It’s hard to tell if Brian Matthew was trying to be informative, or dripping contempt, when he introduced his next guests on Saturday Club, on the BBC’s Light Programme, in October 1964. “Next on the show here in London, a group of lads who’ve all adopted the fairly fashionable shoulder-length hairstyle, and their music is exclusively the commercialised, British form of rhythm and blues, as you’ll hear in this number called Big Boss Man, from the Pretty Things.”
Later on, Matthew asked the band if indeed they felt their hair was in fact the longest in the business, occasioning nearly a minute of earnest discussion about situations in which their hair might be inappropriate. Such was to be the fate of the Pretty Things in the mid-60s: to be a band who embodied all that was a threat to bourgeois values, to an extent that rather overshadowed the music they were making. The biggest threat of all was Viv Prince, the band’s drummer, whose death at 84 was announced on Instagram on Friday by, fittingly, Jack White.
