With 20/20
hindsight, it's easier nowadays to explain the Group Sounds period as a business
phenomenon rather than as a musical movement, for the power was forever to remain
in the hands of heavyweight management companies such as Watanabe Pro. and
Asuka Pro. These big management companies paid their stylists to spot potential
idoru, or lead-singer material, to overly dress and colour-code their young charges,
to coiffure and manicure, paint and powder them, until many groups who had been
signed up as wildly unpredictable longhairs found themselves so battered and brutalised
by their arduous journey through the Group Sounds management blender that their
record and TV debuts bore little or no resemblance to the refusenik bedroom
ensemble they had started in the first place. Inconsistency became the order of
the day, as GS outfits such as the Golden Cups - who played live shows full of
screaming feedback and delivered blazing B sides of Leaves/Love/Blues Magoos informed
punk rock - were still forced, through razor-sharp management contracts, to
appear on TV performing creepy ballads that made them sound like whingeing ninnies.
The Cups' light and breathy version of the Classics IV's 'Spooky' epitomises this
approach, the original's tough chiming guitar and desperate vocals here
replaced with a string section straight out of 'A Walk in the Black Forest' and
zippy and overly loud apeman snare-drum fills.
