THEY were just another South Coast band of ambitious, naïve, silly, talented, unlucky would-be rock stars who never quite got the breaks they deserved – or couldn’t make the most of the ones they did get.

The names of hundreds of similarly ill-starred bands have long since been forgotten by everyone except the members and their mums, but The Fleur de Lys have never really gone away.

Not that they were ever really “there” in the first place.

A new book is setting the record straight about what is arguably the last great “lost band” of the 1960s by reclaiming its place in the firmament of great British beat combos.

Circles: The Strange Story of the Fleur de Lys, Britain’s Forgotten Soul Band by Paul “Smiler” Anderson and Damian Jones (Acid Jazz Books, £12.99) provides a fascinating insight into music business machinations throughout the 1960s as the showbiz world of pop gave over to the murky world of rock.

Formed in mid-1964 in Southampton from the best of the city’s young bands, The Fleur de Lys soon outgrew the Southampton/New Forest circuit and by the time Bournemouth boy Gordon Haskell joined on bass towards the end of 1965 they’d already had one single (a version of Buddy Holly’s Moondreams produced by future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page) and a loyal following of Mods.

The big city beckoned but its bright lights and stage frights didn’t agree with the “big fish, small pond” mentality of some of the band and Gordon found himself in a fiercely ambitious new line-up.

That guitarist Phil Sawyer isn’t as well known as the holy trinity of British guitar heroes Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck – just listen to his work on the band’s best-known single, Circles – is a travesty, although he seems quite at ease about it all.

By the end of 1966 they had a residency at the Playboy Club, gigs on the Continent and records out on two different labels, but it wasn’t enough to secure the line-up which remained, at best, fluid.

Sharing a flat with Jimi Hendrix, opening for Cream, playing for Brian Epstein and backing soul singer Sharon Tandy saw them hired as Atlantic’s British version of US studio band Booker T and The MGs which is how they met Polydor Records house producer Graham Dee, who now lives in Bere Regis, who brought Gordon Haskell back in touch with his old Bournemouth running mate Tony Head.

“I wanted to work with Tony Head because he was such a great singer,” Gordon remembers.

“Tony and I had been friends for years. He was what I’d call a proper singer as opposed to a pop star and I wanted that for our band.”

But the history of the band being what it was, Gordon upped and left (eventually to rejoin another Bournemouth alumni Robert Fripp in King Crimson, which he grew to loathe) soon after Tony joined in March, 1968. Still, they were playing in front of The Beatles and the Stones in London clubs, backing Aretha Franklin and opening for The Beach Boys on tour and a year later managed to record what many regard as their defining moment – a Graham Dee song called Two Can Make It Together.

A duet between Tony Head and Sharon Tandy, billed as Tony & Tandy, the single flopped, precipitating the band’s final implosion.

In another story of what might have been, the authors point out that the Fleurs were the first British band signed to Atlantic Records... and yet never made more than £15 a week.

The second and third Atlantic signings were Led Zeppelin and Yes, who made millions.

Circles is a meticulously researched, handsomely presented tome produced with a vital Mod-like attention to detail that rounds up one of the great untold stories of the ’60s.

It also has enough heart to be dedicated to the memory of Tony Head, who died in October 2006.