By the end of 1965 the Downliners Sect were down to a four-piece. After THE COUNTRY SECT, the group were anxious to get back to making the kind of music they knew best: straightahead rockin’ rhythm’n’blues.
Their January 1966 single, ALL NIGHT WORKER, put them right back on track. Recorded at Regent Sound, Rufus Thomas’ classic R&B mover was hijacked and hotwired Sect-style with sizzling fuzz guitar lines and booming bass runs. “Basically after THE COUNTRY SECT we just wanted to get back and do something a little more in our line,” explains Terry. “In actual fact, after recording THE COUNTRY SECT at Advision, we said to Mike Collier. ‘Let’s go back to basics. Let’s go back to Regent Sound’. It was a simple studio; it didn’t have the high-tech gear that they had at Advision, and we liked the idea of working with Bill Farley.” Farley had engineered many of the Rolling Stones’ early recordings (including their entire first album) and the Pretty Things’ “Rosalyn” at Regent Sound and he pushed his equipment to the limit to channel the excitement in the studio directly onto the master tape.

Released in April 1966, THE ROCK SECT’S IN was, as Terry describes it “a hotch-potch,” and the record as a whole was a return to the more earthy, rockin’ sounds the band understood best. The handful of ‘50s rock’n’roll numbers scattered through the rest of the material may have been backdated but they had raw qualities that were in short supply on the British pop scene at the time. “It was a reaction to the music going soft,” explains Don Craine. “It was going more back to the purity of when the R&B thing started with the good rock music that got rid of the rubbish that was going around at the time.”For this reissue, Munster Records have added two great non-LPs tracks, ALL NIGHT WORKER and the amazing GLENDORA. Issued as the group’s eighth Columbia single in June 1966, “Glendora” turned out to be one of the highlights of their career to date. For once, all the pieces – including the production – fell into place, and the result was ‘60s punk perfection.

Next to milestone 1966 album releases like the Beatles’ REVOLVER, the Rolling Stones’ AFTERMATH and Dylan’s BLONDE ON BLONDE, the Downliners’ third LP could be perceived as a retrograde step, a return to rock’n’roll primitivism. But THE ROCK SECT’S IN occupies its own unique slot in the big picture.