Wracking my brains to come up with anybody famous named Fields, and thus get the ball rolling on this review in characteristically good-natured style. There’s world class boozer W.C. of course, Rochdale warbler Gracie, and Labour Party turncoat Frank, but other than those three, I’m completely stumped. Does Strawberry count?
Such capricious meanderings aside, Fields also happens to be the name of a somewhat splendid little progressive rock group from 1971, whose short-lived tenure was equalled only by a lack of creativity when coming up with a title for their one and only album.
A minor-league supergroup of sorts, Fields put ex-Rare Bird organist Graham Field; ex-King Crimson drummer Andy McCulloch; and vocalist and guitarist Alan Barry together in the same studio for the first and final time.
The resultant album, Fields, may hold no real surprises for the seasoned prog vet, but it is, nonetheless, an excellent and highly accomplished listen.
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album reviews, prog rock
This day will never happen again. There’s no disputing that, but so what? Stating the bleeding obvious doesn’t impress me or anybody else unfortunate enough to be reading this…
Wait though. This Day Will Never Happen Again is, in fact, the name of the new album from veterans of the late 1980′s UK neo-psychedelic boom, The Chemistry Set. Those in command of a memory unaddled by booze and other such substances may well remember that The Chemistry Set were the band I singled out for particular praise in Head Full of Snow’s review of the A Phase We’re Going Through compilation album.
Their epically atmospheric version of Del Shannon’s psychedelic sojourn ‘Silver Birch’ was the best track on the album and one that gets many a hard-earned repeat play on the HFoS sound system. If you managed to get a hold of A Phase We’re Going Through via fair means or foul, you’ll be pleased to know that ‘Silver Birch’ makes an appearance on This Day Will Never Happen Again, this time minus the phasing, in all its original glory.
Both versions are exceptional and modern classics as far as HFoS is concerned. Indeed, the best track here as well. But that’s not said lightly, considering some of the stiff competition this album has to offer.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
The world of Mr Fox is one inhabited by characters that sport names such as Neddy, Jacky, Clancy and, of course, the sinister presence that gives its name to both the band, and this, their debut album.
Released in 1970, this fascinating strain of electric folk is as bucolic as a winter’s afternoon stroll along the Yorkshire Dales. Such is its rustic charm that it very nearly slips into the pewter tankard and horse brass territory of traditional acoustic folk, which, if you’re partial to the occasional spot of “hey-nonny-nonny” (ahem) is no bad thing.
Husband and wife team, Bob and Carole Pegg take the helm, crafting an album that’s occasionally jolly, occasionally dark, sometimes sombre and in the case of the title-track, downright sinister.
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acid-folk, album reviews, folk rock
Is it rude to question whether Hatfield and the North had been listening to The Soft Machine’s eponymous 1968 debut and its 1969 follow up Volume Two, prior to taking to the studio themselves for this, their own self-titled 1974 debut?
Probably not, as the fact of the matter is Hatfield and the North sprang from the same Canterbury scene that nurtured The Soft’s own growth, and if that wasn’t enough Hatfield and the North (the album), also features a guest spot from Robert Wyatt, whose offbeat vocals and drumming were so memorable on those early Soft Machine albums.
But to continue equating Hatfield and the North to The Soft Machine is as predictable an opening gambit as likening Flash to Yes, or, heaven forbid, writing an entire review that does little else… ahem. So I won’t.
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album reviews, prog rock
Unfurl copious amounts of bunting, for a celebratory mood is in the air. This here marks the 202nd posting at Head Full of Snow, a momentous number deserving of an album of gargantuan proportions.
In the absence of such a beast, we have Caravan’s If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You, the underwhelming 1970 follow-up to their sparkling self-titled debut.
Once again it’s one of those prickly matters that splits the prog-listening community in two, with one side of the divide saying If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You is an exceptional album, populated by wonderfully melodic and intricately formed, career-defining songs. Then there’s me on the other side, who says it isn’t.
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album reviews, prog rock
Meanwhile, over at, rock writer and critic, Sid Smith’s excellent Postcards From The Yellow Room blog, a recent extended podcast featured a discussion and reminisces of the latter day Soft Machine albums.
Unfortunately – for me, anyways – the latter day Soft Machine albums fall largely into the unholy bracket that is jazz-fusion. Man alive! Jazz, and all its derivatives, one of the few musical genres with the potency to send us at HFoS Towers into a prolonged sleep, one from which we’re often too afraid to stir, for fear it might still be playing. Very often it is; such is the nature of a beast notorious for getting permanently stuck in the neutral gear of tedium.
Nevertheless, the talk was a hugely entertaining one, as are all of Mister Smith’s podcasts (as well as a great source for some obscure musical finds) and can be heard right here. Don’t forget to subscribe.
Talk of The Soft Machine’s later releases inspired me to dust off the band’s first two albums for a well deserved airing. This was before the unsavoury jazz-element had taken a grip and the debut album, called The Soft Machine but later known as Volume One, is, for me, the best thing these onetime pioneers of the British underground put out.
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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock
If there’s four words guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of those of a nervous disposition, assorted woodland animals and my good self, they are The Incredible String Band. I have previous with this particular band of “musical” ne’er-do-wells and it wasn’t pretty, so imagine my horror when reading the liner notes of Spirogyra’s 1971 debut, St. Radigunds, and their name cropped up as a major influence on guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, Martin Cockerham.
It’s enough to turn a man to drink but fear not, for although there are occasions when Cockerham’s voice does sail dangerously close to the tuneless whine often heard emanating from the vicinity of the ISB’s Robin Williamson, he manages to keep it together, ensuring a listening experience that isn’t likely to leave you reaching for the bleach as a pre-bedtime nightcap.
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acid-folk, album reviews, folk rock, progressive folk
Truth be told, and I’m never one to do otherwise, I tend to approach solely instrumental albums with a certain degree of dread. This may, or may not, stem from a particularly bad experience had while listening to Camel’s The Snow Goose. The fact I very nearly slipped into a coma is neither here nor there; the fact I could’ve been doing something more constructive for its 45 minute duration, such as watching a recently painted door dry, is what really rankles.
However, Schicke Führs Fröhling’s 1976 album Symphonic Pictures, takes a decent swing at curing me of this irrational phobia. Not that it succeeds completely but I’m a little less anti-blah blah as a result.
In fact, if the truth really be told, I actually tell a lie at the beginning of this review when I say “truth be told”, as my aversion to instrumental albums isn’t strictly wholesale. For instance, I’m a sucker for Spaghetti Western soundtracks, as also the actual films, and could quite happily listen to a spot of Bacalov, Brunai, Ortolani, Morricone, et al, without fear of winding up face down in my bowl of soup.
It’s to the credit of the three German symphonic progsters gathered here, that they made this debut album sound like the soundtrack to an imaginary movie, while achieving a sound that belied their slim membership.
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album reviews, prog rock
Douglas Evil. Julius No. Victor Von Doom. Henry Jekyll. Josef Mengele. Fu Manchu… erm… Harold Shipman. What’s the common denominator here?
That’s right; it’s a roll call of doctors. More importantly, it’s a roll call of evil doctors. Yes, doctors who deal in evil as opposed to good. Some coveted world domination, others the forced conception of a supposed master race. Some just wanted a world free of old age pensioners.
But there’s a new Doc in town. At least, in 1971 there was, although nobody seemed to notice Dr. Z’s bid for global supremacy, a failure underlined by the fact Three Parts to My Soul allegedly sold less than 100 copies.
But Dr. Z didn’t have sharks with “frickin’ laser beams” at their disposal. Nor did they have a nuclear reactor submerged in water. They didn’t even have a bottle of diamorphine and a rusty syringe. No. Dr. Z’s weapon of choice was progressive rock.
Some might say that a twenty minute drum solo or an extended freak-out on a Mini Moog would be more than enough to beat an unsuspecting world into submission, but they’re just philistines! How dare they!
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album reviews, prog rock
Some thought it impossible. Some said I was insane to even try. Others thought I had to be joking. But I ignored the naysayers… these “glass half empty” merchants of very little faith, and I achieved the unthinkable. The long sought after grail of the delusional writer everywhere, and that’s to crowbar the words “German”, “delectation”, “Swiss”, “Belgian”, “Krautrock”, “genesis”, “Brainticket” and “Vandroogenbroeck” into a single sentence.
Allow me to present it to you in all its splendour:
The genesis of Brainticket was a collective of Belgian, German and Swiss musicians, headed by multi-instrumentalist Joel – wait for it – Vandroogenbroeck, who pedalled a strain of experimental Krautrock, for the delectation of anybody willing to listen.
There, worth the wait, wasn’t it?
Brainticket’s second album Psychonaut, released in 1972 and recorded by a completely different line-up to that of their debut Cottonwoodhill (Vandroogenbroeck aside), eschewed the overt electronic experimentation of the first album for a more grounded (something of a misnomer perhaps) psychedelic approach. So what we have is an album of psychedelic progressive rock that looks back three or so years and borrows heavily from the sound that was prevalent then. No bad thing, at all.
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album reviews, prog rock, psychedelic rock
What should we do with the drunken sailor, er-lie in the morning? Answers on a postcard to the usual address please. As for High Tide, well I doubt they ever experienced er-lie morning, though I’m sure they enjoyed the occasional tipple and possibly something a little stronger to take the edge off the daylight. Such is the environment from which they stemmed.
That environment was Notting Hill’s Ladbroke Grove. The epicentre of the British underground during the late sixties and early seventies, where the hair was long, the drugs were frequent and the music was raw. It was a spiritual homeland to such renowned barnets as Arthur Brown, the Deviants, Stray, Peter Bardens and, of course, perhaps the hairiest of them all, the Edgar Broughton Band.
Remaining true to the Ladbroke Grove ethic of too much hair and bruising jams, HighTide’s debut album, Sea Shanties, was released in 1969 and inhabits a place somewhere between the heavy rock of early Sabbath and good old-fashioned, salt of the earth, guitar-led prog.
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album reviews, prog rock
Mention Greece and what springs to mind? Nana Mouskouri’s NHS specs? Anthony Quinn cutting a rug against an Ocean backdrop in Zorba the Greek? The very mad husband of our very own Her Majesty the Queen (God bless ‘er)? Maybe even a bag of chips and a jumbo sausage, please?
Bone idle stereotyping aside, maybe the answer is three portly blokes banging out their very own brand of psychedelia and prog? If this be the case then we’re on the same wavelength. Welcome to the club.
Yes, Aphrodite’s Child features a pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, flexing his musically inventive muscles on keyboards and whatever else comes to hand, and Demis Roussos in the days before he took to wearing a glittery dress and became a global superstar. There’s also some bloke called Loukas Sideras on drums, but he must’ve drawn the short straw when it came to divvy up the post-Aphrodite success.
Their 1968 debut, End of the World, is a splendid piece of often eerie psychedelia, which hints at the progressive road down which they’d soon be travelling.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
Ladbroke Grove: in the late sixties and early seventies, home to some of the hairiest bastards ever to draw breath. Had a barber set up shop in this particular part of Notting Hill in the belief that there was plenty of unkempt trade milling about, he’d have gone under within the month, for these hairies* were not for shorning.
Like Samson, the hair maketh the man, bestowing its bearer with superhuman powers and the ability to extract the most vindictive of riffs from a Fender Strat, while simultaneously protecting them from the ravages of hard drugs, hard booze and even harder women.
It’s widely known that Edgar Broughton used his barnet to avert the destruction of California, when nuclear rockets were fired into the San Andreas Fault by a rogue businessman. That Mick Farren managed to stop the nefarious actions of an alien emperor, determined to obliterate the earth through a series of seemingly natural disasters. And who can forget certain members of The Pink Fairies foiling a fearsome foursome who’d dehydrated and kidnapped members of the United World Organisation’s Security Council?
Happy days. And you’ll be pleased to hear that the aforementioned left-leaning, heroes of hirsute hedonism are all represented on Cries From the Midnight Circus – Ladbroke Grove 1967-78, along with a roll call of similarly tuned hairy heathens. All of whom inhabited this enclave of the English counterculture back when it was acceptable for “the fuzz” to unleash their truncheons upon anybody merely suspected of growing their hair in public.
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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock
The Wind in the Willows. Now what does that bring to mind? David Jason? Peter Sallis? Cosgrove Hall Productions? If you failed to grow up in Britain during the early eighties then there’s every chance you’re now scratching your head, wondering what blend of Rastafarian Old Holborn I’ve been toking on.
I failed to grow up, but I was there in the early eighties. Alfie Shepherd wasn’t, but it didn’t stop him writing a concept album based on Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel, The Wind in the Willows. Ah, the innocent aspirations of the psychedelic age, when nobody would bat an eyelid if such a record were released.
Except it didn’t get released; not in 1969, as intended, anyway. You see, young Alfred wrote the piece for Angel Pavement, the psych-pop band with whom he played lead guitar. He recorded the whole thing in a home studio as a set of demos to play to the rest of the band. However, due to various unavoidable circumstances, what was meant to be, wasn’t to be, and the band split in 1970 leaving Alfie alone with his demos and his memories.
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album reviews, psych-pop
Clark-Hutchinson were two hirsute hippies so stoned they thought the recording studio was a field somewhere in deepest Somerset. God bless ‘em.
That can be the only the reason they saw fit to put out albums as though they were playing at a festival. And you could do worse than getting stoned yourself prior to listening to this. I didn’t and still enjoyed it. Imagine what it would be like having smoked half a kilo of Dutchman’s fancy, or even tripping on an acid-soaked Yellow Pages.
Heavy, man. REAL heavy.
Free to be Stoned – The Complete Decca Recordings Anthology is a two disc affair, collecting together the lion’s share of these fabulous furry freak brothers’ Decca output, recorded between 1969 and 1971. I say lion’s share as there’s no inclusion of the tracks from debut album Clark-Hutchinson, which Decca refused to release on the grounds that the track ‘Make You’ was obscene. But that’s a very different sounding album and not really missed when you tot up what we’ve got here.
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album reviews, freak rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock
Wondrous Stories – 33 Artists That Shaped the Prog Rock Era could just have easily been called Wondrous Stories – A Beginners Guide to Prog Rock; or Wondrous Stories – Prog Rock by Numbers; or even less charitably Wondrous Stories – A Cynical Attempt to Cash-in on the Recent Prog Rock Resurgence.
Some might think the latter title unfair. I certainly would, as this double CD makes no claims to being the last word in progressive rock compilations, or even one for the seasoned prog aficionado. In fact, I wish I’d never typed it now, but my delete key’s playing up so I can’t ryub ti tout…
Wondrous Stories – An Exercise in Prog Rock Predictability would be completely unfair, however. Unfair and wrong. As even though the artists included on here are fairly typical, some of the song choices aren’t.
Take for instance the Yes track, ‘Wondrous Stories’. One has to wonder whether it was picked simply to give the compilation a punchy title. Granted, they’re not going to put twenty minutes of ‘Close to the Edge’ on here, but surely they could’ve found something better from the glory days of Fragile or The Yes Album, more representative of the band’s space-prog sound. Of course, licensing issues may also have played a part here, but let’s gloss over that factor, as it threatens to ruin my entire argument.
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album reviews, prog rock
“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, We’re so glad you could attend, Come inside! Come inside!”
Google “Brain Salad Surgery review” (Brain Salad Surgery being the fourth studio album by prog behemoths Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and you’ll probably find 20,000 or so more reviews of the 1973 album, better written and more entertaining than this one; such is its status as a cornerstone of prog rock.
I’ve not tried it out for myself, so I can’t absolutely be sure this is right, but I think I’m pretty safe in assuming that there are one or two others out there who’ve had the same idea as me. With an album this big, it would be rude not to.
