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:
Rick Wakeman – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
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?
Truth be told, no album is ever going to match the expectations kindled by a cover like the one that graces Andrew Leigh’s Magician (Bo Hansson’s Magician’s Hat and Heron’s Twice as Nice & Half the Pricebeing two other salient examples).
That said, this 1970 release by the sometime Spooky Tooth bassist and future Matthews’ Southern Comfort member, does attempt to scale the heights of anticipation its somewhat wonderful artwork inspires… for the first two tracks anyway.
The suspect cover of Bill Nelson’s 1971 debut, Northern Dream, reflects the almost homemade nature of its sound. Written, produced, sung and harmonised by Nelson, with the musical auteur also playing the lion’s share of the instruments, it was recorded on the most basic of equipment and thus enjoys a rawer – dare I say, more honest – sound than one would find on professionally put together singer-songwriter releases of the time.
300 copies of the album were originally pressed, the sessions funded by Nelson’s local record shop in Wakefield. It took the intervention of legendary bumbler John Peel – as was so often the case – to bring Northern Dream to a wider audience and set young Bill on a road that would lead to the forming of unconventional prog act, Be-Bop Deluxe, and numerous other successes thereafter.
The music on Northern Dream transverses various styles, soaking up the psychedelic, folk, blues and even a smattering of country rock (‘Sad Feelings’). As the artist himself states, in this new CD reissue’s liner notes, he “wandered the fields of Yorkshire trying to live the ‘peace and love’, post-hippie dream… some sort of psychedelic troubadour or something.”
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.
One look at the track titles on The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope Yet to be Sent, the 2005 debut album from Circulus, reveals some pretty fertile ground upon which to sew next season’s crop. There’ll be no need to set light to Edward Woodward, or to give a rousing chorus of ‘Sumer is Incumen In’ (not until their third album, anyway); Circulus have it all in hand.
Existing in one form or another for longer than I’d care to mention, the constant factor that has kept Circulus going all this time is Michael Tyack; songwriter, vocalist and medieval throwback. It is him we have to thank for the unique brand of psychedelic, progressive folk rock that Circulus purvey, like the troupe of wandering minstrels given access to electricity that they are.
The Lick on the Tip of an Envelope Yet to be Sent may not be their first release, but it is their first album and it sets out the Circulus manifesto very nicely indeed.
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.
It’s easy to laugh at Donovan. So often painted as a bandwagon-jumping, wide-eyed innocent, he was initially marketed, somewhat wrongly, as the British answer to Bob Dylan, before he embraced the flower power movement, turned all trippy and started hanging around with John Lennon. The fact that he took his dad on the road with him didn’t really help matters.
Despite the ridicule fired in his direction back then and in the intervening years, Donovan was nonetheless responsible for some of the gentler and more memorable songs of the psychedelic era. His blend of acid-folk flavoured psychedelic pop/rock first found an outlet on his third album release, 1966′s Sunshine Superman.
Originally denied a release in the UK due to contractual disputes, Sunshine Superman finally saw the light of day over here in 1967, although with an amended track-listing that threw in some songs from the follow-up, Mellow Yellow, and omitted others. The 2005 EMI reissue reinstates the original line-up, as well as a further 6 bonus tracks.
Possibly my favourite of all Caravan songs. ‘Ride’ is a thoroughly psychedelic piece taken from their self-titled 1968 debut album, when the soon-to-be prog faves were still in the grips of psychedelia.
The Canterbury scene stalwarts sprang from the Wilde Flowers, the band that went on to split its membership between Caravan and Soft Machine, and ‘Ride’ is a gentle breeze floating on the warm summer air of a lush pastoral setting, somewhere in England, 1968.
Any compilation that features the song from the maypole scene in The Wicker Man is going to have something going for it.
Strange Folk is a collection of folk songs, some from the 1960s and 1970s, and others more recent, which share a dark or decidedly unusual edge. The 19 tracks hereon range from the eerie, in Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man’s ‘Mysteries’, to the unintentionally terrifying with the Incredible String Band’s masterclass in cat-strangling, tuneless dirgemaking ‘Saturday Maybe’.
But don’t let the inclusion of those enemies of the carried note put you off – skip buttons could well have been invented with these forte-free fiends in mind – as Strange Folk manages to erase any bad Incredible String-based experiences with some shrewdly chosen musical remedies.
How about a wee drop of finest acid-folk from Pentangle, the folk-rock/jazz-folk pioneers formed by legends of the scene, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn?
Thankfully, ‘House Carpenter’ is a jazz-free zone, instead incorporating Renbourn’s sitar and Jansch’s banjo to produce one soothing psychedelic folk ensemble. Singer Jacqui McShee and Jansch share vocal duties on the unique arrangement of this traditional folk song, which, in turn, is based upon ye olde ballad, ‘The Daemon Lover’.
So begins the first review of 2010. And where better to start than with the latest release from those retro vinyl-pushers, Fruits de Mer Records? This time they’ve called upon the services of Swedish anglophiles (musically, at least) Us & Them, and produced a 3-track EP worthy of Venus herself.
Now, before we crack on, it’s worth mentioning that this site was once tagged by someone out there in the sprawling wilderness of the internets as “anti-folk”. This was on the strength of a review of those warbling cat-stranglers The Incredible String Band and their so-bad-it’s-awful album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and to say that Head Full of Snow loves a bit of acid, pastoral or wyrd-folk is a bloody great understatement.
Which is just as well in the case of Us & Them and their brand of gentle, but dark, folk stylings as demonstrated on the Fruits de Mer Volume Eight EP. Now if we’d been tagged “anti-jazz” that would be a different, yet fairer, matter.
If your idea of a good time is something along the lines of setting light to virgins in wicker effigies, then Comus could be right up your street. Even if you harbour no such homicidal tendencies, they’re still a damn fine listen.
Comus inhabit that most spectral of sub-genres, acid-folk – A blend of the psychedelic and the folkish, underpinned by a progressive foundation. It’s an area of music renowned for its ethereal eeriness, oft-beauty, and mystical meanderings…
… Except nobody seemed to have told Comus that, for their 1971 debut, First Utterance, is, to put it bluntly, quite terrifying.
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.
I seem to have jumped the gun when I made the rather bold statement that The Duckworth Lewis Method had released the best new album you would hear this year – back in August. Since then I have gone on to discover the sublime Circulus, who released their third album in June (reviews soon, promise) and now this cheeky little combo, The Witch and the Robot.
Set to be released on October 5th (2009), On Safari is their debut album.
Hailing from Ambleside in the Lake District, the band’s press release promises a blend of dark psychedelia, folk, shanties and spoken word – “proving that the darkest music often comes from the prettiest places” – and I’m happy to say they don’t disappoint. In fact any album actively promoting shanties, has to be a must-listen in my book.
Circulus are a rather excellent modern-day psychedelic-folk act, who look as though they’ve taken one double-dip of lysergic acid diethylamide too many and woken up in the late sixties/early seventies – a better time for music, when this type of thing was the norm.
Fusing Elizabethan elements into their witch’s cauldron of evocative and pastoral psychedelia, Circulus are quite unlike anything else doing the rounds today. HFoS applauds this non-conformity and a sound that reaches out from the perfumed gardens and Jostick-scented abodes of 1971.
Long before Marc Bolan turned electric, installed a rhythm section, shortened the name of his band to T Rex and launched a full fontal assault on the UK charts with his hugely successful brand of glam rock, there was Tyrannosaurus Rex, the two man psychedelic-folk outfit who ruled the underground during the late ’60s.
John Peel favourites, the band comprised of Bolan on vocals and guitar, and the wildly hedonistic Steve Peregrin Took – a man who’d named himself after a Hobbit – on percussion, backing vocals and anything else that came to hand. They swam in an enchanted sea of acoustic folk-rock, heavily influenced by the psychedelic scene, with tales of the fantastic straight out of Tolkien, blended with the poetry of Blake.
Unicorn, released in 1969, was their third album and Took’s last.
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.
Kevin Ayers’s Joy of a Toy does its best to defy the pigeon-hole. Just how do you begin to describe it? Pastoral? Folk? Psychedelic? Progressive? Avant Garde?… Well it contains elements of all these things and more.
Released in 1969, the debut release from the ex-Soft Machine vocalist and bass player takes the title of one of his former group’s songs and opens a window onto a world that is uniquely English.
Psychedelic music, be it of the rock or slightly more flowery pop variety, is thoroughly adept when it comes to throwing out a haunting tune. For example, just take Pink Floyd’s ‘Julia Dream’, John Wonderling’s ‘Man of Straw’, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘White Ship’ or Peter Thorogood’s aptly named ‘Haunted’ – mere examples of a musical genre that often excelled in sending a shiver up the old spine. Syd Barrett’s ‘Golden Hair’, based on a poem by James Joyce, is two minutes worth of ethereal eeriness that for me evokes images of a twilight cottage at the edge of a dark, dark wood, sometime in 1969. Don’t ask.
“… My god, the spiders are everywhere…” Words to send a shiver down the spine of anyone with the slightest aversion to those eight-legged, scuttling terrors.
And that is evidently Kaleidoscope’s intention in the eerily folkish, pop-psych of ‘(Further Reflections) In the Room of Percussion’, employing imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place in a 1970′s BBC adaptation of an M.R. James ghost story.
Just what is the room of percussion, where shadowy friends climb the walls?
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?
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