Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] The Hollies - Maker

 

The Hollies’ track Maker, tucked into the November 1967 UK album Butterfly, is a short but telling moment in the group’s late-60s phase, a record that finds the three in-house songwriters moving beyond their singles-hit craft into more exploratory studio work. The album was recorded at EMI’s studios across the late summer and early autumn of 1967 and issued in that autumn.

On a close listen Maker reveals a compact arrangement that blends the band’s trademark vocal layering with an added timbral color: Tony Hicks’ electric sitar is credited on the track, and the production also calls in John Scott for string and brass arranging duties that give the short piece an orchestral hint beyond straightforward pop band instrumentation. Those credits are reflected in contemporary release information and later reissue documentation, which list Allan Clarke, Graham Nash and Tony Hicks as the songwriting names attached to the album material.

The recording context matters for understanding the choices around Maker: the Butterfly sessions took place at Abbey Road and were overseen by long-time Hollies producer Ron Richards, a steady technical hand who had shepherded the group’s studio work through the mid-60s. The band’s presence at Abbey Road was not incidental; in later recollections Graham Nash reflected on the experience of working there with a kind of reverence, saying, “Holy is not really the right word, but it’s almost the right word. It was revered. It was church-like. You knew you were going into a very special place, when you walked up those steps at Abbey Road, you knew that something incredible was happening here. And it was. And we were so thrilled to be there.” That memory helps explain why the Hollies experimented with modest additions — electric sitar and orchestral touches among them — in search of studio possibilities even while keeping the focus on their vocal interplay.

As a single track Maker did not circulate as a standalone hit in the UK market, yet it survives as part of the Butterfly sequence and in subsequent reissues. For the musicians themselves the period has been discussed with both affection and a hint of bemusement: Tony Hicks later reflected on the rediscovery of the Evolution/Butterfly material with a practical eye toward how the band’s strengths were used in studio decisions, saying in an interview that “If Ron had spotted it he would have no doubt tried to get the harmonies in there, because we were the Hollies.” That remark points to the group’s constant concern for vocal arrangement even when new instruments or orchestral colors were tried out on individual cuts like Maker.  Putting Maker beside its neighbours on Butterfly shows a band at a crossroads of taste and method: the track is short, concentrated and shaped for studio effect rather than single-chart performance.

At the level of sound, Maker is small in duration but layered in choices. The dominant features that define its aural character are the Hollies’ trademark multi-part vocal approach, a chiming lead-guitar timbre, the electric sitar colour that Hicks supplies on the track, and a restrained bed of arranged strings/brass that sits behind the band rather than overwhelming it. Listening to the mix and reading session credits together makes clear how the group balanced these elements: the voices are foregrounded and sculpted with close harmony writing, the lead-line instruments punctuate rather than dominate, and the arrangement work by Scott gives the track a measured orchestral sheen without turning it into a full orchestral pop number. 

Turning to the song’s lyric material, Maker unfolds through a concatenation of condensed, colour-rich images and a speaker who seems to watch or be suffused by an external creative gaze. The language is compact and impressionistic: colour references, elemental terms and short phrasings appear in sequence to form a mood-piece rather than a story with a beginning, middle and end. The text moves through floral and atmospheric images, sometimes slowing into single-word or two-word lines that function as tonal anchors, and the cumulative effect is more evocative than expository. The band’s vocal delivery—tight harmonies, gentle dynamic shading—keeps the text in an interpersonal register while the studio touches around it keep the sound quietly suggestive rather than declarative. For close readers, the lyrics present a speaker whose sights and feelings are mediated by a maker-figure, yet the song never spells out that relationship in literal terms; it leaves room for listeners to project whether the maker is a lover, an artist, a godlike presence or an inner creative force.

    You might also like the review I  wrote for "Various Artists - Maximum Sitar '66-'72 (18 Sitar Classics From Psychedelia's Golden Age)".

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_(Hollies_album)
2. https://open.spotify.com/track/5LWXWLv2nlVAkEfOFWiIyt
3. https://www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/3851/the-hollies-tony-hicks-interviewed-2010-the-road-is-long/
4. https://music.apple.com/gb/song/maker-stereo/1750080936
5. https://motolyrics.com/hollies/maker-lyrics.html
6. https://www.discogs.com/release/12936858-The-Hollies-Butterfly