Various – Pebbles Vol. 6 (The Roots Of Mod)

This is a pretty decent compilation of (mostly) British r&b of the mid 60s, however it has two faults. One is the usual one with an album compiled from needle drops rather than from master tapes - the sound isn't always brilliant (it's not bad, especially if, as I speculate below, it's been through a cassette stage) and there's occasional surface noise.

The other, though, is much less forgiveable, and that's the speed. All of the tracks here are mastered too fast, mostly by about 5% with maybe a third not as bad, as far as I could establish by comparing with other sources. The likely reason is that most or all of the tracks have gone through tape to tape transfers - quite probably of cassettes - and cassette decks in particular vary in speed by a few per cent in my personal experience.

I'm much less inclined to believe that someone actually assembled copies of all these rare records in one place in 1980 and then mastered them from a record deck that ran fast, especially given that some aren't as badly sped up. So I'm guessing that at least the 12 or 13 tracks where the anomaly is the same were compiled on a tape machine that ran a bit slow, and then mastered from one that ran faster. 5%, incidentally, is nearly a semitone. The vocals give it away - on an album of instrumentals I might not have noticed but I was digitising it and realised it sounded sped up, so I corrected it with Audacity.

Every single song a classic.
Wonderful compilation of rough punkish british Rhythm & Blues from the early 60s.
Actually Bill & Will is an american band, but sounds very british in a way.
The title "The Roots Of Mod" is a bit confusing, `cause the roots of mod are Jazz and early black R`n`B,
but maybe the songs can be seen as the roots of many 80`s Mod-Revival groups like the Jam, The Lambrettas, The Chords, The Prisoners and others.
Definitely one of the greatest Pebbles comps.