Kenny Lee and the Mark Four became something of a sensation during their residency in the northern German seaport town of Wilhelmshaven, adored for their music – not difficult for an audience who in many cases had never seen a live rock act before – and notorious for their ‘long’ hair (just above averagely long in Britain for the time) which caused them to be nicknamed The Mushroom Heads by the local newspaper. “They really used to stare in the streets if we walked past,” Eddie told ‘Good Times’ magazine in 1992.

The Big Ben residency saw the band working harder than they ever had before, performing eight thirty-minute sets a night to ever more appreciative audiences. The vocal casualty count for such gruelling conditions was high. “One by one, the voices were going,” says Dalton. “So everybody really had to take a turn in singing because a few nights we went down from a five-piece to a three-piece because two of the members were in bed.” Even the drummer had to muck in, and when he did his colleagues were surprised at what a sweet and confident triller Jack turned out to be. Dalton: “He wasn’t that forward. He was a bit quiet and shy. When he decided to start singing, we all thought, ‘Blimey’, he’s got quite a good voice actually’.”

Returning to England, the band received a hero’s send-off from the fans they had galvanised. Though they couldn't expect as rapturous a reception from residents of their home country – who had far more bands to choose between than did the Wilhelmshaven crowds – they were still kept in work in the UK for almost every day of the month of April 1964.

Inevitably, they returned to German shows for another residency – this one for around a fortnight - within a month of two. The club’s owner had been disappointed by the performances of the Roadrunners, the Liverpool band who had taken over from Kenny Lee and the Mark Four. Ironically, Mick Thompson credits the Roadrunners for helping to turn the Mark Four into a more substantial, R&B-oriented act. Rhythm and blues was something many musicians (and audiences) of the era turned to in desperation at the way the once earthy rock and roll had become the domain of pompadoured legions of clean-cut singers (for some reason seemingly all called Bobby).

In many ways, the band’s Big Ben residencies was as significant a factor in the development of the band as stints in Germany had been for the Beatles, although memories differ on this. Both Jack and Mick credit the residencies for moving the group into a more hardcore R&B direction. In addition, Jack and Kenny cite Wilhelmshaven as marking the start of Eddie’s experiments with feedback.

Feedback is the term given to the high, shrieking sound that results when an electric guitar set to a high volume is placed too close to its amplifier and causes the guitar’s sound to enter the guitar and get amplified again (which in turn feeds back, and so on in a continuous loop). Though Pete Townshend has received credit for being the first to employ feedback creatively, Eddie Phillips is one of a couple of other candidates for being the true pioneer in this area. “There was a band there [on the second residency] who had two nights to go by the time we got there so we just hung around,” recalls Jack. “One night we listened to them and the guitarist was a good player – I don't know his name- and he used to use just a little bit of feedback to lengthen his chords and that. We looked at it and we thought, ‘That’s interesting’ and Eddie looked at it and he thought, ‘That’s interesting’ and he started experimenting with it and sort of took it on from there. We liked it and we encouraged him: ‘Open it out, man, really go for it’.”

Kenny Pickett, talking to ‘Record Collector’ magazine in 1995, had identical memories to Jack. “Their guitarist used controlled feedback and his solos sounded like an organ,” Kenny said of the Roadrunners. “We were open-mouthed.”

Dalton, though, doubts Kenny’s and Jack’s recollection: “I remember The Roadrunners but apart from accidental feedback, I wouldn’t have thought they'd have done it ’cos they were a real crash-bang-wallop outfit. I wouldn’t have thought they done it but they may have... I think he was doing it himself before then. What I remember where he needed to do it first.. I can remember doing Hertford Corn Exchange and a record had just come out called ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ by The Animals. But we didn't have this organ so Eddie used to just play the chords and sort of feed back with it. That’s how I remember it really coming into proper action.” ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’ was released in June 1964. This was several months after the Mark Four’s first Wilhelmshaven engagement but memories are cloudy as to whether the second residency was before or after June.

