Blessed with all the talents and backed by an eccentric svengali, BLOSSOM TOES were “a band on the up”, albeit torn between the Sirens of pop fame and heavy cred. Then the singer discovered he didn’t want to sing, and a car crash nearly ended them all. Resounding still: the eclectic power of their music. “Salvador 'Dali loved us,” they tell ANDREW MALE.

Do it ever so clean: Blossom Toes, 1967 (from left) Brian Godding, Brian Belshaw, Kevin Westlake, Jim Cregan.

IT WAS ON A COLD WINTER’S NIGHT IN MID-December 1969 that Blossom Toes’ career came to an end. The group, which by then comprised guitar-ist and lead singer Brian Godding, guitarist and vocalist Jim Cregan, bassist Brian Belshaw and drummer Barry Reeves were driving down the M4 in Reeves’s VW Beetle, returning from a gig at Bristol University with Roger Chapman’s Family.

A fixture on the late-’60s underground circuit alongside fellow travellers Fairport Convention, Car-avan, Mighty Baby and Soft Machine, with a recently completed second LP and a session for John Peel’s Top Gear under their belt, they were, in the words of Jim Cregan, “a band on the up” – their heavy, proto-prog sound perfectly in tune with the sounds of the darker coming decade.

“We were on the edge of success,” says Cregan today. “I thought, We don’t have to do much other than just play this stuff for another year. We’ll be all right.” Then their VW Beetle hit a patch of black ice. “Barry’s car lost direction but didn’t slow down at all,” explains Brian Godding. “It ended up rolling onto the other side of the motor-way and into the oncoming traffic.”

With the Beetle finally coming to rest on its side, a dazed and bloodied Blossom Toes attempted to extricate themselves from the battered vehicle.

“I stuck my head out of the back window and there was a car head-ing straight towards us,” continues Godding. “I remember thinking, If that hits us it will chop my head off.”

“Thankfully,” adds Cregan, “the car just clipped us ever so slightly, which was enough to spin us around so that our headlights were point-ing back at the oncoming traffic. That saved our lives.” But the group were over. “I was very shaken,” says Godding. “Afterwards, I said to Brian [Belshaw] ‘I don’t think I want to do this any more. He said, ‘I don’t think I do either.’ We buggered off to a snowbound cottage in Nor-folk, had a week of talking about things and came back and said, ‘Sod it, we’re not going to continue.’ We didn’t have another job but we wanted to stop doing this. Jim was pretty cut up about it.”

“I didn’t for a minute think we weren’t going to recover,” says Cregan. “But the two Brians persuaded each other they should call it a day. That was heartbreaking. Five years of work to get to where we were and then that. I couldn’t understand it.”

And that might have been it – just another band of ’60s hopefuls who faded into history and were forgotten. Ex-cept that didn’t happen. Instead, the reputation of this curious, brilliant group has quietly grown.

In fact, despite his own storied post-Toes employment in Family, Cockney Rebel and as Rod Stewart’s musical director, co-produc-er and co-writer from 1975 to 1995, it’s fascinating to hear Jim Cregan talk about the relative career footnote of Blossom Toes with utter pride and admiration.