Downhill in Britain after Cosmo's Factory - why?

The truth is that Creedence were really marketed badly over here after Cosmo's Factory. Other bands were putting out records with posters and picture sleeves, appearing on tv, in the press and keeping their fanbase happy, but while that happened in Germany and France, you could forget it in England. The best we got was a fairly dismal gatefold cover for Pendulum and a Pace poster that you see on eBay from time to time. By the time of Mardi Gras all but a few of us had forgotten about Creedence and had moved on to other bands. The Blue Ridge Rangers single "Hearts of Stone" I only heard twice on the radio (thanks to Kenny Everett) while "Jambalaya" and "Comin' Down the Road" were never played. It was almost the same story with "Rockin' All Over the World", which didn't get played on Radio 1, but did get an airing on the commercial stations' US Top 40 Countdown programmes. Same again with "The Old Man Down the Road" and "Rock And Roll Girls" and on and on up to today.

All of this is a great shame. Roy Carr [of the New Musical Express] did a great job promoting the band in the summer of 1970 but after that it all fizzled out. Hard to say what went wrong in Britain when elsewhere in Europe the band remained popular. Perhaps a tour to support Pendulum would have helped and maybe the band needed a manager who really knew how to promote them and keep them in the public eye would have done it.

I've often thought they should have slowed down a lot after the Albert Hall concert and held back a bit, but that doesn't explain why CCR and Fogerty remained hot elsewhere, but not in England.

Thing is, even now, people still think "Rockin' All Over" is a Status Quo song and that "Proud Mary" comes from Ike and Tina; the most common reaction I get when I talk to "new" people is "Who?" and "Oh, I didn't know".

What can I say? Maybe it is just taste, but lots of American music has transferred over here.

By Paul Johnson