The Living Daylights

This Newcastle-spawned outfit was a quartet comprised of guitarist Curt Creswell and drummer Roy Heather, who had previously played with a slightly successful band called the Naturals, and siblings Norman Watt-Roy and Garth Watt-Roy on bass and rhythm guitar, respectively. Their sound was pure freakbeat, a meld of American garage rock and British psychedelia, and they were good enough to get signed to Philips Records. They made their recording debut -- produced by Caleb Quaye -- with a less dramatic but more baroque cover of the Grass Roots hit "Let's Live for Today"; the song (which, ironically enough, had originated with a transplanted British band called the Rokes, in Italy) actually charted in Europe and justified the release of a second single, also produced by Quaye. That record offered a snide, punky freakbeat-style B-side, "Always with Him," that showed on Norman Watt-Roy as a potential rival to John Entwistle as an exponent of a big complex bass sound, but it never went anywhere. The Watt-Roy brothers had exited by 1969 to form the big-band soul outfit the Greatest Show on Earth and Norman Watt-Roy subsequently became the core of Ian Dury's Blockheads. Curt Creswell never re-emerged in the spotlight, although he did apparently work as a session guitarist in tandem with Caleb Quaye into the 1970s. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi