The Mindbenders – A Groovy Kind Of Love (1966)

A Schoolteacher And A Teenager Wrote It In 20 Minutes. Lesley Gore’s Producer Killed It. Wayne Fontana Walked Off A Stage — And The Mindbenders Were Suddenly On Their Own.

The song that would define The Mindbenders’ entire career began with a single slang word, a 22-year-old schoolteacher, a 17-year-old still doing her homework, and a classical piano exercise written two centuries earlier by an Italian composer named Muzio Clementi. The melody is from the Rondo from Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina, Opus 36, No. 5. From those improbable materials, Carole Bayer and Toni Wine built one of the most instantly recognisable pop songs of the British Invasion era — a record that was turned down before it was recorded, recorded before anyone had heard of it, and then kept from number one in both the UK and the US by two entirely different songs. “A Groovy Kind of Love” was released on December 10, 1965, and reached number two on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been earning royalties, surprising people, and soundtracking slow dances ever since.

The single entered the Record Retailer chart on January 19, 1966, at number 34 before peaking at number two on March 16. It was kept from the number one spot by “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra. In the US, the single reached its peak of number two on May 28, 1966, a position it would hold for two weeks — “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge kept the song from reaching the top spot. It sold one million copies globally, which, for a first single from a newly configured Manchester beat group suddenly missing their lead singer, represents one of the more remarkable commercial debuts in 1960s pop history. In the Cash Box singles chart, it went one better — all the way to number one. The song that couldn’t reach the top of either major chart still managed a chart-topper. Pop music has always had a gift for irony.

The writing session is the stuff of Brill Building legend. Carole Bayer Sager wrote the song when she was 22 and working as a schoolteacher, alongside Toni Wine, who was 17 and still in high school. Bayer had been writing songs without success for United Artists publishing, paid $25 a week, before being paired with the teenage Wine at Screen Gems. They were firmly at the lower rung of the industry — waiting for someone to play their songs for the acts who were looking for material, knowing that everyone was really waiting for Carole King’s next song instead. Then one afternoon, the word “groovy” came up. “We were talking about ‘groovy’ being the new word,” said Wine. “The only song we knew of was ’59th Street Bridge Song’ by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. And we knew we wanted to write a song with that word in it — because we knew it was the happening word, and we wanted to jump on that. Carole came up with ‘Groovy kinda… groovy kinda…’ and we’re all just saying, ‘Kinda groovy, kinda groovy…’ I don’t exactly know who came up with ‘Love,’ but it was ‘Groovy kind of love.’ And we did it. We wrote it in 20 minutes. Just flew out of our mouths.” The melody they built the lyric around was, as Bayer later confirmed, essentially a piano exercise — the Clementi sonatina that Wine had on the keys. Even though they claim full songwriting credits, they mainly wrote the lyrics and just slightly modified Clementi’s music. Clementi, who died in 1832, has never received a royalty cheque.

Before it reached any band at all, the song nearly died at the first hurdle. Bayer Sager originally pitched the song to pop star Lesley Gore in early 1965, but Gore’s producer at the time, Shelby Singleton, rejected it — as he found the word “groovy” too slangy. The word that the two writers had deliberately chosen because it was the happening word of the moment was, in Singleton’s estimation, precisely the problem. Gore passed. The original rendition was then recorded by American singing duo Diane & Annita and released as “Groovey Kind of Love” on the French EP One by One in 1965 — a version nobody outside France heard. The song needed a band who could make it matter, and those circumstances were about to present themselves in the most chaotic way possible.

In the middle of a concert in 1965, Wayne Fontana — lead singer of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, the man whose band had just taken “The Game of Love” to number one in America — decided he had heard enough, walked off the stage and kept walking. Fontana had been increasingly frustrated as the band proved unable to score another hit, and in the midst of a concert he decided he’d had enough and left the band unceremoniously. The three remaining members — Eric Stewart on guitar and vocals, Bob Lang on bass, and Ric Rothwell on drums — could have folded. Instead, they did the opposite. Stewart, a guitarist who was not remotely expecting to become a lead singer, stepped forward by necessity. Via battlefield promotion, the Mindbenders’ new lead vocalist was bound for a long career — he would go on to co-found 10cc and collaborate extensively with Paul McCartney. None of that was imaginable yet. Right now, they simply needed a song. Jack McGraw, who ran Screen Gems’ London office, had discovered “A Groovy Kind of Love” and felt that Stewart and the others could do a nice job with it. He was right — though the original demo that Bayer and Wine had recorded was slower, and much closer to the tempo of the Phil Collins version that would go to number one over twenty years later, while the Mindbenders recorded it at a brisker, more buoyant pace. Two entirely different songs live inside the same melody. Both of them worked.

The recording itself carried one additional footnote of absurdist timing. The single was released in the United Kingdom by Fontana Records on December 10, 1965 — and according to guitarist Eric Stewart, the single initially failed to take off due to the Christmas rush. A song called “A Groovy Kind of Love,” released into the most competitive commercial week of the broadcasting year, initially got lost in the noise of the holiday market. It took until January to find its footing — and then, once it started moving, it moved very fast. Stewart’s vocal — light, clean, slightly guileless — was the perfect vehicle for a lyric written by people young enough to mean every word of it without complication. The chirpy production, the walking bass, the uncluttered arrangement: all of it served a song that knew exactly what it was and made no apologies for it.

Phil Collins came to the song almost by accident. Collins had originally suggested it as a good one for collaborator Stephen Bishop to record, with Collins producing. He had heard the writers singing the demo and thought it was great. Then, recording the soundtrack for the 1988 British film Buster — based on Buster Edwards, one of the Great Train Robbery gang — Collins recorded it himself. On September 10, 1988, Phil Collins sat at number one on the UK singles chart with a version that added notes of anguish and desperation that the Mindbenders’ original had never contained. When Collins sings “My whole world could shatter, I don’t care,” it sounds as if he knows what it’s like when a life does indeed fall apart — in the Mindbenders’ version, the same line flows by light as a breeze. Same words. Different man. Different life. The song contained room for both readings simultaneously, which is how you know the lyric was built to last. Pan-European magazine Music & Media described Collins’ version as “a slushy version of the original ’66 hit of the Mindbenders” — a verdict that tells you everything about which version the critics preferred and nothing whatsoever about which version went to number one.

What followed for the Mindbenders themselves was a story of near-misses and eventual dissolution. Their next Bayer-Wine collaboration “Can’t Live with You (Can’t Live Without You)” struggled to break the UK top 30. “Ashes to Ashes” took them to number 14. The band broke up in November 1968 at the final concert of a UK tour also featuring The Who, Arthur Brown, and Joe Cocker — a lineup that suggests the Mindbenders’ final night was not a quiet one. Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman went on to form Hotlegs, then 10cc, one of the most critically acclaimed British bands of the 1970s. The battlefield promotion that had made Stewart a lead singer had simply been the first step in a longer journey. Wayne Fontana, who had walked off that stage in 1965, died on 6 August 2020. The two writers who had built the song in 20 minutes went on to very different kinds of greatness: Toni Wine sang on Willie Nelson’s version of “Always on My Mind” and Sugar Sugar by The Archies; Carole Bayer Sager wrote “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” “That’s What Friends Are For,” and collected an Oscar, Grammy and Golden Globe along the way. Not bad for two people who were, at the time of writing, a schoolteacher and a teenager. Watch the video and read the full story at Music Videos Club — because this one deserves more than a quick listen.