A belated Happy New Year to you. “Happy” is a stretch at the moment I know, so perhaps a Better New Year maybe a more appropriate wish.
What follows will have you scratching your head a little with some references in relation to where we are right now, but stick with it and all will become clear.
C.M. Lord is my shepherd... she restoreth my faith in charity shop digging... she leadeth me back to the blogging world.
Charity shop digging has been challenging this year but just recently I had seen a return to almost normal service. Most shops were once again happy to put vinyl out on the floor, and stock turnover was improving. Finds have been thin on the ground though. And now we are back in a lockdown of sorts for at least another four weeks and the shops are shut again.
For just a few weeks before our latest “pause” one of my favourite charity shops (venue of some consistently good finds in the last year or two) had started putting vinyl out again. On my first visit there since the vinyl had reappeared I found an Undisputed Truth album, which was a nice surprise. However, the album was ultimately disappointing when I got it home and gave it a spin. Nevertheless it served to instil some fresh hope of future finds, and on my very next visit, just a few days before “lockdown 2.0”, I picked up this C.M. Lord album for the princely sum of 99p. For some reason it was placed next to the two boxes of albums for sale and I almost missed it completely. Maybe someone had pulled it out with a view to buying it and decided against it. Their loss. It is a fine album.
Catherine Mitchell Lord is a new name to me. This album was released very late in 1981 I think, and a single came out around that time too, but they made little or no waves it seems. I was still DJing in '81 but by the end of that year I think I had hung up the headphones and walked away from the wheels of steel so I had lost touch with the scene a little by then.
I can find very little info online about Cathy. Seemingly her first appearance on wax was in 1974 when a London single bore her name. By 1976 she had moved to Capitol – a major label that did a good job of releasing some very fine Soul music, especially in the mid '70s. - and an eponymous album appeared, and spawned a single Oh Mama which did nothing but is excellent, and now in demand. Her Discogs page tells me she released five singles and three albums between 1974 and 1983....
And that is where my “copy” stops. You see I wrote this back in early November last year, about a week into Lockdown 2.0. It was going to be my first post here for a while but it didn't happen. It just goes to show the blogging mojo is a fleeting and very fragile beast, even managing to desert me in mid composition (photo had been taken, mp3s created too). In the end it took almost another month before I snapped out of my blogging malaise and burst into life again with another Feel It Advent-ure before another radio silence kicked in. Now here we are almost another month later and into yet another Lockdown. Taking up where I left off with my two month old half a post above feels like a Groundhog Day.
So what else is there to say about CM Lord? I think I was just starting a deep dive into the internet back in November to see what else I could piece together on her when I very abruptly went off air, so to speak. I have finally completed that task now.
Initially I found reference to an article that appeared in Blues & Soul in August '76 but it was behind a paywall. That prompted me to dig out my old magazines. No August '76 copies though, I was predominantly buying Black Music back then. I fast forwarded to late '81 to see if I could find any coverage around her 1981 album but it seemed I stopped buying Blues & Soul in August of '81, a few months before this album of hers was released. A dead end.
In truth there is not a lot to find on Cathy. She also goes by the name Catherine Mitchell Wilmore, possibly her married name. My research did lead me down some interesting paths though that I think are worth highlighting here.
Robby Adcock, part of a late '70s Disco group Midnight Rhythm, offers some insight to her early career. There is a long piece here which is worth reading. C.M. Lord was, in fact, a name of an LA band active in the early '70s (and a youtube comment suggests they were playing at the Starwood in Hollywood around '73). CM Lord, the band, turned up at a small California based 8 track recording studio called Fat Chance Recording early in '72. They took their name from Cathy who was their lead singer. Their debut single, on London, was released in '74. I am sure the band would claim credit for it although 45cat show a pic sleeve where it is clearly pushing Cathy as a solo artist. (Another group comes to mind here – Rufus. Chaka Khan was, of course, their charismatic lead singer, but in their instance it was the group, not Chaka, who were very much the marketed entity in the early years). Around then the band had become part of the, then, deeply underground early disco scene in California. Cathy was a great writer apparently but she lost the rights to much of her early work it seems when Fat Chance's owner Joe Long wrangled the rights to her songs – a depressingly common story back then.
In '76 CM Lord – Cathy or the band?, might have thought they had her/their big break. An album was released on Capitol. Writing credits include all the band members names, although it is only Cathy who appears on the cover and it was clearly Cathy as a solo artist who was being pushed. The album did nothing.
Around the same time, possibly earlier, the band, including Cathy, would appear to have been sucked into a group of musicians who became very prolific on at least one shady record label – Baby Grand. In '76 the Steven Hines Band had a release on Tiger Lily Records. Steven Hines had been / was in the band CM Lord. Cathy co-wrote many tracks on that album.
Later in the '70s and into '80 Cathy had a few writing credits on disco slanted records but nothing else as far as I can find. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, at the end of '81 suddenly she appeared again on a major label – RCA Montage – with the album featured here. She was evidently on major label's A&R radar. After that though , again, I can only unearth a few writing credits and a sole 12” disco release through into 1983 at which point she seemed to essentially disappear from the music scene.
I did find only two other co-writing credits after 1983 – on a 1989 Natalie Cole track, and a 1991 electro/hip-hop track (DJ Extraordinaire with Lord Hakim House Tha' Set), but it is possible this was just sampling one of her earlier compositions.
On a copyright database I found her name listed a couple of times with 1943 given as a birth date.
Catherine Mitchell Wilmore, I think you will agree, is not a common name and I did find a reference to a woman of that name currently living in Los Angeles. Her age is given as 78 which would be consistent with the birth date I found, and interestingly a relative (son?) is listed with a given name of Lord. It all stacks up. If it is Cathy then it seems she has never strayed from LA, or at the very least returned to her old stamping ground. There is an address and a telephone number given. I guess I could try and make contact, but maybe nowadays that could be viewed a bit too much like stalking.
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