Thanks to Shaun Greenfield, formerly of the Country Music Store, we can place our Fab 40 Sundowners in Kent. "They played in Folkestone and the surrounding villages – I lived in the area at the time," he told us. He then referred us to a feature on the now-defunct website kentgigs.com. The band line-up – as of August 1963 – was listed by the Folkestone Herald as Martin Jones (guitar), Bozz Leggett (rhythm), Roger Ames (drums) and Neville Takes. They were previously called The Travellers and in view of the ensuing plethora of Sundowners, perhaps would have been well-advised to stick with the original name. Where Am I, their fourth and final release (a third was issued in the name of Linda Doll and the Sundowners) was penned by Peter Lee Stirling (co-writer of Knees by Kenny Everett and Dave Cash).

There were an awful lot of bands called Sundowners, as per a comprehensive list on 45.cat, that reveals that even prior to the Sixties and the release of the film, musicians known as The Sundowners Band released a number of 10", 78rpm records on shellac.

The proliferation of bands bearing the same name had for some time led us to conclude erroneously that Scottish, rather than Kentish Sundowners recorded Where Am I. The confusion arose mostly because The Record Collector Rare Record Price Guide listed only one band under the Sundowners name, crediting them with five singles on four different labels.

Bruce Welsh, Canadian author of What About Us? A Rocklopaedia Of Britain's Other Recording Groups 1962 – 1966 discovered some additional info during his research for Volume 2 of his Rocklopaedia, which covers 1967 – 1969.

The clipping, left, kindly contributed by Bruce, is about Folkestone's Sundowners. It lists the line-up as Martin Jones (lead guitar), Bozz Henson (rhythm), Neville Take (guitar) and Roger Ames (drums) – the same names, with slight variations from those that were printed in the Folkestone Herald. (However, we all know that local papers in the Sixties were infamous for getting people's names wrong.) The same photo also appears in the programme below, but band members are not named individually.

John Cotter added to the story and kindly contributed the theatre programme below. "There is very little to be found about them online, but The (Kent) Sundowners were the 'house band' on a Larry Parnes package tour that I went to in 1964, which included some big names like The Crystals and a couple of up-and-coming male singers. They must have been quite good musicians to get that slot."

(Right) Enlarged text of the programme blurb about the band

Scottish Sundowners

The website for the Pavilion Ballroom in Strathpeffer, Ross and Cromarty, lists several appearances, both as The Sundowners and as Tommy Trousdaleand the Sundowners. In 1967 they were billed as 'Scotland’s Top Showban, Tommy Trousdale and the Sundowners', so it was clearly a name worth retaining.

The Scottish Sundowners in the early Sixties comprised Jim Patterson (lead guitar), Eric McLauchlan(Rhythm), John Waugh (bass) and Eric Swindon (drums), formed in 1963 by vocalist Tommy Trousdale as his backing band. (As per the EP sleeve on the right, kindly contributed by Bruce.) Glasgow's Thistle label specialised in folk, county and football-related music.

London Sundowners

Two singles listed in the The Record Collector Rare Record Price Guide as releases on Columbia and Spark in 1968, were recorded by the Hackney Sundowners, comprising of Steve Robbins (bass, vcls) Dave Silverman (various instruments) and Barry Weitz (banjo, gtr, vcls).
Dave's nephew Simon kindly got in touch to confirm that these Sundowners had no connection to the Scottish band.

The clipping on the left provided by Simon refers to the band's appearance on Granada's TV talent show First Timers, which ran from May '67 to April 68 as short inserts into a daily news programme. It evolved into New Faces, in a half-hour slot hosted by Big L's Tommy Vance.