THE MINDBENDERS - MINDBENDERS (FONTANA 1966) Jap mastering cardboard sleeve + 10 bonus

...After a tour of America, Fontana abruptly left the band in the middle of a concert in 1965. Guitarist Eric Stewart suddenly became the lead singer of the band, which immediately dropped "Wayne Fontana" from its name.
The Mindbenders' first single without Fontana was the hit "Groovy Kind of Love" (a Carole Bayer Sager / Toni Wine composition).The song reached number two in the U.S., and sold one million copies globally. It was successfully revived by Phil Collins in the 1980s. The album of the same name, however, was a failure, as were their other singles and later albums.
A second song by Bayer and Wine, "Ashes to Ashes," did reach number 14 in the UK Singles Chart, after an earlier effort in 1966, "Can't Live With You (Can't Live Without You)" had struggled to break the Top 30. The Mindbenders made their final American tour in July 1966, kicking off in Atlanta, Georgia on Independence Day, in front of a capacity 25,000 crowd, but they were only the support act. James Brown was the headliner and, while Eric Stewart remembered, "we went down quite well," a more memorable show came when the Mindbenders played the Fillmore West later in the tour. "The liquid light show was great and really worked with our act, which was a lot heavier than on our records"...
.......................................
Remaining together following the departure of frontman Wayne Fontana, the Mindbenders got off to one of the most promising starts any band could enjoy, when their debut single "A Groovy Kind of Love" soared to number two in the U.K. and topped the chart in America. And had the group only succeeded in locating a decent follow-up, they might well have developed into one of the finest British bands of the late '60s.
Instead, a series of disastrous choices of 45s condemned them to the ranks of rank also-rans, and it is only later that the sheer quality of their other work — material hitherto lost on two Mindbenders LPs — had been re-evaluated sufficiently to let listeners state that here was one of the greatest of all Britain's post-beat bands....
Here