Song Of The Day 7/14/2014: Paintbox - "Get Ready For Love"

Young Blood International!: A couple of months ago my emotional chiropractor Brooks Martin posted this song on my Facebook feed. I forget the context. I found it quite agreeable. Not content to leave simple pleasures uninvestigated, I searched for Paintbox on Spotify. And as usually happens from such whimsical efforts, you're getting a theme week out of it.

Paintbox was on a compilation celebrating the singles of Young Blood International. Like Motown and Stax has done in recent years, Young Blood released packages featuring all the singles they released, A- and B- sides. I browsed through these compilations and felt like I'd discovered a parallel universe in the U.K. to American Top 40 of the '70s: Given a few twists and turns -- and in some cases, badly-required production tips -- some of these songs could have been popular one-offs instead of, say, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree." They captured the frisson of pop's immediacy in those times, expressing an innocence (naïveté?) and irrepressible quality that I found amusing. So I kept listening.

Frustratingly, though, almost all I could find out about Young Blood International came in that paragraph. There's just no information out there whatsoever about Young Blood. Yet here they are on Spotify, a flotilla of cultural weirdness without a shred of metadata. I did find out two things: (a) Young Blood was founded by Miki Dallon, a pop star of the most minor order from the U.K. who branched off behind the scenes, and (b) Young Blood's only presences in the U.S. charts were Apollo 100's Bach-updating "Joy" and a song called "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep," which you probably don't want to hear too much about.

But that's it. I can't find anything of substance about the history of Young Blood, perhaps because they released, um, quite a bit of insubstantial stuff. Some of it, though, is really interesting, and a couple of efforts were awkward attempts to latch onto the '70s pop culture narrative. I'll get to a couple of those later this week, but here's that Paintbox song which I admit I love. Brooks knows me too well.

(And who knows, maybe over the course of the next six days someone will unveil the story behind Young Blood, and I can regurgitate it right here, right now.)