Songfacts®:

• "Would You Believe?" is the title track of Billy Nicholls' 1968 debut album. Recorded when he was just 18, the song finds him addressing a former lover with calm, unmistakable finality:
  
  I wouldn't change my mind now
  I wouldn't waste my time now
  I should erase my mind of you
  
  The title poses an ironic rhetorical question: Would you believe that all that overwhelming love is now firmly in the past?
• The song was written by songwriter Jeremy Paul, who happened to be at Immediate Records' offices when he played it on a harmonium for an audience that included Nicholls and members of the Small Faces. The reaction was immediate. "They heard it and said, 'Oh that's a great little tune,'" Nicholls recalled to Mojo magazine. Steve Marriott quickly suggested recording it, and before long the group had headed into Olympic Studios. When Immediate boss Andrew Loog Oldham heard the result, he recognized it as the perfect opening statement for his grand ambition of creating a British answer to Pet Sounds.
• "Would You Believe?" was produced by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces. Oldham then took the recording and layered it with a lavish orchestral arrangement.
• The recording drew on an extraordinary pool of talent:
  
  Steve Marriott (Small Faces): vocals and guitar
  Ronnie Lane (Small Faces): bass
  Ian McLagan (Small Faces): organ
  Kenney Jones (Small Faces): drums
  Nicky Hopkins: harpsichord/piano (also played with the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, and The Beatles)
  Big Jim Sullivan: acoustic guitar (a top session player who played on 54 UK #1 singles)
  Jerry Shirley: drums (later of Humble Pie with Marriott)
  Caleb Quaye: guitars/keyboards (formerly of Bluesology with Elton John, and the guitarist who helped the young Elton John secure his first recording demos at Dick James Music)
• The track's most distinctive sonic feature is Marriott's wild, shouted vocal outbursts cutting across Nicholls's smooth lead. "I was very flattered that he wanted to sing on it actually," Nicholls told Mojo. "He had such a great voice. I mean, it might have been a little bit over the top, to be honest." Oldham, evidently feeling the same way, attempted to bury Marriott's vocals under the string section, but Marriott's voice was too powerful to be drowned.
• "Would You Believe?" opens the album and functions as its overture and mission statement. It is also the only non-Nicholls composition on the record; Oldham selected it before fully partnering with Nicholls, as the ideal keynote for his Pet Sounds ambitions. Released as Nicholls' debut single in January 1968, it offered a tantalizing glimpse of an album that almost nobody would hear at the time.
• When the Would You Believe album arrived in April 1968, Immediate Records was collapsing financially. Only around 100 promotional copies were pressed, and the record never received a proper commercial release. It remained one of pop music's great lost treasures until Nicholls reissued it on his Southwest Records label in 1998, followed by a wider release the following year. The album's reputation grew steadily, eventually earning a place in The MOJO Collection and becoming one of the most celebrated "what if?" records of the psychedelic era. A Near Mint original pressing sold in 2017 for just over £8,000, and in 2026 Charly Records launched their Immediate Records 60th Anniversary celebrations with a new worldwide release of the album.