"I remember The Roadrunners,” says Eddie. “I weren't sure if we were doing that sort of thing then or not. I can't really recall the sequence of things then.” However, his instinctive feeling is that his journey into the world of feedback started by accident. “I used to use a Futurama guitar which [was] like a Strat – solid bodied guitar – and I used that with a Vox AC30 treble boosting. Then in the early Mark Four days I bought a Gibson 335. It was a new guitar. They only came out in I believe ’62 and I was the first British guitarist I think to use that model.” At first, Eddie didn’t like the sound he got from the Gibson with a Vox amplifier: “So I changed my amp and went over to a Marshall and then the 50 watt Marshall that I bought wasn't as loud as the 30 watt Vox so I then went on to a hundred watt Marshall with two cabinets and that’s when I first experienced the feedback, the Gibson being a semi-acoustic. First of all, I thought, ‘Oh God – what am I going to do with this? This is like, every time I stand in front of the amp, the guitar starts howling’. But then I figured out that you could actually play a shape and according to what pick-up you was using, the feedback would be in tune with the shape you're playing and you could get a note feeding back. I thought, ‘This is quite handy, really’. I figured out how to [use it].... Getting to know your equipment, really. What it would do when you did something. That’s how I first stumbled across it. When The Animals brought out ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, we never had an organ and we wanted to play the song so I put this vibrato thing on and hammered the chords and then turned the volume – never played a chord, never struck the chord – but I just turned the volume up on the guitar after hitting the chord shape and I got this weird organ sound out of the guitar. That was all done on feedback and sustain from really overloading the amp and just hammering on the chords. I could play the whole song without ever playing the strings in the right hand. We all went, ‘Yeah! That’s alright’. And from that, we used it here and there.” Though a trademark of the Mark Four’s act, the band wouldn't put this technique onto a record until ‘I’m Leaving’, the B-side of their third single, released in August ’65.

For Eddie, there is an art to feedback of which too many practitioners aren’t aware: “It’s not just a case of turning the guitar up and just standing in front of the amp. I've seen people do that and it’s just a racket. Sometimes it’s a bit hit-and-miss but if you really work at it you can actually use it to a bit of a degree where it [fits] in with what you’re doing.”

As to who invented feedback – or rather devised its manipulation so that it turned from a technical drawback into a form of artistic expression – Eddie points out, “It was probably some old blues player in the 1940s. Probably got too near his amp and went ‘I don’t like that!’” In modern pop terms, the first record to feature feedback was The Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ (November 1964), although nobody claims that the Fab Four were doing anything other than putting on vinyl a technique that others had been doing before this on stage. The question is, who was the first? At the time, Eddie thought he was the only guitarist on the scene utilising this strange new feature he’d discovered about his instrument. Unbeknownst to him, across London, another guitarist in a group uncannily similar to the Mark Four was doing the same thing. The group was the High Numbers and their guitarist was one Pete Townshend. “It is ironic the way it worked out,” says Eddie. “We worked mainly in the Mark Four in north London and east London and the High Numbers were doing a similar kind of thing in west London and we never really knew about it until someone said to me one day, ‘There’s this band called the High Numbers and they do all that sort of thing that you do’ and I felt really pissed off at the time ’cos I didn't think nobody else was doing it. Didn't think that much more of it really ’cos then we wasn't really aspiring to anything, we was just doing our thing really. But history shows that was that and that was that.” He adds, “It was ironic that we ended up with a producer who previously recorded The Who.”

Townshend himself says, “I know for a fact that Dave Davies, Eric C[lapton] and Jeff Beck all happened on feedback at the same time. I have never claimed to be first. My claim is that I was the loudest.”

“I did see the High Numbers as well so it was something we knew about,” says Rod Siebke of feedback. Interestingly, asked who had greater mastery of feedback out of Townshend and Phillips, Siebke opines, “Eddie, definitely. His control was better.” However, it didn't seem to Siebke that the Mark Four and the High Numbers had any other similarities: “I don't know about later on, I don’t know about the ’66 band. I would imagine maybe things got a little bit more Who-ish then but really I would say the ’64, ’65 band were a rhythm and blues band really.”

