Emotions

The record

At a glance

Artist

The Pretty Things

Released

1967

Album

Third studio album

Original tracks

Twelve

UK label

Fontana TL / STL 5425

Producer

Steve Rowland

Why it matters

An imposed pop surface cannot conceal a band inventing its next language

Emotions is valuable precisely because its tensions are audible. Fontana wanted a more commercial product, producer Steve Rowland brought in arranger Reg Tilsley, and the band heard many orchestral additions as interference with the music they had recorded.

The result is not uniformly compromised. Brass can sharpen Death of a Socialite, strings can expose The Sun’s melodic ambition, and the contrast between rough voice and polished arrangement creates emotional friction unavailable on the earlier albums.

The record also spans a lineup reconstruction. Brian Pendleton and John Stax began the sessions but left; Wally Waller and Jon Povey joined Phil May, Dick Taylor and Skip Alan during the album’s completion.

Exact track assignments for Pendleton and Stax remain uncertain. A trustworthy page names their participation without inventing a session chart the surviving documentation cannot sustain.

Songwriting is more distributed than a simple May–Taylor label suggests. Ian Stirling appears on three credits; Waller co-writes several pieces, including The Sun and Bright Lights of the City.

The twelve tracks move away from direct blues adaptation. Death of a Socialite, Photographer and Growing in My Mind observe modern identity, while The Sun, Tripping and My Time open more internal or psychedelic spaces.

Emotions completed the group’s Fontana obligation. Their move to EMI and partnership with Norman Smith would allow S.F. Sorrow to transform the experimental implications here into a fully controlled project.

The album therefore matters as both artwork and evidence. Its unevenness documents a band, label, producer and arranger pulling the same recordings toward different futures.

London, 1966–67

Fontana obligations during a two-member turnover

The Pretty Things’ 1966 singles sold less strongly than their early hits. Fontana assigned Steve Rowland, already associated with commercial pop production, to guide the group.

Progress, released in December 1966, paired the band with prominent brass but did not become a hit. It belongs to the immediate album period without appearing on the original LP.

Sessions began late in 1966 at Philips Studios in London and continued through major personnel changes. Rhythm guitarist Brian Pendleton left around Christmas, followed by bassist John Stax.

Phil May invited Wally Waller, who took over bass duties and brought Jon Povey into the group. Povey contributed keyboards and vocals; Waller added guitar, bass and a developed harmony voice.

Rowland enlisted Reg Tilsley to arrange and conduct brass, strings and harp across much of the album. Some parts were overdubbed, while band and ensemble worked together in certain sessions.

Fontana released Emotions in Britain in 1967 as TL 5425 in mono and STL 5425 in stereo. The LP contains twelve tracks, six per side.

Children became a May 1967 single and contains a clearer example of the new Waller-Povey harmony dimension.

After release, the band left Fontana and signed to EMI’s Columbia label. The next studio album, S.F. Sorrow, was made with greater creative control.

A changing lineup

Old and new lineups overlap without a safe track map

May’s voice remains abrasive enough to resist complete orchestral smoothing. That resistance is central: elegant surfaces repeatedly meet a singer who sounds suspicious of elegance.

Taylor adapts from R&B lead guitar to concise psychedelic colour. His parts must cut through brass and strings without competing continuously for frequency and attention.

Alan is the stable rhythmic member during personnel turnover. Drums keep the LP recognisably a band record even when orchestral overdubs occupy the foreground.

Waller’s arrival expands both bass movement and harmony. His co-writes introduce melodic turns that point beyond the group’s earlier blues framework.

Povey’s keyboards and high vocal blend appear selectively. The album does not yet exploit them as fully as S.F. Sorrow, which makes their emerging presence historically audible.

Pendleton and Stax belong to the album personnel but cannot be assigned responsibly to a precise list of released tracks. The uncertainty is stated through careful boundaries, not public research language.

Rowland’s production seeks clarity and commercial shape. Tilsley’s arrangements add a second authorial layer that can reinforce melody or pull against the group’s preferred force.

The session musicians include brass, cello, double bass and harp players. Their documented roles explain the texture without turning them into permanent band members.

Orchestrated transition

R&B weight beneath brass, strings, harp and new harmony

Death of a Socialite uses brass to turn social observation into a sharp public procession. The arrangement amplifies satire rather than merely sweetening it.

Children introduces new harmony possibilities. Waller and Povey help make the chorus wider, giving generational subject matter a collective voice.

The Sun is one of the album’s clearest melodic departures from raw R&B. Strings and vocal line create warmth, though the band’s underlying tension prevents sentimentality.

There Will Never Be Another Day combines finality with forward motion. Later unadorned remixing reveals how much the orchestration changes its emotional weight.

House of Ten uses enclosed space as a compact pop setting. The arrangement makes the house feel designed, while May’s delivery keeps its inhabitants uneasy.

Out in the Night lets darkness return the band toward a tougher outline. Harmony and orchestral colour remain, but the subject restores mystery and movement.

One Long Glance opens side two with perception stretched into memory. Its title captures the album’s habit of turning single moments into arranged emotional scenes.

Growing in My Mind is the strongest direct sign of psychedelic transition. Repetition and inward lyric shift attention from external conflict to changing consciousness.

Photographer examines mediated identity with clipped precision. Orchestral detail suits a song about framing appearances, even as the band questions the image.

Bright Lights of the City gives urban attraction a polished surface. Waller and May’s writing allows harmony to shine while the rhythm section suggests restless movement underneath.

