VIA PRESS RELEASE | More than half a century after it was recorded, The Cyrkle’s The Minx, an album of lush pop, psychedelia, and film music from the band behind the ’60s classics “Red Rubber Ball” and “Turn-Down Day,” returns October 2 via Sundazed Music. Available on white vinyl and CD, both accompanied by a DVD featuring the original 1969 feature film, the album is available for pre-order.
Remastered from the original master reels with the full participation of the band members, the expanded edition The Minx features 20 tracks, including alternate and film versions of “Squeeze Play,” “Murray The Why,” and “Nicole,” along with “Baxter’s Dangerous Game,” “Terry’s Escape,” “Kites,” and an alternate instrumental version of “Something Special.” The expanded edition also includes bonus tracks and extensive liner notes that illuminate one of the strangest and most compelling chapters in The Cyrkle’s history.
Presented alongside the original feature film on DVD, The Minx can finally be experienced in its full, wonderfully strange late-’60s context—part pop album, part film score, part psychedelic curio and a revealing final chapter from one of the era’s most distinctive hit-making groups.
Recorded in mid-to-late 1967, The Minx is, in many ways, the great lost Cyrkle album. Created as the soundtrack to a provocative independent film, the sessions arrived as the group was moving beyond the pristine folk-pop that had taken them into the Top 20 and toward something more adventurous. Laden with three-part harmonies, breezy arrangements, psychedelic flourishes, and inventive instrumental passages.
Opening track “Squeeze Play” launches both the film and soundtrack with one of the most powerful performances in The Cyrkle catalog, while songs including “Murray The Why,” “Nicole,” “It’s A Lovely Game Louise,” and the vocal version of “The Minx” reveal a band expanding its sonic vocabulary without abandoning the melodic sophistication that made its best records so distinctive.
Over the ensuing decades, The Minx developed a mythology nearly as colorful as the film itself. Its suggestive title and provocative marketing—“The Minx is exactly what you think she is”—helped give the record a reputation as the soundtrack to a far more explicit movie than it actually accompanied. Meanwhile, beat collectors and DJs discovered a wealth of breaks within its grooves, making original copies highly coveted and increasingly expensive.
The Cyrkle emerged from the fertile mid-’60s American pop landscape with an extraordinary pedigree. Managed by Brian Epstein and named by John Lennon, the group scored its breakthrough in 1966 with Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley’s “Red Rubber Ball,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, followed by another Top 20 hit, “Turn-Down Day.” By the time of The Minx, however, the group was stretching well beyond the sound that had first brought them national attention.
The album particularly showcases the composing and arranging talents of Tom Dawes and Don Dannemann, whose gift for concise, indelible melodies would soon find another outlet. Following The Cyrkle, both became enormously successful creators of advertising music, with Dawes and Dannemann responsible for jingles and commercial compositions that became an inescapable part of American broadcasting for decades.
