Sunday Music – Knight In Rusty Armour

Today’s music video is Knight In Rusty Armour, played here in this clip by the English duo Peter and Gordon.

Link to Video at You Tube

This video was posted to You Tube by janschro

Peter Asher and Gordon Waller were a huge act during the time when the English music scene led the World in the sixties, as what became known as The British Invasion took hold. So many new acts appeared and their stars shone brightly for almost a Decade, influencing the direction of music for all time.

Peter and Gordon were one of those singing duos who were a large part of that, singing ballads mainly, and not really venturing into the Rock Music which was released with bewildering speed during that time. They had a career which lasted for only five years, but during that time, they brought out a number of songs which made it into the Top Five mainly, and usually the Top Ten at least. They had a string of 8 hits which did well both at home in the UK and also in the US.

In early 1964, they had a Monster Transatlantic smash hit with their first single the Paul McCartney written A World Without Love, and while that was their only Number One in the UK and the U.S. they were hugely popular here in Australia, where they had three Number One hits, and the last of these was the surprise hit Lady Godiva, which stayed at Number One here in Australia for four weeks in the lead up to Christmas in 1966.

Not long after releasing that song, they released their follow up song, which I have featured today, A Knight In Rusty Armour, which was always my favourite song of theirs. While this song barely charted at all in their home Country, the UK, and only just made it into the Top 20 in the US, it was again a Top Five hit here in Australia. They had one further hit here in Australia only with Sunday For Tea in early 1967, and then they faded away.

Five of their early hits were in fact written by Paul McCartney, and I would suppose that just having that name attached to any song virtually assured it would do well, no matter what the song was.

Peter Asher’s sister Jane Asher was dating McCartney at the time, for a period of almost five years, and McCartney not only wrote songs for Peter and Gordon, but also songs about Jane as well, recorded by The Beatles. After their performing career wound up, Peter Asher went on to head up Apple Records Management for artists and repertoire, and is also well known as the Manager and Producer for both Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, after leaving Apple and moving to the U.S.

Peter and Gordon were initially reluctant to release the novelty song Lady Godiva, as they had a firm following in the ballad genre of music, and there was an initial perception that a novelty song like this one would lose them some of their solid and quite huge fan base. Taking a bit of a gamble, they recorded the song and released it, and it became a surprise hit for them, and on top of that, they then recorded this song, A Knight In Rusty Armour, which was also a minor hit for them doing especially well here in Australia, as I mentioned above.

There are very few video clips of Peter and Gordon performing live any of their songs at all, let alone this one, so this is the studio version of the song with some images laid over that.

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Tagged: Music, Music Video, Peter And Gordon, The British Invasion

Posted in: Music, Videos