915 The Left Banke “Walk Away Renee” 1966

“Even in a year as star-blessed as 1966, the Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee stood out. There was a harpsichord, a string quartet, a keening vocal and a lyric of real teenage heartbreak. Back then, 15-year-old [Michael] Brown worked as a part time engineer at his father Harry Lookofsky’s recording studio in New York. In photos he looked mournful and out of time, with King Charles spaniel hair. He looked as if he would have felt at home in a Victorian drawing room, but the studio was where he met George Cameron, Tom Finn and singer Steve Martin (not the comedian). They became fast friends, forming the Left Banke in 1965. A No 5 hit, Walk Away Renee was big enough US hit for the group to record a Coca Cola jingle, and others - in their idiosyncratic style - for Hertz car rental and Toni hairspray... Brown had unlimited access to his father's studio where, according to the Left Banke’s part-time lyricist Tom Feher, ‘he’d just pound away at the piano, and we’d all stand around the piano and try to emulate the Beatles and the Hollies.’ One day in late 1965, Tom Finn had brought his girlfriend Renee Fladen along to the studio, and Brown was instantly smitten - in short order he wrote three songs about her...With orchestral arrangements from his father, and Brown’s knack for odd, bunched chords and a taste for extreme melancholy, the sound was quickly tagged ‘baroque pop’ by the press” (Bob Stanley, The Guardian, 20 March 2015).

The Left Banke “Walk Away Renee” 1966