How an American band and a London jazz venue launched the British pub rock era
On May 3, 1971, Eggs Over Easy began a monthslong residency at the Tally Ho
The British pub rock scene was started, oddly enough, by a band of Yanks called Eggs Over Easy. Austin de Lone, Jack O’Hara, and Brien Hopkins had flown to London in late 1970 to record an album with producer and former Animals bass player Chas Chandler, who had gone on to manage the recently deceased American guitarist Jimi Hendrix.
Though the trio’s members were based in New York, they were part of the emerging country rock scene that would produce the Flying Burrito Brothers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Clover (who you’ll read about at some point on the A Rebellious Noise blog), and the genre’s biggest act, the Eagles. Like these and many acts on both sides of the Atlantic, Eggs Over Easy was influenced by the organic, rootsy sound of The Band.
It must have been an exciting time for the three young Americans making their first trip to England. There they were, recording their debut album at Olympic Studios in the Barnes district of London, open less than five years earlier but already legendary. Olympic was where the Rolling Stones arguably reached their creative peak, recording all or parts of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street.
Then business intruded in the form of a contractual impasse between the band’s manager, Peter Kauff, and Cannon Films, which was launching a music division and underwriting the recording sessions. With work at Olympic suspended, Kauff urged the Eggs to wait it out in London while he sought a solution.
Great idea, but with Cannon money slowing to a trickle, soon the band was in dire need of cash. Sales assistant jobs at Harrods being in short supply, Eggs Over Easy did what musicians do — they started looking for gigs. O’Hara talked the management of the Tally Ho, a jazz-only bar in the Kentish Town district of North London (near where the boys had found temporary housing) into booking the band.
In a 2021 interview with Martin Johnson published in Americana UK, O’Hara dismissed an urban legend that he pulled a fast one on the Tally Ho by falsely claiming Eggs Over Easy played jazz:
It is complete bullshit. I don’t know who made it up, but I have always resented that, to tell you the truth. The real story is better for me. I will tell you exactly. I got cleaned up on a Monday night and walked up there, I might have told the band I was doing it, and I walked in, there may have been someone playing there or maybe not. There was just one bartender, who called the manager, and somebody had told them we were in town, and we were doing a few things like working on a record, but we just wanted a place to play in the neighbourhood and we would come and play for free. He said he would go talk to the governor upstairs who was the female owner and she obviously lived upstairs. He said, “If you can describe your music in one word, what would you say?” and I said “Fun.” That is just what I said, fun, and he said OK and went upstairs and he came back down after ten minutes and said, “OK, why don’t you come around next weekend and do a show.”
And so on Monday, May 3, 1971, at the Tally Ho, the pub rock era officially began — though somewhat inauspiciously. “It was dead quiet the first night, but the people there were enthused,” O’Hara tells author tells author Will Birch in his book, No Sleep Till Canvey Island: The Great Pub Rock Revolution.
Enthusiasm in a pub typically translates into more beer sales, so the Tally Ho owners kept booking the Eggs, who undoubtedly were a lot more fun than the staid jazz acts they increasingly began to usurp on the pub entertainment schedule. All three Eggs sang and played multiple instruments, giving them the kind of versatility that keeps audiences interested (and drinking). They also were joined at the Tally Ho gigs by drummer John Steel, who like Chandler was a former Animal and had played on the Eggs’ recent recording sessions at Olympic Studios.
Soon the band was packing the joint, playing several nights a week and Sunday afternoons, with jazz acts shrinking to one night on the Tally Ho weekly schedule. As word spread about this lively scene created by Eggs Over Easy, other pubs and bands sought a piece of what promised to be an exciting, burgeoning, and potentially lucrative market.
One music business entrepreneur, Ireland native Dave Robinson, recognized the opportunity presented by pub rock and over the next few years would set about replicating the scene at the Tally Ho by building a network of more than 30 pubs in and around London. Robinson would go on to manage some of the biggest names in British music, many of which you will read about in this blog. He also co-founded Stiff Records, which had roots in the pub scene, released the first punk single, and created a home and artistically nurturing environment for new wave stars such as Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and Madness.
So what made Eggs Over Easy such a big hit at the Tally Ho?
