The Scaffold

Information about The Scaffold

The Scaffold were a comedy, poetry and music trio from Liverpool, England, consisting of Mike McGear (real name Peter Michael McCartney - brother of Paul McCartney), Roger McGough and John Gorman. They performed a mixture of comic songs, comedy sketches and the poetry of McGough, and released a number of singles on Parlophone and EMI between 1966 and 1970, and on Island and Warner Bros. thereafter, achieving Top 10 success in the UK with:
  • "Thank U Very Much" (No. 4), composed by McGear;
  • "Lily the Pink" (# 1), based on a traditional song about Lydia Pinkham.
  • "Liverpool Lou" (# 7), recorded during the 1974 McGear sessions with Wings.
In addition to the hit singles, The Scaffold's output included four albums, The Scaffold (live at Queen Elizabeth Hall) on Parlophone in 1968, Lily the Pink on EMI in 1969, Fresh Liver on Island in 1973 and Sold Out on WB in 1975. In addition, a Scaffold greatest hits album entitled Singles As + Bs was released on See For Miles Records in 1982.

Jack Bruce, Elton John, Graham Nash and Jimi Hendrix were among the session musicians who performed on The Scaffold's early records (none of the trio being musicians).[1]

In 1970 The Scaffold appeared in a children's television series, Score With The Scaffold.

In early 1971 they provided some catchy tunes for inclusion in a television publicity campaign heralding the introduction of decimal currency to the UK. In this series of five-minute programmes, titled Decimal Five and shown on BBC1, they sang such inspired lyrics as "Give more, get change" and "Use your old coppers in sixpenny lots".

In 1972 they made a ½ hour musical movie called "Plod" based on an earlier stage production. The film was made on location in Liverpool and included boys from the Liverpool Institute High School earlier attended by the McCartney brothers and Beatles George Harrison.

In 1973, The Scaffold transferred to Island Records and released one album, Fresh Liver, before metamorphosing into the expanded line-up of Grimms with the likes of Neil Innes and Andy Roberts. After the 1974 success of "Liverpool Lou," recorded with Paul McCartney and Wings, The Scaffold reunited for their final album, Sold Out, on Warner Bros. Records.

Notes
1. ^ In his 1981 book "Thank U Very Much - Mike McCartney's Family Album", Mike McGear describes a later meeting with Elton John during which John advises him he used to sing background vocals for the group.

See also

External Links

City of Liverpool
Liverpool skyline, as seen from across the River Mersey

Coat of Arms
Location within England
Coordinates:
Sovereign state United Kingdom
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Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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Mike McCartney (born Peter Michael McCartney, 7 January 1944, at Walton General Hospital, Liverpool), known professionally as Mike McGear, is a British performing artist and rock photographer and the younger brother of Paul McCartney.
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Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who first gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles.
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Roger Joseph McGough CBE (born November 9, 1937) is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as performing his own poetry regularly.
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John Gorman (born 4 January 1936, in Birkenhead), is an English comic entertainer, vocalist and musician.

After grammar school, Gorman worked as a telecommunications engineer.
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In common, present day usage the word comedy almost always refers to the creation or presentation of humor with the intention of provoking laughter. Most comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations,
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Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible
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Parlophone is a record label, founded in Germany in 1896 by the Carl Lindström Company. The ₤ trademark may resemble the British pound sign (£), but it is actually a German L, for Lindström.
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EMI Group PLC

Public (LSE:  EMI )
Founded 1931
Headquarters London, England, UK

Key people Eric Nicoli, CEO
Martin Stewart, CFO
Industry Music
Revenue £2.07 billion (2006)
Net income £724.
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1930s  1940s  1950s  - 1960s -  1970s  1980s  1990s
1963 1964 1965 - 1966 - 1967 1968 1969

Year 1966 (MCMLXVI
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1967 1968 1969 - 1970 - 1971 1972 1973

Year 1970 (MCMLXX
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Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" [2]   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
"God Save the Queen" [3]
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"Lily The Pink" was a popular single by Liverpudlian comedy group The Scaffold.

Based on the folk song "The Ballad Of Lydia Pinkham", "Lily The Pink" was a surprise hit, becoming the Christmas #1 in the UK singles chart for four weeks, in December 1968.
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Lydia Estes Pinkham (February 9, 1819 – May 17, 1883) was an iconic concocter and shrewd marketer of a commercially highly successful herbal-alcoholic "women's tonic" meant to relieve menstrual and menopausal pains.
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McGear
(1974)

McGear is the second solo album by English singer Mike McGear, released in 1974.

The album was a collaboration between McGear and his older brother Paul McCartney, who produced the record.
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A wing is an appendage used for flight by an animal or an apparatus used to create lift in aeronautics.

Wing or wings may also refer to:
  • Insect wing, outgrowths of the insect exoskeleton that enable insects to fly

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See For Miles Records is a British record label which distributed some of the records of Dandelion Records on CD in the 1990s. The name hints both to its owner Colin Miles and The Who's I Can See for Miles.

See also

  • List of record labels

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John Symon Asher "Jack" Bruce (born May 14, 1943) is a Scottish-born musician, composer and singer. He is best-known as an electric bassist, harmonicist and pianist, and was most famous as a vocalist and the bassist for the 1960s rock band Cream. He lives in Essex, England.
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Sir Elton Hercules[1] John CBE[2] (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March, 1947) is a five-time Grammy and one-time Academy Award-winning English pop/rock singer, composer and pianist.
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For the contestant from UK game show Countdown, see .


Graham William Nash (born February 2, 1942) is an English-born singer-songwriter known for his light tenor vocals and songwriting contributions in pop group The Hollies and folk-rock band
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Jimi Hendrix (November 27 1942 – September 18 1970) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. Hendrix is considered one of the greatest and most influential guitarists in rock music history.
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Score with the Scaffold was a BBC children's programme, which started in 1970. It starred the pop group The Scaffold.

It was a quiz programme, although interspersed with various material including musical numbers and sketches.
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Television (often abbreviated to TV, T.V., or more recently, tv; sometimes called telly, the tube, boob tube, or idiot box in British English) is a widely used telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures
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Decimal currency is the term used to describe any currency for which the ratio between the basic unit of currency and its sub-unit is a power of 10.

In practice this usually means that 100 sub-units make up 1 of the basic units, but currencies divided into 1000 sub-units
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1970 1971 1972 - 1973 - 1974 1975 1976
For the song by James Blunt, see .

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Island Records is a record label that was founded by British record producers in Jamaica. It was based in England for many years, but is now owned by Universal Music Group of the United States, and is operated through The Island Def Jam Music Group.
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Grimms (1973–74) was an English pub rock and poetry group, originally formed as an extension of The Scaffold. The band name was an acronym formed by the initial letters of each member's surname:
  • Gorman, John born 4 January 1936, in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England.

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Neil James Innes (born 9 December 1944, in Danbury, Essex) is an English writer and performer of comic songs, best known for his collaborative work with Monty Python, and for playing in the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and later The Rutles.
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Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who first gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles.
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