Te Missing Links made only one album. Teir eponymous record was released
in December 1965. It was put together at a time when singles were still more
highly regarded by record companies, and in common with, for example,
the frst Who album, My Generation, released in the UK two months earlier,
Te Missing Links was more a collection of diverse material than a coherent,
organized and unifed package. Tings, though, had begun to change. George
Martin, who produced the Beatles’ Rubber Soul between mid-October and mid-
November 1965 said: ‘Up till then, we had been making albums rather like a
collection of singles. Now we were beginning to think about albums as a bit of
art on their own. And Rubber Soul was the frst to emerge that way’ (Doggett and
Humphries 2010).
Te frst Easybeats album, Easy, released in September 1965 was unifed
by all the songs being originals written by members of the group. Te Missing
Links contained six songs composed by members of the group and six covers.
While the album’s organization might appear old-fashioned, the recordings on
it were anything but suggesting, perhaps, a lack of understanding of the radical
nature of the group by Philips, the record company. By the time of the release
of Te Missing Links this incarnation of the group had released three singles.
All were included on the album with the exception of the B-side of the frst
single, ‘Something Else’, the group’s cover of Eddie Cochran’s 1957 single. It is
not known how many copies of the album Philips had pressed but the general
assumption is probably around 500, a similar number as had been pressed of the
group’s previous singles. Clearly, Philips was not expecting the album to sell in
large numbers.
Te Missing Links were formed as a fve-member group in early 1964. Peter
Anson, the driving force, had grown up listening to his father’s jazz and blues
1
Te Missing Links, Te Missing Links (1965)
Jon Stratton
An Anthology of Australian Albums : Critical Engagements, edited by Jon Stratton, et al., Bloomsbury Academic &
Professional, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=5987463.
Created from unisa on 2020-11-26 00:36:13.
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