Interestingly, it’s not because they rocked the house; Eggs Over Easy wasn’t trying to break decibel records. “We weren’t loud,” de Lone tells Will Birch. “In fact, we were pretty quiet, playing as a combo, trying to listen to each other.”
The lower volume undoubtedly played into one of the band’s major strengths – vocal harmonies. What pub patron wouldn’t be impressed – even blown away – by three quality singers combining their voices in myriad, magical ways? Like sunrises and plunging necklines, glistening harmonies are life-affirming.
As if their vocal prowess wasn’t impressive enough, Eggs Over Easy members frequently would switch between guitar, bass, and keyboards over the course of the night. That kind of virtuosity not only catches an audience’s attention, it injects a little extra suspense and anticipation into the show. What’s this configuration going to sound like? Can these guys pull it off?
Perhaps even more impressive was the band’s seemingly limitless repertoire, something that blew away Nick Lowe and other members of Brinsley Schwartz, the flailing, aimless band then managed by Dave Robinson. Eggs Over Easy seemingly could play anything. Call out a tune, they’ll do it. Country rock was their sweet spot, but the Eggs could convincingly play blues, R&B, rock, swing, and blues. Plus all three members wrote songs, so they mixed in good originals with popular covers. Great musicians, great singers, a bottomless songbook – sounds like a rousing, fun night out at the pub! Just like O’Hara promised the Tally Ho proprietors.
But Eggs Over Easy didn’t fly to London to become a pub rock band; they came to record an album that would chart and get them on proper tours. Now the contractual issues were preventing the album’s release. Their work visas having expired, the three members of Eggs Over Easy flew back to America at the end of 1971 with no album, no record company, and no career momentum. They played their last U.K. gig at the Tally Ho on November 7.
A year later, Eggs Over Easy signed with A&M Records, recording their first officially released album, Good ’n’ Cheap, in 1972. After a decade of failing to gain commercial traction despite their collective talents, de Lone, O’Hara, and Hopkins disbanded the group in 1981. By then, the seed they planted at the Tally Ho in London on May 3, 1971, had fully flowered into a musical revolution that took multiple forms.
Wait, we want to see Eggs Over Easy!
Sadly, there are no videos (at least that I’ve found) of Eggs Over Easy at the Tally Ho or even at some of the other venues they played in England during their stay. I did find a live performance of Eggs Over Easy at Dingwalls in London in November 2011. Given that the band members were in their sixties at the time, I’m not going out on a limb to suggest the video probably doesn’t capture what it was like at the Tally Ho in 1971, when these guys were in their mid-twenties. What it does capture is a polished, professional group of musicians. No surprise there.
While video of Eggs Over Easy from their pub rock days remains elusive, here’s a 4-minute promo video for Good ‘N’ Cheap: The Eggs Over Easy Story, a compilation album that spans the band’s career. The promo video features O’Hara, de Lone, Nick Lowe, Stiff Records co-founder Dave Robinson, and Huey Lewis.
That album Eggs Over Easy recorded at Olympic Studios with Chas Chandler and John Steel? It eventually was released – in 2016! Called London ’71, the album gives you a good idea of how Eggs Over Easy sounded back then, as well as what types of band originals Tally Ho patrons were hearing. Below is an example of a song from that era. The influence of The Band on this tune is clear.
Coda
Listening to the song above and reading about Eggs Over Easy may make the connection between this laid-back group of Americans and British punk rock seem flimsy and even non-existent. But O’Hara theorized to Americana UK that the band displayed a punk attitude in what they did on stage:
The thing about us that was punk was that we just didn’t give a fuck, you know, we just didn’t give a fuck [laughs], and we did whatever we wanted to do. We did ‘Brown Sugar’ when it came out right on the stage at Tally-Ho, we did Ray Charles songs, old rock’n’roll, Sam Cooke songs, and we did our material, whatever we wanted to do. There were no lines drawn, it was just a true, natural organic experience.
That sounds like a punk aesthetic to me.
As always, I’d love to hear from readers who were lucky enough to see bands such as Eggs Over Easy during the pub rock era. If you’re one of them, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section or via email at carnage@arebelliousnoise.com. And thanks for reading! — Chris Carnage