Badfinger Doc 1 of 6

From Wiki: Badfinger originated with a band out of Swansea, South Wales in 1961 called The Panthers. The Panthers' featured lineup contained Pete Ham (lead guitar), Ron Griffiths (bass guitar), Roy Anderson (drums), and David 'Dai' Jenkins (guitar). After a handful of moniker changes, in 1964 they settled on The Iveys, named after a street called Ivey Place in Swansea.

By March 1965, Mike Gibbins had joined as the drummer and the band graduated to backing locally such UK national groups as the Spencer Davis Group, The Who, The Moody Blues and The Yardbirds. By June of 1966, the band had been taken on by a manager named Bill Collins, who was renting a home at 7 Park Avenue, Golders Green, London, where the whole band moved in with another UK act called The Mojos. The group performed briefly as a backing band for David Garrick ("Dear Mrs. Applebee") but continued to perform as themselves across the UK throughout the rest of the decade. In 1967, Jenkins was asked to leave the group due to a lack of seriousness. and he was replaced by a Liverpudlian guitarist Tom Evans of Them Calderstones, the band's first non-Welsh member.

As a well-received stage act on the London circuit, performing a wide range of covers from Motown, blues, soul to Top 40, psychedelic pop, and Beatles, The Iveys consistently garnered interest from record labels. Ray Davies of The Kinks auditioned to produce them by recording three of their songs at a demo studio in London. However, it was not until Mal Evans, the longtime "roadie" for The Beatles and an employee of their Apple Records label, took up their cause that they were finally signed to a label -- Apple -- on 23 July 1968, the first artists signed to the label. Griffiths later said in a Mojo magazine interview: "The ultimate goal was to get a recording contract, but to get one from Apple was really exciting. Yet we were still living at Golders Green, getting £8 a week each."[2] Mal Evans had pushed several demo tapes of the group to each of the individual Beatles and got approval for signing them from Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon, who couldn't believe they were recorded on a sound-on-sound 2-track tape recorder. Each of The Iveys was also signed to Apple Corps' Apple Publishing.

The Iveys released their first single worldwide, "Maybe Tomorrow" (a Tom Evans song), in late 1968. It reached the Top Ten in a number of European countries and Japan, but only rated #67 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and failed to chart in the UK. Another Evans composition, "Storm in a Teacup", was included in an Apple EP produced to promote Walls Ice Cream, along with songs by other original Apple artists James Taylor, Mary Hopkin and Jackie Lomax. 

Due to the chart success of "Maybe Tomorrow" in Europe and Japan, a follow-up Iveys single was released in July of 1969, "Dear Angie" (a Griffiths song), but only in those markets. The Iveys album, entitled Maybe Tomorrow, was issued only in Italy, Germany and Japan in 1969. Plans to release in the UK and U.S. were halted for reasons never made entirely clear by Apple. The most prominent rumor is that Apple Corps president Allen Klein personally stopped the releases due to his desire to re-organize the label and solidify his control over it.

McCartney gave The Iveys a boost when he offered them the chance to record and release "Come And Get It," a song he had written for the soundtrack of the film The Magic Christian. McCartney went on to produce the song for the band, as well as the group's original compositions of "Carry On Till Tomorrow" (commissioned as the main title theme) and "Rock Of All Ages." These three tracks would appear both in the film and soundtrack album. Ron Griffiths became ill midway during the sessions, and Tom Evans had to play bass on "Rock Of All Ages."