Therefore I have laid out a blueprint of how those reviews probably read, one which can be followed by anybody else further down the line who might wish to join the Brain Salad Surgery Review Club™. Pay on the door, please.
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album reviews, prog rock
What’s that? A joke? Well… I don’t usually but… Here’s one for ya. What do you get when you cross Ian Fraser Kilmister (known to the world as 190% proof hairy warthog, Lemmy) and a Malaysian born tabla player?
Sam Gopal’s Escalator, that’s what you get.
I didn’t say it was funny. I don’t think I actually said it was a joke. And neither is this album. Sam Gopal’s Escalator is serious stuff. Serious, acid-induced psychedelic rock, chiselled from a slab of blackest granite.
Travelling on a subsonic undercurrent, 1969′s Escalator menaces and petrifies in turn, and the very presence of future Hawkwind and Motorhead bassist Lemmy, should be enough to ward off the faint of heart. Probably for the best as I fear they wouldn’t survive the trip.
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album reviews, freak rock, psychedelic rock
Some things are deserving of greatness, whilst other things aren’t. Ergo, Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn deserves every plaudit it inevitably gets, whereas their The Wall doesn’t. Some may not agree with that. Possibly every man that has ever caught wind of the fragrant odour universally recognised as progressive rock, will now be tutting and shaking their head in a display of passive disapproval at this carefree dismissal of The Wall, what some consider to be beyond reproach because of who recorded it, but the truth is there for all to see. I may well be dancing about architecture, but at the same time The Wall is aggrandised over nothing.
The Emperor’s new clothes are revealed and what is the mighty Floyd’s last album (at least as far as listenability goes) is shown up for what it is. Nevertheless, would you take the word of an unproven critic, yet time and again proven eejut, on this? Of course not. To do so would be foolish. So acquire a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and experience the big fuss about nothing for yourself. Draw your own conclusions. On a pomposity scale it’s up there with Yes’s Tales From Topographical Oceans, yet lacks the charm of ELP’s ‘Karn Evil 9′.
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album reviews, psychedelic rock
Following on from two previous downers, it’s time HFoS had something a little more uplifting.
Well, not necessarily uplifting (though there are moments), but something gentle, occasionally dark, fleetingly creepy and most importantly, worthy of a second listen. Trader Horne’s one and only album, 1970′s Morning Way, is, in fact, worthy of much more than a second listen.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Firstly, this may have been Trader Horne’s lone release, but they were in fact a duo comprising of original Fairport Convention vocalist and one time member of an embryonic King Crimson, Judy Dyble, and Irish folk rock underground ubiquity Jackie McAuley. The conjunction of these musical forces resulted in Morning Way, a pleasingly obscure example of psychedelically informed folk rock.
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acid-folk, album reviews, folk rock, psych-folk
While we’re on the subject of good album covers, that of Traffic’s 1971 album, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, continues to divide opinion on whether it’s a classic or not. I say it isn’t; everyone else says it is.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s quite poor, faintly reminiscent of The Who’s Tommy, and possibly designed as a portent to what lies within.
Nevertheless, Rolling Stone would list Tony Wright’s artwork as one of their “100 Greatest Album Covers”, but what do they know? Then again, what do I know? Very little, obviously. That’s why I’m sat here writing this barely coherent nonsense for free.
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album reviews, prog rock
I really like the cover of Heron’s 1971 double album Twice as Nice & Half the Price. It depicts the band and the Devon gameskeeper’s cottage, outside of which the album was recorded.
Situated in a wood near to the village of Black Dog, it’s a snapshot of pastoral bliss from a time when bands left, right and centre were decamping to record company-paid, far from the madding crowd retreats, to “get it together in the country”.
Yes, I really like this album cover. I can almost picture myself there too. Enlisted to tickle a triangle, bang a tambourine, or shake a cowbell, which is about the limit of my musical prowess. Outside a cottage. In a wood. In Devon. In 1971.
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album reviews, folk rock, prog rock
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