100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #98 The Creation – Making Time

Released: 1966

Sometimes even being the ace face just isn’t enough. With guitar innovator and man-about-town Eddie Phillips, The Creation began life as The Mark Four and were managed by the flamboyant Tony “Strat” Stratton-Smith, who would later go on to look after Genesis and The Nice.

It was Phillips’ adoption of feedback and use of the violin bow that won him notable admirers including Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page – and contemporay rumours had it that the former asked him to join The Who and the latter was given a straightener for his cheek (Neither are true).

Produced by Shel Talmy, Making Time was the band’s debut single, eventually making the lower reaches of the charts before they collasped two years later after a solitary album, the European only released We Are Paintermen. If pop music at the time was largely still clean and sharp, Phillips gave the song a distinctively jagged surface, an impression doubled up by singer Ken Pickett’s rasp.

What goes around though does sometimes come around; long revered by Paul Weller, by the mid-80’s a railway worker named Alan McGee began a fledgling record label and named it after the band, who later reformed and signed to it as Britpop galvanised the fabled construct of 60’s London. Phillips and Pickett worked on a further, 1996 released album Power Surge, but Pickett’s untimely death shortly after meant that it was their last. Even ace faces it seemed still needed luck on their side.