The Swinging Blue Jeans

The Swinging Blue Jeans are a 1960s British Merseybeat band, best known for their hit singles "Hippy Hippy Shake" in 1963 and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "You're No Good" in 1964. Their last charting single was "Don't Make Me Over" in 1966. The band's first stable line-up was singer/guitarist Ray Ennis, guitarist Ralph Ellis, bassist Les Braid, and drummer Norman Kuhlke. Ellis was replaced by Terry Sylvester (later of the Hollies) in 1966. From the late 1960s onwards, the Swinging Blue Jeans underwent many more line-up changes, which eventually left them with no original members by 2010.The group had its origins in 1957, when Bruce McCaskill formed a jazz-influenced skiffle sextet called the Bluegenes. Besides guitarist/vocalist McCaskill, the original line-up also included banjo player Tommy Hughes, washboard player Norman Kuhlke, and oil drum bass player Spud Ward. There were a number of early personnel changes, as guitarist Ralph Ellis joined the band and Ward was replaced by Les Braid. Johnny Carter and Paul Moss entered the band to replace Hughes and McCaskill. They were a fully working band by 1962, playing skiffle and traditional jazz at venues in Liverpool and at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany. Initially, the German audiences were unimpressed and booed them off the stage, leading the group to rapidly reinvent themselves as a rock and roll band, with a name change, to reflect their attire, to the Swinging Blue Jeans.In 1963, the band, now a quartet of vocalist/guitarist Ray Ennis, guitarist Ralph Ellis, bassist Les Braid and drummer Norman Kuhlke, signed a recording contract with His Master's Voice with record producer Walter Ridley. The quartet's first recording, "It's Too Late Now", which was written by Ennis, made the British Top 30. In December 1963, a cover of the song "Hippy Hippy Shake" took the band to number two on the UK chart and established them as stars. They had a three-year spell of success, rising and falling with Merseybeat itself. The Swinging Blue Jeans had the standard Shadows line-up of two guitars, a bass guitar and drums and achieved local fame with their appearances at the Mardi Gras Club and the Cavern Club.After a number of singles and two EPs during 1963 and 1964, their first album, Blue Jeans a-Swinging, was released in November 1964; a contemporaneous American LP composed of singles and EP tracks, Hippy Hippy Shake, included the instrumental "Wasting Time", which had no contempory UK release.In early 1966, Terry Sylvester from The Escorts replaced Ellis, who had shared songwriting duties with Ray Ennis. The band drifted into a middle of the road direction which failed to bring them any success. In 1967, the band's producer Ridley decided to try and transform Ennis into a solo star, cutting the disc "Tremblin'" with session musicians and backing vocals by Madeline Bell and Kiki Dee, but it was ultimately released under the band's name. Also in that year the band went to a five-piece unit with the introduction of another member from The Escorts, bass player Mike Gregory, with Braid moving on to keyboards. Sylvester left at the end of 1968 to replace Graham Nash in The Hollies. The band eventually retired to the cabaret circuit.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.