The similarity of the guitar styles of Townshend and Phillips would increase when the Mark Four became a four-piece in late ’65, necessitating that Eddie cover both rhythm and lead parts and thereby develop a similar rhythm-lead style to the one for which Townshend would become famous when The Who achieved commercial success. The similarity between the two didn't stop there. Eddie observed to Dave Barnes of Sixtiespop.com, “The weird thing was with Pete - we actually did a couple of gigs together and - I don't suppose he realised but I did - how alike we were in off-stage things. I remember at the time we were both into slot car racing and things like that.” Nor did it end there: footage from the ’Sixties even shows a remarkable physical similarity between Phillips and Townshend: both were skinny, black-haired axe-wielders with a certain similarity in the nose department.

The two bands into which the High Numbers and Kenny Lee and the Mark Four respectively mutated– The Who and The Creation - were also comparable, each featuring a four man line-up with a non-playing singer purveying explosive but melodic music that has come to be termed Pop Art, a nascent form of psychedelia inflected with performance art usually associated with the mod movement. Because the Who secured a record deal before The Creation, they were generally perceived to be the originals and The Creation the copyists. Perhaps because of this, journalists drawing parallels between the groups was something that infuriated Kenny Pickett. In his interview with ‘Blitz’ magazine in 1982, he said, “The only thing that the press used to do that I didn't like was compare us to The Who. We weren't anything like The Who. We were a totally different band. We did the same circuits and I suppose we made the same sounds. But we’d get to a gig and the adverts said, ‘The band with the Who sound’ and people didn’t come because of that.” Even as late in the day as 1995, interviewed by Record Collector, when asked if The Creation were influenced by The Who, Kenny spat “No, we weren’t” and did so – according to interviewer John Reed – “angrily”.

“He used to get really pissed off about it, ’cos he knew where we came from,” says Eddie. “It all started from the Mark Four and the Mark Four really did their own thing and didn’t even know about The Who – what was then the High Numbers.” Nonetheless, Eddie acknowledges that of all the guitarists he has seen, Townshend is the one with the closest style to his own and that there were similarities between The Creation and The Who: “That was really – I say that to this day – a strange kind of fluky coincidence.”

If the story of the Roadrunners putting the idea of feedback in Eddie’s head is true, for a band who achieved precisely nothing in commercial terms, the Roadrunners would seem to have made quite an impact, at least on Kenny Lee and the Mark Four. Dalton, too, recalls the Roadrunners as being the catalyst for a change of style which saw his band move over to music with a bit more grit. “When we first went over there we was playing all Beatles numbers,” Dalton recalls. “We went from the Beatles [to] R&B – totally different band. When we saw The Roadrunners, they went down so well we thought, ‘Oh well, we better change a bit’ and did Jimmy Reed stuff and stuff like that. If you listen to the track we made called ‘Try It Baby’, that’s an R&B number which we copied.”

Not that the Roadrunners were the only band to be credited with influencing the Mark Four in an R&B direction . Kenny Pickett, speaking to ‘Blitz’ magazine in 1982, said, “The one biggest influence on our band was a north London band which nobody had ever heard of called Four Plus One… Steve Howe was one of their players. We were doing a gig at the Club Noreik in North London and Four Plus One came on, doing American rhythm and blues. We’d never in our lives seen a band like this, because they were so loud! All they did was Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but they did it their own way. They were leaping around the stage and going absolutely bananas! That night, we dropped everything we’d ever done and we didn't do any gigs for a month of two. Then we totally changed and became a rhythm and blues band.”

"We was influenced a bit,” Jack says of Four Plus One, “because at the time we were doing rhythm and blues by now, moving into that style of stuff, but we were still basically a band, we just stood there and played our stuff.” Jack recalls the venue for the first night the Mark Four shared the bill with Four Plus One not as Club Noreik but as Watford Town Hall. However, his other recollections chime with Kenny’s: ”They had all these movements and really were quite a good band, a good show and everything. Their movements were weird for a start. A couple of them, they were racing around the stage – it was probably a throwback to the old rock and roll stuff – and jumped up in the air and all this stuff. They sort of sold themselves to their audience, rather than just standing there and saying, ‘This is the music’. They went out and sold themselves as personalities more. They seemed to strike a chord with us. Nobby then decided he was going to move around like that a bit and somehow the band just seemed to wake up after that. We seemed to have a bit more movement, a bit more vitality.”

