on one of their biggest variety shows "Zevensprongen" which was the original version of "The Generation Game". By this time "Dreams are Ten a Penny" had reached number six in the Dutch charts. Also appearing on the show was "CLIVE DUNN" who was having chart success with his song "GRANDAD". A month later we made a five day promotional trip to Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, where we performed on a couple of TV shows, did some press interviews and made several appearances in Discos miming to backing tracks.

By this time a Kincade album had been released, it had been recorded by John Carter using session musicians before we had become involved, so we had not played or sang a single note on the album, but "Penny Farthing Records" began using our photos on the record sleeves.

In may we appeared on British Television on a children's programme called "Lift Off With Aysha". This time we had to sing live to our own backing track. We recruited a drummer called Alan Eden and on 10th May travelled to Manchester. We recorded our backing track at Indigo Recording Studio and then went to Granada TV for the actual programme. The producer was Murial Young and we appeared with 60s chart group "VANITY FAIR". It was transmitted on 1st June and I think I did quite a reasonable impersonation of John Carter.

We continued promoting Kincade material for the rest of 1973, making serveral visits to Germany where we undertook a three week tour in October. We performed some completely live material interspersed with backing tracks, appearing in Discos and some dance halls. Some of the gigs were great and others disastrous, but we had a great time. Our last appearance as Kincade was on the German TV show Disco 73 in December 1973 with a song called "Big Hand For Annie". This song failed to chart anywhere and so the project came to an end and we were redundant.

KINCADE 1972 - 1973

(Click on photo to enlarge, plus more photos )

END.