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
For those who like their progressive rock to be pompous, oppulent, lavishly overloaded and thoroughly overblown (you had me at pompous), the following press release may be of interest:
Airing: Saturday 4th September 2010. 10am (Repeated Friday 1oth September. 10pm)
Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, two of the keyboard giants of the classic progressive rock era, have recorded a rare interview together for Planet Rock Radio.
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news, prog rock
Even the grunts at HFoS Towers – the ones who put this poor excuse for a website together on a weekly basis – deserve a holiday once in a while; hence the lack of activity for the past week.
Never fear, all is well, and what better way to return than with the final release from what, for many, will be the sorely missed Bracken Records. The label ran by Andy Bracken, one half of the team behind Fruits de Mer Records – and, incidentally, a very erudite interviewee, as witnessed here and here – is calling it a day.
What better way for the label to go out than to enlist the aid of FdM favourites Cranium Pie (their version of ‘Madman Running Through the Fields‘ is a particular highlight in the Fruits de Mer canon), whose blend of psychedelic progginess keeps the flag flying in 2010 and beyond.
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prog rock, psychedelic rock, song reviews
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
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
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
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
Suddenly appearing in 1969, prior to disappearing with equal haste not long after, Dr. Z was a part-time project undertaken by three learned gents from Swansea University.
Their one and only 1971 concept album, Three Parts to My Soul, was released on the Vertigo label to the sound of one hand clapping and underwhelming critical indifference and is said to have sold as few as 100 copies. In the intervening years it has been touted as one of the rarest albums to have been put out by Vertigo and original vinyl copies are priced in the three figure bracket among collectors of obscure prog.
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music vid, prog rock
When you leave five or so pounds of Semtex in the crawlspace beneath a stage, then tell whoever’s booked to play, mid-set, that you’ll detonate it unless they crank up the pace a touch, it probably sounds a little something like this.
Beggar’s Opera, playing as though their lives depend on it.
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music vid, prog rock
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
Alan Bown played the trumpet with rock & roll big band, The John Barry Seven. When the Brit beat and R&B boom exploded, Alan Bown did what any self-respecting trumpeter would do and formed his own group, The Alan Bown Set, soon to be known as The Alan Bown!
With Jess Roden on vocals and a couple of Toytown psych excursions, in ‘Mr. Job’ and ‘Toyland’, under the belt they released Outward Bown and a self-titled album before Roden quit. The vocals for the latter were re-recorded by the late Robert Palmer, he of ‘Addicted to Love’ success, who went on to pull exactly the same stroke as Roden for the next album, quitting the band just prior to its release.
Gordon Neville was recruited to overdub Palmer’s vocals and, now simply calling themselves Alan Bown, 1970′s Listen was the result.
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album reviews, prog rock
Here’s a bit of trivia for you. 1973′s Journey, from Arthur Brown’s progressive outfit Kingdom Come, was the first ever album to use a drum machine for its all of its percussion. The technology in question was a Bentley Rhythm Ace, one of the first of its kind, and in honour of this, the drumming was credited to the imaginary member, Ace Bentley.
Possibly not one of the likeliest bits of trivia to help out in a pub quiz, but you never know. I’ll be expecting a share of the loot, beer tokens, knock off DVDs etc. if it ever does.
As for Journey itself, once again Arthur Brown confounds expectations by flying off on a musical tangent to what had gone before.
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album reviews, prog rock
Prog rock always held close ties to classical music, with a good deal of the musicians involved having been classically trained and using the disciplines of the form when it came to ideas and song structure. The Nice, Rick Wakeman, E.L.P. and to a certain extent E.L.O., sit as some of the more famous examples of this crossover between the two genres, and Procol Harum maintained the symphonic edge throughout the course of their original ten albums and onwards to this day.
Not so well known, but possibly one of the strongest demonstrations of the merger between classical and prog, is the 1970 album Act One, by Glaswegian band, Beggar’s Opera.
Sporting a surreal cover that just smacks of late sixties and early seventies wonderland-esque mind alteration, Act One sets the Beggar’s Opera stall out right from the very off, weaving the work of various classical composers into their Hammond organ marinated sonic stew.
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album reviews, prog rock
At Head Full of Snow we care not where our progressive rock hails from.
So long as it sounds good and, for the most part, is sung in the Queen’s own English (apologies, but we like to know what’s going on) then it’s guaranteed a repeat spin on the HFoS turntable.
Wigwam was a Finnish prog band, featuring among its fold, English ex-pat Jim Pembroke and Pekka Pohjola, who, as well as attaining solo success, also played with Made in Sweden and Mike Oldfield’s band. 1971′s Fairyport was their third album for the Finnish label, Love Records, following on from 1969′s Hard ‘n’ Horny and 1970′s Tombstone Valentine.
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album reviews, prog rock
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