Tony Atkins of Group Five recalls a marked difference in the abilities of the band after their German sojourns. “When they came back from Germany they were much, much tighter and they really had evolved,” he says. “They were doing fairly similar stuff to us – pop sort of stuff, cover versions and whatnot and not too much R&B – and they changed their image quite a lot actually. They were a lot more leaping around on stage as well.” The band were obviously proud of their Wilhelmshaven stint: the group’s van – to be seen parked outside John Dalton’s house – was emblazoned with a handwritten sign declaring “The Big Ben Club, Wilhelmshaven, Germany”. Through the windows of the van, incidentally, could be discerned the gold lame suits they wore on stage at this juncture.

"We was looking for things other than the pop chart stuff of the time,” says Eddie. “That’s how we got on to trying to play our version of rhythm and blues, the Jimmy Reed stuff. I picked up the harmonica and learnt how to play that a bit ’cos we wanted to do stuff like ‘Dimples’, the John Lee Hooker song.”

Not that any musical style was set in concrete for a band who, then, were fundamentally populist. Dalton: “We was even at one time going through a stage of playing Tamla Motown…. We went through different stages so we were never just an R&B band. We just used to alter with the swing. Whatever was in at the time.”

On their second visit to Germany, the group had their minds projected further forward. Their debut single had been scheduled for a May release by Mercury and – clearly – stardom was therefore possibly just around thee corner. “While we was away it was going to be released,” laughs Dalton. “We said to Ian Swan, ‘We better not take any gigs for when we get back because obviously if it’s a hit record, the money goes up a hell of a lot’.”

It was on this second German trip that the band dropped the “Kenny Lee” part from their handle. This was because for a very brief period Kenny was not a member of the band, having been slung out for deserting his comrades. “He actually went into Hamburg with the governor, the bloke who owned the club,” recalls Dalton. “Without saying a word, they just disappeared. To do the gig was so hard. We were having to do eight sets a night. For your lead singer just to go missing without telling you was really hard.” However, Kenny was almost immediately given a reprieve by his colleagues. Dalton: “’Cos we needed him, to be quite honest. Although we all done a small piece of singing, he was the lead singer.” However, the band insisted that the shortened name that they had instantly adopted on Kenny’s dismissal be retained. It no longer made sense – Kenny Lee and the Mark Four had added up to five, reflecting the number of personnel – but a gesture had to be made. (Jack also suggests another reason for the shortened name: “While we were out there, the Beatles and the Mersey stuff was really starting to happen and we decided we’d be better off with one name. That would have been a bit dated then, that style of name. So we just dropped the Kenny Lee bit and called it the Mark Four, ’cos we couldn't think of anything else.”) Kenny would always have an somewhat uneasy relationship with his colleagues in the Mark Four and The Creation. “I think Kenny was always a little bit sort of aloof from the rest of the band,” says Rod Siebke. “Even in more recent times, just before he died, he was one on his own, as such. Even on stage, he was the frontman. The band was the backing band as such…Kenny was that little bit older which probably would have made him a little bit more aloof. He’d already been out there working with other bands and been a roadie.”

‘Rock Around The Clock’ b/w Larry Williams’ ‘Slow Down’ appeared in May 1964. Perhaps due to the fact of the sheer novelty – or, in some eyes, impertinence – of them covering the song, it actually received some media exposure. Not only was it advertised in the music press – with the band wearing the black leather waistcoats and black trousers they had adopted around this time in place of the gold lame image – but at least one music paper reviewed it. “Sooner or later, someone had to revive “Rock Around The Clock”,” said the reviewer of the ‘New Musical Express’. “In fact, I’m surprised it’s taken so long! New Mercury group the Mark Four are the ones to do it, but regrettably they make no attempt to change or modernise the original styling. The treatment is just the same as Bill Haley’s. Still, if you’re too young to remember Mr Haley, this won’t bother you. In any case, you’ll have a ball to the swinging, rocking beat. The title ’Slow Down‘ is rather inapt for this medium-twist ditty, with its insistent driving beat. Again, good material for dancers.” The band were also treated to the thrill of hearing themselves on radio for the first time. “They tried,” Dalton says of Mercury’s promotion department. “I think they got it played on ‘Family Favourites’ or something on Sunday morning.” However, the riches the band had envisaged as rolling in from their new status as recording artists did not materialise. “I don’t think it sold anything at all,” says Dalton.

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