HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO

THE YARDBIRDS (1966)

The devil may have all the best tunes but from the early to the mid-sixties the Yardbirds had all the best guitarists. Clapton, Beck and Page all passed through the band on their way to bigger (though not necessarily better) things and this parade of talent combined with a sense of reckless experimentalism to produce a string of innovative singles. None more so than the extraordinary 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.' One of the few tracks the group recorded while both Beck and Page were in the line-up it prefigured British psychedelia by several months, effectively ushering in an age of spaced-out lyrics and guitar freakouts. On twin lead guitars the two superstars do pitched battle while Keith Relf's fey vocals float over the top, gabbling none too convincingly about reincarnation. Just to add to the bizarro mix a cockney monologue starts up towards the end of the song, supposedly modelled on the ramblings of a doctor at a VD clinic Beck went to. Unsurprisingly in these pre-Sgt. Pepper times the single didn't even make the top forty, a cast iron example of a song way ahead of its time. Within months every motley group of macho, beer swilling lads would kill for the hippy, trippy sound so brilliantly encapsulated by 'Happenings...'