The Minx (The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Somehow the Cyrkle, one of the more clean-cut pop-rock groups of the late 1960s, ended up doing the soundtrack to the obscure X-rated movie The Minx. (Although it was originally intended as more of a B-movie, nude scenes were added to generate controversy.) As such it qualifies as something of the lost Cyrkle album by a band that only put out two proper LPs. It's not the "great" lost Cyrkle album, because the songs, penned by the group's Tom Dawes and Don Dannemann, varied between innocuous period late-'60s pop-rock and unremarkable soundtrack filler. The requirements of a soundtrack did require versatility, though, and the songs varied from competent harmony pop-rock with debts to the Beatles and Beach Boys ("Squeeze Play," originally intended as the title theme) to summery bossa nova ("The Minx"), forced quasi-bubblegumish jocularity ("Murray the Why"), a pastiche of sentimental '50s rock ("The Party"), trendy sitar-rock psychedelia ("Nicole"), the Kinks-ish "Something Special," a Duane Eddy-ish instrumental ("Walter's Riff"), and instrumentals suitable for dated incidental background and chase scene music with a late-'60s flavor. The CD reissue adds eight bonus tracks, all but one previously unreleased, among them the "film versions" of several songs from the movie and instrumentals that again seem to have been intended for the incidental soundtrack mood. Most curious of all of these is an instrumental version of "Kites," which was, with lyrics and vocal, a big 1967 hit in the UK for Simon Dupree & the Big Sound. Also here, though unlisted on the sleeve, is a cheesy original commercial (or soundtrack to a trailer) for the film.