City Boy in concert at BBC’s Paris Theatre in 1975.
City Boy were a band you most likely never heard of – not that they didn’t try their level best or had the benefit of stellar production going for them, not to mention support from a record company not usually associated with breaking acts to any degree. The success City Boy achieved, even after all that, never got past tepid and, for the most part is largely undeserved.
You could chalk it up to bad timing. Had City Boy debuted even as little as a year earlier, it may have made a big difference. But timing, especially in the area of Rock and Pop, is critical. Audiences are fickle – movements sometimes take over, leaving otherwise worthy bands lumped in with “yesterday’s news” and lost in the shuffle.
City Boy got started in 1974, but their debut album didn’t arrive until 1976. During that time we had Glam heading into the sunset and the first hints of Punk on the horizon. Between all that there were the Stadium bands; the ones already established who could withstand changes in public taste and still sell a decent number of albums. City Boy, even though they were critically well received didn’t translate to sales and so they never really got above low-end moderate, with only the lone single 5705 making the charts. And even an opening act slot for lablemates Thin Lizzy on a nationwide UK tour didn’t translate to any appreciable bump in sales.
By 1979 they had left Mercury/Philips for Atlantic and finally called it quits in 1982.
But for a reminder of what they sounded like in 1975, or an introduction if you never heard them before – this In Concert gig for the BBC in 1975 is a good representation of what they were up to relatively early on.
Enjoy.
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