Spooky Tooth was always a very spiritual group something that often shone through in their music but sadly they seemed to lack a corporate vision. This lack was possibly enhanced by the conflict of interests with Chris Blackwell being less the personal manager and more the record company boss.
This situation led eventually to cracks appearing in their unity. First Greg Ridley was encouraged to leave the band to form Humble Pie, with Messrs Marriott, Frampton and Shirley. His replacement was Bob Griffin, an old friend of Mike Kellie’s from their first childhood band The Phantoms. Bob was later the bass player with the original Steve Gibbons Band. In 1969 Griffin was replaced by Andy Leigh who left to become a member of Matthew’s Southern Comfort. Soon afterwards Gary Wright departed to form Wonderwheel. Harrison, Kellie and sometimes Grosvenor continued and recorded – The Last Puff – with some members of Joe Cocker’s Grease band but the marriage was basically over. They had created a large following around the world but without someone to guide them properly they lost sight of their goal.
Mike Harrison formed a band called Junkyard Angel as well as producing several solo albums. Luther Grosvenor joined Mott the Hoople for a short while and recorded two solo albums, the most recent of which is the sensitive “Floodgates”.
Mike Kellie played for a season with Johnny Hallyday and made contributions to records by The Who, Traffic and Three Man Army before forming a band with songwriters Brian Parrish and Paul Gurvitz hailed, unfortunately, as the new Beatles due to the fact that they were George Martin’s first signing since the end of the fab four. This band included Rick Wills on bass and Mickey Gallagher on keyboards (to later contribute Hammond and piano parts on several of The Only Ones recorded tracks . They did one American tour, one album and then Kellie, Wills and Gallagher left to team up with Peter Frampton who had recently quit Humble Pie. They became known as Frampton’s Camel.
Gary Wright of course had a huge American number one with Dreamweaver which firmly established his solo career.
There were other incarnations of Spooky Tooth involving several other line ups but none ever captured the same sense of power, melody and soul as the original line up. The truly final Spooky Tooth offering could be seen as the 1974 album Witness on which Wright, Harrison and Kellie teamed up with Mick Jones on guitar and Chrissy Stewart on bass. The album, recorded in England and Muscle Shoels has definite Spooky Tooth moments and was well thought out and recorded, however without the back up of a real band it did very little.
Mike Harrison has remained a solo artist as has Gary Wright. Kellie returned in 1976 to the live stage in The Only Ones.