Tripping makes altered movement explicit. The band’s sharper edges and the arrangement’s colour meet rather than cancel each other.

My Time closes by reclaiming temporal ownership. Voices and instrumentation widen the claim, giving the Fontana finale a sense of departure even without a formal farewell lyric.

Track guide

Twelve changing emotional rooms

Twelve emotions

Time, city, memory and unstable interior life

The title Emotions describes variety rather than a continuous story. Each track isolates a social, temporal or perceptual state and gives it a different arranged frame.

Time recurs in There Will Never Be Another Day, One Long Glance and My Time. Finality, memory and ownership form three distinct temporal positions.

Public identity drives Death of a Socialite and Photographer. One records a class figure’s decline; the other questions the person controlling images.

Children and House of Ten examine social units at different scales. The first expands into generation; the second contracts into one address.

The Sun and Out in the Night create an obvious light-dark pair without functioning as narrative opposites. One seeks warmth; the other invites movement through uncertainty.

Growing in My Mind and Tripping locate change within perception. They are early psychedelic subjects produced before the group’s full Sorrow-era transformation.

Bright Lights of the City makes modern urban life both attractive and restless. Its polish is thematically appropriate even if the band resisted the imposed production method.

The album’s central tension is autonomy. My Time names it directly, while the record’s production history makes the claim resonate beyond the lyric.

Fontana TL / STL 5425

Mono and stereo Fontana endings to the first contract

Fontana issued mono TL 5425 and stereo STL 5425 editions in Britain. Both contain twelve tracks divided six per side.

The title and portrait-style presentation frame the album as a catalogue of feeling, though the music’s actual conflict includes band versus arrangement as much as romance. The original side break after Out in the Night separates external social scenes from a second side increasingly concerned with glance, mind, image and time.

Later editions append singles and alternate mixes. Their packaging often exposes archival conflict that the original Fontana sleeve did not explain.

The album is the final Pretty Things studio LP on Fontana. Its catalogue numbers therefore mark both an edition and the end of the group’s first label period.

1967

1967: commercially stranded between two identities

Fontana released Emotions in Britain in 1967 after the December 1966 single Progress and around the May 1967 release of Children. The album did not restore the commercial momentum of the group’s earliest singles and debut LP.

The band disliked the imposed orchestral direction and did little to promote the record. That response is part of its history but should not be converted into a claim that every arrangement fails.

Contemporary context made the LP difficult to place: it was more ornate than the group’s R&B identity but less fully psychedelic than the stage sound and forthcoming EMI work. Retrospective criticism has increasingly valued its songs and transitional originality, especially when later remixes permit comparison with reduced orchestration.

Once the Fontana contract ended, greater creative control transformed the same dissatisfaction into the methods of S.F. Sorrow.

The third album

The awkward album that contains the route to Sorrow

Emotions is the catalogue’s clearest document of external production pressure, but its legacy should not be reduced to victimhood. Several arrangements reveal melodic strengths the earlier records could not display.

Waller and Povey’s arrival is historically decisive even though their full harmony and instrumental identity emerges only gradually here. Growing in My Mind survives as a direct bridge from freakbeat to psychedelic self-examination. The Sun and Bright Lights of the City show Waller’s immediate value as a co-writer capable of broadening May’s melodic range. The unadorned remixes of four album songs let listeners compare band and orchestration, but they are later reconstructions rather than replacements for the 1967 masters.

Pendleton and Stax deserve inclusion in the album personnel despite uncertain track allocation. The record captures departure as well as arrival.

Progress and A House in the Country belong to the surrounding single story. Their addition to CDs creates a fuller Fontana endpoint without changing the LP.

The record’s long-term value lies in audible contradiction: hard blues reflex, commercial pop design, orchestral colour and emerging psychedelia coexist before the band can choose among them.

Original programme

Twelve originals before singles and unadorned remixes

The original album contains twelve tracks and ends with My Time. Mono TL 5425 and stereo STL 5425 are both original British configurations. A House in the Country and Progress are period singles, not LP tracks. Later alternate versions of Photographer, There Will Never Be Another Day, My Time, The Sun and Progress are archival remixes.

Brian Pendleton and John Stax participated during the session period, but exact released-track assignments remain unconfirmed. Wally Waller and Jon Povey joined during the album’s creation. Reg Tilsley arranged and conducted the orchestral musicians; he was not a Pretty Things member. Expanded digital durations should not be confused with the original roughly thirty-two-minute LP.

A listening path

Hear the band and arrangement as two interacting layers

1. Begin by hearing Death of a Socialite’s brass as satire, then compare it with Children’s genuinely band-centred harmonies.
2. Follow The Sun through There Will Never Be Another Day and House of Ten as three different forms of melodic containment.
3. Use Out in the Night as the original side-one ending and reset before One Long Glance.
4. Hear Growing in My Mind, Photographer and Bright Lights of the City as mind, image and environment rather than generic psychedelia.
5. Let Tripping lead into My Time, where altered motion becomes a claim of autonomy.
6. Stop after My Time, then compare selected stripped remixes with the album versions.
7. Play Progress and A House in the Country separately as contract-period context rather than inserting them into either LP side.

Research trail

Sources and further reading

• Emotions album, credits and review — AllMusic
• Original Fontana stereo programme — 45cat archival record
• Expanded Emotions digital programme — Apple Music
• The Pretty Things catalogue and lineup history — AllMusic
• Complete studio-album historical review — Uncut
• Institutional band discography — MusicBrainz