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The Allan Sisters
I'm in with the Downtown Crowd / Give It Up Girl - 7"
Quality - 1966
Michael Panontin
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The Allan Sisters would probably be a mere footnote in the annals of CanCon were it not for the northern soul obsessives across the Atlantic who trade copies of their 'I'm in with the Downtown Crowd' for upwards of $900 USD.
The sisters - Jackie and Coralie - started singing when they were just little girls and eventually started doing shows in their hometown of Edmonton. They were originally working as one-half of a singing group called the Four Tops but after a string of disappointments left to continue as the Allan Sisters. With their sights firmly set on the big time, they moved to Toronto, where Jackie hooked up with (literally, as in married) the well-connected Art Snider, who was working as a musical director on the CBC's Country Hoedown show as well as running his own label, Chateau Records.
The Allan Sisters issued their first piece of wax in 1964, a bouncy girl-group ditty called 'Larry', which peaked at #35 on Toronto's CHUM-AM and which undoubtedly would have fared better had it not come out smack in the middle of Beatlemania. Snider must have been thinking the same when he mused about "a whole new world of recording [lying] across the pond". It was not long after that he and the sisters along with singer Pat Hervey jetted off to England to record twelve sides in just three hours, making them the first Canadians to record over there.
RPM gushed about it in their August 2nd, 1965 issue. "For two shy young gals from Canada's west, it was almost like reaching their summit," they wrote. "While in England for their session they managed to make a tour, the length and breadth of the now very popular hub of the world music industry. Wherever they went in England they were received with great enthusiasm."
In September 1966, after several more singles had met with varying degrees of minor success, the Allan Sisters issued the one that they would be remembered for. Snider had the good sense to introduce the sisters to Al Rain, the man who almost single-handedly created the northern soul scene up here in Canuckistan, penning Hervey's 'Can't Get You Out of My Mind', Grant Smith and the Power's 'Thinkin' About You' and all four sides by the Tiaras.
In Rain's hands, the Allan Sisters morphed into a bonafide blue-eyed soul duo. Taking its cue from Dobie Gray's own nod to the in-crowd the previous year, 'I'm in with the Downtown Crowd' kicked things up a notch or two, with a pounding Berry Gordy beat, some deft horn arrangements and a fetching vocal right out of the Petula Clark playbook. Just as good was the sugary 'Give It Up Girl' on the flipside, making this one of the really indispensible double-siders in the CanCon discography.
That same year, the Allan Sisters landed a guest appearance on CTV's A Go-Go '66, which caught the attention of Tommy Hunter, who would feature them on his popular Tommy Hunter Show for a good eleven years. Both sides of this single would later find their way onto a 1969 LP (Drummer Man), a disc that features no fewer than six Al Rain tunes and is thus highly worth digging up.
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