Rock Your Clogs

Dartford's other great contribution to popular music (although Sidcup Art College can claim them both as well). Their origin is intimately tied up with The Stones - Dick Taylor played with Jagger and Richards in a pre-Stones band that merged with Brian Jones's and Ian Stewart's "Rollin' Stones". Taylor switched to bass, but quit soon afterwards to go to art school, but was convinced by another Sidcup student, Phil May, to start another band.  They had early success, but also gained a reputation for being riotous and difficult to manage live, and the pressures of life on the road led to numerous personnel changes. Stylistically, they moved from blues to R&B to psychedelia, with plenty of soul touches and orchestration. Creatively they probably hit their peak in the late 60s with S.F. Sorrow (always tagged as the first rock opera) and Parachute, although Taylor had left before the latter was recorded.  Neither was commercially successful, and the band folded in 1971. A second incarnation was formed almost immediately, and was eventually signed to Led Zeppelin's SwanSong label. This line-up soon folded, and in the late 70s the 1967 line-up reformed, and the band kept going, led by May and Taylor, with lots of line-up changes and breaks until 2018, 55 years after they were formed. Longevity data for the first recording line-up is below.