IT LOOKS as if William Shatner’s second album — a mere 36 years after his debut, The Transformed Man — will become a novelty hit thanks to his Philip Marlowe-like cover of Pulp’s Common People. Sadly it’s too late to resurrect the still-born pop career of another Sixties celluloid icon, David Hemmings.
As a boy soprano, Hemmings played Miles in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Quite possibly, he didn’t draw on this experience in the 1963 beat flick Live It Up. This starred a band called the Smart Alecs made up of four GPO dispatch riders. Still, he was in good company — a pre-Small Faces Steve Marriott was the drummer.
Antonioni’s Blow-Up in 1966 got him off the dispatch-riding treadmill. MGM figured they had another singing pin-up actor in the style of Richard Chamberlain and got Hemmings into the studio with Byrds Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, plus noted jazzers James E. Bond Jr and Ed Thigpen.
“In another life he would surely have known Rimbaud, Byron and Poe,” ran the sleevenote of David Hemmings Happens. “His reptilian eyes seem far away, fixed on psychedelic visions.”
Inside the sleeve was a pull-out of Hemmings’s sub-Munch doodling along with an album of folk-rock splashed with McGuinn’s raga workouts.
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Hemmings improvised the lyrics on the spot — fine on the olde English of Anathea, not so hot on Talkin’ LA: “One small rose, like, some pretty kind of flower, y’know?” In spite of a great sleeve, the album sold zilch.
Reminded of it by the writer Kieron Tyler just before his death, the actor frowned. “David Hemmings Happens . . . didn’t really happen at all, did it?”