The Mountain Kings were among the best of the local groups working the area around Birmingham, England, in the mid-'60s that didn't make it to stardom. They were formed in Walsall, in the West Midlands, northwest of Birmingham, in 1963, out of the breakup of an existing local group called the Scotty Wood Combo -- that band had split over a disagreement about which musical direction to pursue, and lead guitarist Terry Rowley and saxophonist/keyboard man Howard H Smith decided to keep working together, updating their music to something closer to that of the Merseybeat sound coming out of Liverpool. They were joined by lead singer Maurice Clawley, who had led a band called Maurice Lee the Starliners and had passed through another band called the Nightriders (no relation to the group that Mike Sheridan led in Birmingham); and he brought with him drummer Mel Downing, who had played drums for those same Nightriders. The choice of the name the Mountain Kings derived from the fact that they performed a rocked-up version of the Grieg piece In the Hall of the Mountain King on-stage (Sounds Incorporated, of course, later made the Grieg work a key part of their repertory, and the Birmingham-spawned Electric Light Orchestra would also get a lot of mileage out of the piece a decade later.)

They were a major local attraction on the burgeoning Midlands performing scene by early 1964, and played all of the top venues in the area around Birmingham. They even got to back U.K. teen idol Ricky Valance during the latter's failed attempt to revive his career during the Merseybeat era, and were on the bill with the Beatles a couple of times. The quintet was good enough to get signed by Decca Records in 1964, just in time to appear on a Birmingham-spawned compilation album called Brum Beat. Their four songs were among the most impressive on the LP, all group originals, written either by Clawley and Rowley or jointly by all five members -- one of those, There'll Be Times, was a hit that should have been, a briskly paced, achingly beautiful rock & roll ballad that cried out to be issued on a single. The album didn't create a groundswell of interest -- albums generally didn't sell in England during those years, unless they were by the Beatles or they were tied to the Christmas holidays -- and remains their sole commercial legacy. The band's four songs represent a good, solid dance outfit with a powerful, highly focused pop/rock sound. In 1966, Rowley left the group to join the Montanas, who enjoyed somewhat greater national success on the Pye Records label. He had the most significant career of any of the Mountain Kings, later joining the original lineup of Trapeze, which was signed to Threshold Records (a label founded by the Birmingham-spawned Moody Blues), though he was only part of the group long enough to work on their debut album, as a quintet, before they became the trio configuration by which they were best known. The Mountain Kings lasted for a year or so after Rowley's departure with various replacement members, before calling it quits in 1968. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi