Arthur Brown – Kingdom Come
Following the pyrotechnic histrionics of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the eccentric titular hero of that group left behind the psychedelic Hammond-fest for which he’d become a household name, and formed the progressive outfit Kingdom Come.
The debut album, Galactic Zoo Dossier, fused rock and electronics, receiving a mixed response in the music press, and for its 1972 follow-up, the eponymous Kingdom Come, Arthur Brown returned to the theatrical madness that became the signature of his Crazy World.
Kingdom Come is a hotch-potch of ideas and sounds. A sonic mess of the experimental and avant-garde, recorded under the mind-altering influence of something a little stronger than herbal tea. Despite all this, Arthur Brown and his band of merry men – Andy Dalby (guitars and vocals), Goodge Harris (keyboards), Phil Shutt (bass and vocals), and Slim Steer (drums) – somehow manage to pull it off.
Endlessly chopping and changing from one style to the next, then quickly back again, Kingdom Come, to the uninitiated, can be quite a disorientating listen. It’s certainly a departure from Galactic Zoo Dossier and, indeed, from their third and what proved to be final album Journey. This lack of cohesion troubled critics of the time, but hell, what did they know?
Taking the theme of water as its starting point, and also the title for the first track, Kingdom Come is vintage Arthur Brown weirdness. Peppered with humorous skits – some of which work, some don’t – the tongue is kept in the cheek throughout, with the comedy operatics at the beginning of ‘City Melody’, the Python-styled irreverence of ‘The Teacher’ and the-throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to ‘The Experiment’.
Not everything works and at only eight tracks that might seem a poor yield, but with such a bizarre wealth of things going on, the scattergun method means there’s always something just around the corner to retain the interest.
As we here at HFoS are big fans of Arthur Brown’s brand of overt lunacy (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown comes highly recommended), this is right up our street. It’s as progressive as they come, but not in the traditional sense of, say, Caravan or Gentle Giant. Instead, Kingdom Come is a shipwrecked vessel, fractured across the rocks of musical invention and helmed by Arthur Brown’s larger than life persona.
The 2010 Kingdom Come reissue adds alternative versions of three of the songs as bonuses and is available from Amazon.co.uk
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