The 1967 Liverpool Single YouTube Just Rediscovered, and Why Will Sergeant Never Forgot It

Fifty-eight years after it sank without trace, a single song by a band that never made a second record is finding its audience the way nobody in 1967 could have predicted: through a phone screen. In May 2026 the vintage-45s channel Transistor Pop posted a loving appreciation of The 23rd Turnoff and their lone Deram single, Michael Angelo. It has now passed 43,000 views, with thousands of listeners hearing baroque Liverpool psych-pop for the first time and asking the same question collectors have asked for decades: how did this disappear?

The short answer is that it never had a chance to do anything else. The 23rd Turnoff rose from the ashes of the Merseybeat outfit the Kirkbys, the home-town band fronted by a young songwriter named Jimmy Campbell. When the beat era curdled into something stranger and more colourful, Campbell renamed the group after a motorway sign for the M6 exit nearest Liverpool and went chasing the sound in the air in 1967. They cut one single for Deram, Michael Angelo backed with Leave Me Here, in September of that year. Then nothing. No album, no follow-up, no second act.

What makes the rediscovery sting a little is how good the record actually is. Michael Angelo is two and a half minutes of orchestrated melancholy, strings and acoustic guitar and a melody that aches in exactly the way the best 1967 ballads do. It shared a label and a year with the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin, and it is not a stretch to imagine the two sitting side by side on the charts in some kinder timeline. Campbell wrote with the conversational sadness of Ray Davies and the childlike strangeness of Syd Barrett, and on this single he sounds like a man who knew he was making something that would outlast him, even if he could not get anyone to notice at the time.

People noticed eventually. Will Sergeant of Echo & the Bunnymen, one of the great Liverpool guitar players, has long counted Campbell among his heroes, the kind of torch-passing that only happens when one Liverpudlian recognises something true in another. Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, writing in The Times, called Campbell “the era’s lost songwriter,” and The Guardian later listed the early compilation of his work among the 1001 albums to hear before you die. Campbell himself supported the Beatles back in January 1962, in his very first school band the Panthers, before any of this began. The threads run everywhere through Liverpool music history. He was always just one turn off the main road.

There is a Beatles footnote here too, and it is worth getting right. The 23rd Turnoff did cut a session with George Martin, who then passed on producing the group, much as Joe Meek did. The Beatles’ producer heard the songs and walked away, and the band ran out of road soon after. Those surviving session recordings, long the stuff of collector legend, are part of the story this collection finally tells in full. It is a quiet echo of the unreleased George Martin session track we restored for the Action’s Rolled Gold, more proof that the man’s reject pile would have been any other producer’s career.

Campbell would go on to record three cult solo albums and form the power-pop band Rockin’ Horse with Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats before his death in 2007, admired by everyone from Sergeant to Badfinger’s Joey Molland and heard by almost no one. Michael Angelo: The Complete 1967 Recordings gathers every surviving 23rd Turnoff master and acetate, restored and sequenced as the album the band never got to make. If it grabs you, the rest of the story is in the catalogue too: the Kirkbys’ It’s a Crime: The Complete Recordings, Campbell’s solo Half Baked, and Rockin’ Horse’s Yes It Is.

The algorithm found him before the charts ever did. Better late than never. Go and see what 43,000 people heard.

Michael Angelo: The Complete 1967 Recordings is available on vinyl and CD from Think Like A Key Music.