The Jook

One of the first bands launched onto the U.K. scene during the first crazy days of the glam rock explosion and one of the most unfortunate casualties of the audience's own intransigence, the Jook are one of those groups whose most telling attributes are apparent only with the benefit of hindsight. They inspired the Bay City Rollers' tartan uniforms, they predicted the power pop boom of later years, and they played with a sharp, guitar-driven passion which would not become common currency elsewhere until the advent of punk. At the time, however, they were nothing more than another bunch of hopefuls, cranking out a succession of singles in the hope that one of them might stick and, in guitarist Trevor White's own estimation, growing more desperate with every one. "Our music was getting so contrived that at one point, we were listening to whatever was the number one single that week, to see what it had got, apart from success, that we hadn't. Then we'd borrow it. Integrity just went out of the window. We'd hear something and say, 'that's it, that's what we should be sounding like.'" It is a sign of the band's own remarkable abilities that today, little of that contrivance is visible. The Jook released five singles. All five are now rightly regarded as classics. The seeds of the Jook were planted by John Hewlett, formerly bassist with '60s psych warriors John's Children but, by the early '70s, moving into management. It was he who introduced guitarist White to singer/songwriter Ian Kimmett. White was a former memeber of the A-Jaes, a band once regarded as Britain's answer to the Beach Boys, Kimmett was working at a music publisher's office in London. Following the common trend of the day, the pair immediately decamped to Jedburgh, Scotland, intending to "get their heads...