David Hemmings

David Hemmings earned his chief reputation as a film performer, most notably through his portrayal of the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s landmark 1966 movie Blow Up, set amid Swinging London. He sustained an acting career across subsequent decades, taking on parts in Last Orders and Gangs of New York in the years immediately preceding his death. After Blow Up, he briefly pursued an obscure sideline as a vocalist, releasing the solo album Happens on MGM in 1967. The record continues to draw interest both from collectors of one-off efforts by screen actors and from completists of 1960s rock, owing to the involvement of several Byrds members.

The project originated when MGM enlisted Hemmings for an album at the same moment the Byrds cut “Don’t Make Waves” for the soundtrack of the studio’s identically titled film. Early Byrds co-manager Jim Dickson was recruited to produce Happens, with guitarist Roger McGuinn and bassist Chris Hillman appearing as session players. McGuinn and Hillman also supplied melodies for two tracks on which Hemmings delivered improvised lyrics. The album further contained “Back Street Mirror,” a song written by ex-Byrd Gene Clark that neither Clark nor any other performer had previously recorded. Recorded without rehearsal time, the LP was finished in roughly a week.

Although Hemmings had sung as a boy soprano with the English Opera Group, his voice by the mid-twenties, when Happens was made, had acquired a rusty, strained, and unremarkable timbre. The finished album stands as a modest period curiosity that alternates between dainty orchestrated folk-rock and contrived, semi-improvised raga rock. It sold virtually nothing upon release in September 1967 and had received no reissue by the time of Hemmings’ death in late 2003.