A small independent, perhaps with connections to the Willows club of Salford. An EP by Pete Maclaine & The Christie Band seems to have been Willows' only release. It offered the tracks 'Drift Away, 'See You Tonight', 'Dream Lover' and 'My Baby Left Me'; as the scan shows, it was recorded at Smile Studios (q.v.) of Manchester and it had a catalogue number of WR-001. There's no year on the labels but a diamond and a '111' in the runoffs indicates that the mastering was done by Sound Manufacturing. A diamond and a '112' can be found in the run-offs of Ian Matthews's 'Shake It' single, which came out in February 1979, so it seems reasonable to assume that this EP was made shortly before then. Other diamond-plus-higher-'1xx' numbers are also from 1979, which enables us to be quietly confident about the dating. In the early '60s Pete Maclaine had been frontman for The Dakotas and then for Pete Maclaine & The Clan, who recorded for Decca; later in the decade he moved onto the cabaret circuit.
Copyright 2023 Robert Lyons.