A Teenage Opera: Original Soundtrack Recording [CD]

I was prompted to review this because of the other review, which I found very interesting. I found it interesting in that it compared this to the likes of Sergent Pepper, SF Sorrow, & Ogden's nut (all of which I too own & LOVE).
I LOVE Weatherman, and the sounds are good. I confess to being unaware of this album's original form, but I do find the mentioned comparisons a little too much for even my imagination... Ogden's Nut it certainly is not (not as soulful or Stanley Unwin strange). SF Sorrow it isn't (the Pretty things are far more psychedelic). Better than Sergent Pepper?! I always rated Magical Mystery Tour higher than that, but even so... it is a comparison I do not agree with (though comparisons are always useful to locate oneself in). Still, if you like The Who's concept album The Who Sell Out, or if Tommy is more your bag, you may enjoy this more.

Mark Wirtz from Cologne in Germany was a member of the EMI production staff in 1960's London, working predominantly with the marvellous band Tomorrow; a partnership which resulted in their rather excellent debut in 1968. But during this period both Tomorrow and Mark Wirtz were working on a far grander project. The vision, a musical, either a full on stage production or even an animated film similar in scope to The Yellow Submarine, this work was entitled A Teenage Opera.

Work began on the project during the summer of 1967 and would continue for a good year before EMI execs pulled the plug on the project, despite several quality songs and purpose made singles being released. It would then take another 30 years for audiences to be given just a hint of the scale and quality of this concept, and here it is, A Teenage Opera - The Original Soundtrack, released on RPM Records in 1996 with the full support and collaboration of Mark Wirtz himself.

On this album are tracks from an array of talent, including works by Tomorrow and in the case of the rather splendid song Grocer Jack, Tomorrow's front man Keith West. There are also works from Steve Flynn, Kippington Lodge and even from Mark Wirtz himself on the triumphant He's Our Dear Old Weatherman, which as a song probably deserves a review of its own.

This album has pop songs, psychedelic songs, full blown musical theatre with children singing choruses and even orchestral delights, which all in all some would find as a whole quite pretentious but I seriously cannot get enough of it. Many of the songs on this soundtrack are beyond catchy so please do not be afraid, trust me its well worth a listen.

I think this album will be of interest to a lot of people. It certainly is yet another example of how much creativity was coming out of England between 67 and 68. I also quite like the fact that despite its quality singles and its creation being slap bang during the concept album wonder years, as a project it still found itself disregarded by the EMI bigwigs, who lets be honest, weren't exactly shy of sanctioning grandiose works during this period, its really quite staggering, for that reason there is definitely an air of loss treasure about this album, and that's very much the case for me.

Definitely one for the curious and most definitely one for those already initiated, buy today.

Despite enjoying greater artistic freedom than in any period before or since, a handful of late sixties rock composers strove to push the creative boundaries beyond what even the industry's patiently elastic limits would accept, resulting in the several great "lost albums" of the period. Brian Wilson's SMiLE finally emerged complete and as intended in 2006, its compositional brilliance diminished only by the uber-perfect new digital recordings lacking the hazy beauty of those original analogue tracks that had appeared piecemeal on Smiley Smile and Surf's Up . Pete Townshend saw the bulk of the material from his impossibly ambitious Lifehouse concept become the splendid Who's Next album and several non-album singles from around 1970-71. And Mark P Wirtz's A Teenage Opera, a set of nostalgic vignettes of Edwardian village life that predated Ray Davies's similar Village Green Preservation Society, was belatedly released in 1996 as a pseudo-film soundtrack described by reissue company RPM as "as near to the original concept as can be assembled with the surviving recorded works".
RPM's A Teenage Opera is simultaneously fascinating, rewarding and confounding. Wirtz agreed to RPM assembling the album from his original 1967 recordings, allowing the use of the original title and enjoying having his name liberally spread over it, but has since disparaged it as a fake: an opportunistic collector's item comprising completed tracks intended for the Opera, incomplete demos likewise, and similar but completely unrelated tracks produced during the same period. Given that some of the latter were subsequently issued by Wirtz as singles under his own and other real and spurious artists' names, and that at least two tracks which are known to have been intended for the Opera haven't survived, his assertion is probably true. The Opera's original intended running order remains a mystery.
The music itself is no less enigmatic. The three amazingly ambitious tracks released as single A-sides can be considered as either masterpieces of whimsical psychedelia or as overproduced pop schmaltz, depending on your taste (and whether you recoil from dense orchestration and kiddies' choirs). The first such release, "Grocer Jack", credited to Keith West and retitled "Excerpt From A Teenage Opera" to whet the public's appetite for the rest of the project, was an unexpected UK pirate radio hit; the other two, "Sam" and "(He's Our Dear Old) Weatherman", stiffed totally, leading to EMI's final withdrawal of support and the shelving of the intended album and animated musical film. Three other songs surfaced with justification on Tomorrow's eponymous album, Keith West and Steve Howe having contributed substantially to the Opera project. Of the instrumentals, most might appear at first exposure to be the corniest of muzak, but intent listening reveals an underlying compositional quality and deft arrangements comparable to Morricone's incidental film music of the same period. If you're into the "toytown" end of psych and 1960s film scores and the historical misadventure of the project appeals to you, you'll enjoy this album; if not, you'll probably be happier with the more esoteric complexity of SMiLE.