Brinsley Schwarz are known for a number of things. Being named after their guitarist. Emerging from the ashes of a Sixties band called Kippington Lodge. An infamous marketing exercise, hatched by Dave Robinson who later went on to form Stiff Records, where a busful of journalists were sent out to New York in April 1970 to watch them play support to Quicksilver Messenger Service and Van Morrison at the Fillmore East in New York City. The plot backfired entirely, the journalists for the most part got stinking drunk on the excursion's rider and proceeded to slate the band in their resulting reviews almost leaving Brinsley Schwarz dead in the water before their career had even really started.
They're also of course known as the platform from which Nick Lowe first started to make his mark as second guitarist and main songwriter. I'd recommend their second album Despite It All, which they recorded and released later in the same year. Vinyl copies of which will fetch you the best part of £30 if you're lucky. Records tend to find their own price. It has the fingerprints of Van, The Flying Burritos and Crosby, Stills & Nash all over it but it's a good listen coming as it seems to do from an altogether slower, more laid-back and contented time.
They went on to become mainstays of the London Pub Rock scene. Lowe ended up on Stiff and became a punk rock producer. Here are four songs from that second record. Nice cover too!
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