Eddy Bonte

TOMMY MOELLER and THE LONG CIGARETTE

In 1965, work is still plentiful for The Roulettes as they continue to dash from stage to radio to TV and back. Still, that hit record won’t come and in May ’65 Neil Sedaka’s ‘I Hope He Breaks Your Heart’ doesn’t take off either. Faith brings out records without the group, but to no avail and his decision to go back to repertory doesn’t exactly boost things either. Still, The Roulettes record their second album with Faith in the EMI studios in St. John’s Wood on Sunday 25th April. ‘Faith Alive!’ - with The Roulettes and writer Chris Andrews credited on the back sleeve – is a vibrant and shaking live-in-the studio album that sells rather well when released in... September.

Geoff Leonard and Peter Walker, Adam Faith biographers: 'Someone's Taken Maria Away' by Chris Andrews provided Faith with another minor hit in June, but the decline in his popularity was ably demonstrated the following month, when for the first time since 1960, he was unplaced in a music paper poll listing top world male vocalists - though he did manage to scrape into the British section. Although The Roulettes played on 'Someone's Taken Maria Away', and the subsequent single, 'I Don't Need That Kind Of Lovin", this turned out to be their swan-song. On the 7th October 1965, The Roulettes announced their decision to concentrate on their own recording career’.
Bob Henrit recalls that 'Adam was moving more into ballads, and anyway we felt that we needed to be a fully-fledged band in our own right, not just a backing group’. `

The Long Cigarette: Moeller comments

Back to the beginning of the year 1965, when Roulettes Russ Ballard and drummer Bob Henrit helped out one-time Roulette Brian Parker and his band-mate Tommy Moeller with a song that would become their third single – Unit 4 Plus 2’s ‘Concrete and Clay’. Though the in-house song-writing team of Parker and Moeller would never repeat that feat, their follow-up ‘(You’ve) Never Been In Love Like This Before’ went Top 20, with August-release ‘Hark’ still a minor hit. It was no secret that Roulettes Ballard and Henrit helped shape the Unit 4 Plus 2’s distinctive pop-folk style on those singles too. When Parker & Moeller presented The Roulettes with a new composition, everything seemed set for the final breakthrough. Released in November ’65, ‘The Long Cigarette’ was applauded by reviewers and disc-jockeys alike.

I eventually located Tommy Moeller in Australia. After the Unit, he worked successfully in the Australian music world, writing commercials, songs for Oz artists and the musical ‘Leonardo, A Portrait Of Love’, with his younger brother Greg. Moeller responded favourably when asked some questions about his pop past.
Tommy Moeller: ‘Brian and I wrote so many songs back then, usually when I got back from touring since he was no longer in the band for health reasons. I recall Brian and I writing the song - I wrote the lyrics - as a bit of fun, imagining a guy hoping he wasn’t being stood up, nervously chatting to the barman. I wasn't at the recording session, but Brian played 'The Long Cigarette' to the Roulettes and I was only too pleased to hear their version and thought it was certainly chart-worthy. I'm not sure but I think it had minor joy in Italy. The Roulettes were a very underrated band and deserved greater recognition. I regarded it a privilege to subsequently have Bob and Russ join Unit 4 Plus 2’.

‘The Long Cigarette’ stands out in the Parker & Moeller’s song-book, Unit 4 Plus 2 being a vocal folk unit singing about more conventional feelings of love and sorrow. Still, Tommy Moeller wants to comment that ‘some of the teenage anxiety referred to in The Long Cigarette can be found in our single ‘You've Got to Be Cruel To Be Kind’’. The sort of stuff they could have recorded themselves after all then? Tommy Moeller: ‘Perhaps we would have recorded it ourselves but the Roulettes' arrangement and Russ' lead vocal was so good, why bother!’.

As for ‘To A Taxi Driver’, the b-side of The Roulettes’ very last single on Fontana in October 1967, Tommy Moeller doesn’t have any specific recollections: ‘At the time so much was happening for us that hindsight has blurred many of the facts !’.