Gadzooks! Has it really been over a month since the last posting on HFoS?
I suggest somebody pulls their finger out and gets a proverbial wriggle on… That would be me then.
Just to let you know, HFoS hasn’t died, nor the bloke what does the writing. It will, in fact, return shortly. Largely because this backlog of Esoteric reissues in need of review, isn’t getting any smaller.
By Christmas Eve, 1977, professional Geordies Lindisfarne had been through the rigors of line-up changes, dissolution and the inevitable reformation, all within the space of eight short years.
The rough ‘n’ ready combo, often derided for their Rent-a-Geordie posturing, may have been past their creative prime by the time Magic in the Air - a live recording of the culminating event in a short run of Christmas concerts – was released, but the fact remains that their first three albums, Nicely Out of Tune, Fog on the Tyne and Dingly Dell, were compelling and enjoyable slices of hairier-than-thou folk rock.
Thankfully, on Magic in the Air – which brings the original line-up back together – the band knows which side their musical bread is buttered and draws all but one of its songs from those first three albums, resulting in a crowd-pleasing set that returns them to their early 70s heyday.
The constraints of time have decreed that there will only be the one HFoS Selection Pack this year; an amalgamation of three as opposed to the usual singular entities. Time has also put paid to the promised King Crimson reviews, but fear not, they will arrive – like a forgetful Santa – in the new year.
So what festive fare have I picked randomly from the ether for you spend your Our Price vouchers on this year? Read on, my fine fellows and fellowettes:
As it’s Christmas, something supremely daft is in order and they don’t come much dafter than this live recording. A man in a cape, with enough electric pianos, organs, Moogs, Mellotrons and what-have-yous to cause an energy crisis on a small Mediterranean island. The London Symphony Orchestra. The English Chamber Choir. Narration from the preposterously eyebrowed David Hemmings (following Billy Dainty’s scheduling conflict). An audience anticipating something with the subtlety of a broken bottle to the throat… What the deuce were they all thinking?
album reviews, folk rock, prog rock, psych-folk, psych-pop, psychedelic rock
HFoS is presently on summer holiday, hence the lackadaisical approach to posting over the past week, this week and, indeed, the next. Never fear, we were allowed to bring our games in on the last day of term and even wear our own clothes, which is always a bonus. I, myself, chose Game of Dracula and proceeded to thrash all comers. The soundtrack to this final day of inertia at HFoS Towers happened to be this rare beauty: Tudor Lodge, a fine old dose of progressive folk rock, by the band of the same name.
Originally released in 1971, Tudor Lodge is as pleasant as an English pasture. A testament to inoffensive, folkie fun by a trio of lovely people, sporting lovely tunes.
A foul night on the beer could find a mid-morning salve from a listen to the 13 tracks that sit innocuously on this splendid reissue. Largely acoustic, this is what it sounded like in certain quarters of England during the late 60s and early 70s. Hell’s teeth! One wishes it was still the same – long hair, flutes, the occasional piano and a soft voice guiding you onto the jagged rocks, courtesy of the ethereal timbre Ann Steuart traded in.
Always fashionably late to the party, HFoS celebrates St. Paddy’s Day two weeks after the event, with a dose of sun-kissed acid folk, drifting in like a bank of green mist from the glittering shores of the emerald isle.
Released in 1974, Loudest Whisper’s folk opera concept album, The Children of Lir, recounts a tall tale from Celtic legend, regarding a Sea god and his four children, who’re turned into swans by a jealous step-mother. Just another day at the office in Irish folklore.
Originally envisaged as a stage show and performed parochially, The Children of Lir turned out to be such an ambitious production that a pared-down version of it was featured in a primetime slot on national TV station RTE. The band, accompanied by 50 or so performers and vocalist/slide guitarist Ron Kavanagh, succeeded in wowing their audiences and the TV exposure helped bring about a record deal with Polydor, a label offering sanctuary to many a progressive artist throughout the preceding years.
acid-folk, album reviews, folk rock, progressive folk, psych-folk
And so it’s with a hey-nonny-no, a pewter tankard of Abbot’s Wedding Tackle™ and an aran-knit jumper you could walk to the North Pole in, that HFoS bids farewell to 2010 with a festive folk Christmas Selection Pack.
The rules, as ever, remain the same. This is no top five and shouldn’t be treated as such. Just another pointless list that captures a few of Head Full of Snow’s favourite acid folk/folk rock albums from the moisty mists of time.
As unfestive an album as it’s possible to get. Comus’s songs of bloody Pagan sacrifice, murder, rape and insanity are certainly not recommended listening for the Christmas dinner table when granny comes around. Liable to cause an untoward reaction in those of a delicate persuasion, First Utterance is the Witchfinder General of progressive acid-folk. Released in 1971, this godless nightmare of an album features an astounding vocal performance by lead singer Roger Wootton, whose words form like the gnarled, twisted roots of a hanging tree against the icy, death-sodden melodies that seethe ominously away, somewhere beneath. A full review of First Utterance can be found here.
First Utterance by Comus is available as part of 2-disc anthology Song to Comus, to buy from Amazon.co.uk
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Forget you ever heard the loathsome ‘Part of the Union’. When the Strawbs were firing on all cylinders they knocked out great tunes like this.
Appearing on 1971′s From the Witchwood, ‘The Hangman and the Papist is a rich swirl of Rick Wakeman’s church organ noodling and Dave Cousins’ atmospheric vocals. A parable on religious divide, ‘The Hangman and the Papist’ is powerful stuff indeed.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDDy6qXIWC8
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Long have I avoided the folk/prog outfit formerly known as The Strawberry Hill Boys. This has been a premeditated decision that has everything to do with their highest charting single, ‘Part of the Union’. This sorry offering is both offensive and musically reprehensible. I won’t dwell on the rights and wrongs of well-fed rock stars smugly making fun of the downtrodden; suffice to say HFoS doesn’t approve. One bit.
That said, this distasteful example of anti-trade union sentiment was written by the band’s rhythm section, who would depart soon after, and despite any animosity I might hold towards the song and its writers, if the truth be known, before this affront to the working classes was vomited onto an unsuspecting world, clad in an ill-fitting overcoat of jauntiness, the Strawbs were a cracking good band. Even after this unsightly smear of a song had been foisted upon the Great British public, the Strawbs could still knock out a half-decent album, leaving the pro-Tory vaudevillian act in the gutter where it belonged.
Political rant over, the epiphany that allowed this previously despised group into HFoS towers came in two forms. Sid Smith’s Postcards From the Yellow Room podcast and Rob Young’s essential and essentially weighty tome on British folk music, Electric Eden
For those of a certain age, myself included, the first exposure to Lindisfarne would’ve come post-Italia ’90, with the truly execrable ‘Fog on the Tyne (revisited)’. It featured, a then in the ascendency, Paul Gascoigne pulling off what has to be some of the worst rapping since Dr. Dre accidentally dropped his prized solid brass bust of salad dodging politico, Cyril Smith, on Eazy-E’s foot, during an early take of ‘Fuck Tha Police’.
Needless to say, it was enough to tarnish the public image of Lindesfarne for a generation who’d never before heard of them, myself included.
But exactly twenty years earlier, the original ‘Fog on the Tyne’ had yet to be released, Gazza was yet to stagger home pissed, and Lindesfarne were dipping their collective toe into the album market with this, their 1970 debut Nicely Out of Tune. Released on the Charisma label, it introduced the folk rock stylings of five hairy-arsed Geordies to a public beyond the borders of Tyne and Wear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you were to head over to AMG and look up their review of Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice, you would find the rather iniquitous quote “… reminiscent of Donovan’s forays into that area, though not as interesting.”
How wrong could they be? Dreaming With Alice, released only in Italy in 1972, possesses a certain magic that more than exonerates the cult that has built up around it over the years. As far as obscure acid folk rarities go, this is a stone-cold classic.
In fact, the only fault that can be found in it is the fact it was released in 1972, whereas it sounds as though it were recorded at the tail-end of the 1960s. The fact that music had moved on so much in the intervening years possibly accounts for the fact it could only secure an Italian release. Of course, nearly forty years on, when it was recorded is an irrelevance.
Jethro Tull’s 1969 album Stand Up was the follow up to the inconsistent debut, This Was, and the first to feature Birmingham-born mainstay Martin Lancelot Barre on guitar.
It was also the album that signposted the path down which Jethro Tull (or the mighty Tull, dependant on personal opinion) were headed, largely doing away with the blues influence of the previous release and drifting, via the road of progressive rock, into more folkish pastures.
The change came about following the departure of Mick Abrahams, who’d left following creative differences between him and Tull’s main man Ian Anderson, over musical direction. When replacement and future Black Sabbath axeman Toni Iommi failed to work out it was left to Martin Barre to take up the mantle, which he did, remaining to this day.
Ah, Jefferson Airplane, those fair-weather freedom-fighters who set the American folk-rock/psychedelic scene ablaze between 1967 and 1970, before falling from the perch and metamorphosing into Jefferson Starship. Granted, there were albums released either side of this three year catchment zone, but none that would have the influence or raw power of Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Crown of Creation and this one, Volunteers.
Jefferson Airplane weren’t afraid to play with politics. They were the self-appointed spokespersons of a generation, riding the revolutionary wave of the time and profiting handsomely from it. 1969′s Volunteers is the result of all this fragmented rhetoric, packaged neatly onto a slab of vinyl and sold back to “the kids” for a nice little earner.
Throughout the history of music it’s generally out of the norm for a band to change their name, while remaining the same band. It happens when a band splits, or the creative force buggers off and takes the name with him. Or it happens in the early days when a band’s still finding its musical feet and they’ve yet to hit the big time. The Move falls into the category of “band that changed their name but retained the line-up” when they became the Electric Light Orchestra (for the first album, anyway), as does Fairfield Parlour.
Fairfield Parlour had already released two albums as psychedelic-folk rockers, Kaleidoscope (not to be confused with the American psychedelic folk-rock ?!?!? band of the same name), and it was under this new name, in 1970, that they put out From Home to Home.
During the late sixties and early seventies, each and every rockstar worth their salt considered themselves to be the new Che Guevara. They communicated with the masses via soundbites of revolutionary rhetoric – more often than not from the comfort of their three storey mansion or tax exile in the South of France – and once the imminent uprising that had been promised burned itself out, they retired to count their money.
Revolution was, after all, big business.
So in honour of some of these Che charlatons who turned tail and fled as soon as the going got tough, Head Full of Snow brings you 5 songs with which to spark a revolution (or not).
An absolute stormer of a track and one that was written at a time when the anti-Vietnam war protests had spread as far afield as London, sparking riots and encouraging Mick Jagger himself to take to the streets and… stand on the sidelines taking photos of the ensuing chaos. Jagger was perhaps the biggest pretender to the revolutionary throne, toying with the imagery during the era of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, but soon getting bored and leaving it all behind to concentrate on becoming the mucky little devil we all know today. ‘Street Fighting Man’ appears on 1968′s Beggars Banquet.
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feature, folk rock, freak rock, music vid, prog rock, psychedelic rock
Fairfield Parlour were once the psychedelic-fairy-tale-folksters Kaleidoscope and this song, ‘Aries’, is bob, and indeed, on. A quiet lament for times gone by and gentle reminiscence, it is a simple thing of beauty.
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