Sultan Street Nine

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Origin: Toronto, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Sultan Street Nine — Birchmount’s Shadow Soundtrack

When Quality Records launched Birchmount in 1969, the label’s mandate was simple: provide racks of budget LPs that mixed reissues with fresh, low-cost Canadian content. To deliver that “new” product, Quality turned to young Toronto songwriter and producer Greg Hambleton, who was then working out of a modest office at 9 Sultan Street, across from the Windsor Arms Hotel. The address would provide the inspiration for one of Birchmount’s most enigmatic projects: Sultan Street Nine.

Like the other so-called “shadow” albums commissioned by Birchmount, Sultan Street Nine was not the work of a touring band but a studio assembly. Hambleton leaned on his trusted circle of Yorkville musicians—principally members of The Magic Cycle (Paul Clinch, Stan Theriault, and Peter Goodale)—to cut the sessions at Sound Canada Studios. The exact identity of the lead singer remains uncertain, but the playing is sharp, and the song choices reflect both Hambleton’s growing publishing catalogue and the hit parade of the day.

The LP blends original Canadian content with familiar covers. Among the standouts are Hambleton’s own “I Believe in Sunshine” (first popularized by A Passing Fancy) and “She Left Me on Tuesday”; contributions from ex-Passing Fancy members Fergus Hambleton (“All I See You”) and Jay Telfer (“Relations with Rita”); and a batch of contemporary hits reinterpreted with a light psych-pop flavour, including The Guess Who’s “These Eyes,” The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” and Burt Bacharach’s “Walk On By.”

As with the other early Birchmount one-offs (Suzanne, Tuesday’s Children, Candy Rock Fountain), the album was pressed in modest numbers and given only minimal promotion. It was simply one more title in the label’s first wave of twenty-plus LPs, its chief selling points being a striking cover and a bargain price. No artist contract was ever signed, and the master tapes have long since vanished.

Today, Sultan Street Nine is prized by collectors not only as a rare Birchmount original but also as a snapshot of Toronto’s late-’60s studio underground. Behind the budget-bin facade lies a document of the Hambleton brothers’ early songwriting, Jay Telfer’s restless creativity, and the capable young players who would surface across dozens of Canadian psych, pop, and folk records in the years that followed.
-Robert Williston

Jay Telfer
Fergus Hambleton
Greg Hambleton