Phil Manzanera - Diamond Head

This is one of those records that has been with me in one form or another since its release in 1975. My first copy of this was on pre-recorded cassette, then came the LP, both of which I wore out.

When my disposable income allowed me to indulge in record collecting in a big way, I tracked down a pristine vinyl copy, the sound of which is simply gorgeous, better than the first CD version from the turn of the century. The last CD remaster that came out on Expression Records in 2011 however has done the sound the justice it deserves.

That this seamless beauty was recorded and mixed in a 26-day gap in Roxy Music's schedule at the tail end of 1975 through the beginning of 1976 before beginning a North American tour is quite astonishing, especially in an era when the rock heavyweights took a week to lay down a two note guitar fill, maan. Even more remarkable is that within this time frame he also recorded an album with his pre-Roxy Band Quiet Sun, unbeknownst to his record label! More on that later.

Manzanera penned all the music, and called in the kind of supporting cast most could only dream of; Robert Wyatt, Eno, John Wetton and Bill MacCormick contribute lyrics and vocals to five of the nine songs here. Manzanera's ex-Roxy colleague gets two, MacCormick, Wyatt and Wetton one apiece. The other four tracks of the original album are instrumentals where a marked Canterbury style gets shown how to flamenco by Phil's spicy electric Iberian guitar stylings, via South and Latin America, a result of his widely travelled upbringing. Joining Phil we have, amongst others, Wetton's bass, Roxy colleagues, all of Quiet Sun, and on bonus track Carhumba a trio of Nigerian musicians and South African trumpet legend Mongezi Feza star on an early foray into what would become known as world music. Oh, and not forgetting one Ian McDonald on bagpipes on East Of Echo.

I make no excuses for this review going down the dreaded "track-by-track" route, as a classic album like this deserves no less. And so, to the backing of a tune coming straight down a dusty track from a high sierra somewhere in an alternate universe, lacking only imagined castanets clicking away, Robert Wyatt gets to wrap his ever distinctive tonsils around a Spanish tale of derring-do and subterfuge from the Frontera. This is followed by the contemplative instrumental title track that unfolds like a waking flower in the desert, reaching full bloom under the sympathetic cultivation of Eddie Jobson's multi-tracked strings. Phil contributes a marvellous understated guitar solo, one of the few on the album.

Unusually for a solo album, the main man's instrument is largely used in an impressionistic manner, leaving the strength of the songwriting and arrangements to do the work. This highlights the lack of ego and pretence at large, something most solo albums of the era suffered greatly from.

Big Day, the first Eno song, sees the protagonist longing for home, in this case Peru, and for once Eno keeps it relatively literal, to an accompanying simple descending chord sequence. It is of course, quite sublime. "Oo-poo-Peru", indeed! The Flex is a dirty funk workout, starring Jobson's Stevie Wonder-esque clavinet and Andy McKay's sax, topped off with a dirty funk-fuzz guitar break from Phil.

Next up is Same Time Next Week, where John Wetton and Doreen Chanter duet on John's laissez-faire hymn to liberated 70s sexual mores, something of a follow up to the devil-may-care attitudes expressed in his lyric to Easy Money, penned only a couple of years before this. The music is a skittering jazz sand lizard chasing the tail of the much heavier Crim tune, topped off with a nice'n'sleazy guitar break from Mr M.



This is followed by the sublime Miss Shapiro, an immediately obvious Eno vocal and lyric. This and Big Day match anything on the "vocal" four of Eno's first five solo albums, before he stopped writing and singing those odd and oblique words, and ran with the ambient themes first expressed on Discreet Music, the odd one out of those first five, all much to our loss.

A typically surreal example of Eno word association, Miss Shapiro is one of those seemingly effortless left-field pop lyrics that he was so good at, and includes a doo-wop pastiche in the chorus that I swear goes "Chop suey, chop chop suey". If it doesn't, it should! Hidden away in the song there is even a reference to the world's longest running soap opera, BBC Radio 4's The Archers. Marvellous! Manzanera's handclap festooned tune to this is suitably throwaway, but timeless all the same. A veritable pop classic.

Lurking around in the studio were the rest of Quiet Sun, waiting to start the nightshift, so why not use them all together for once? This our hero does and adds Wetton's bass, Thompson's drums, Ian MacDonald's bagpipes and Eno's guitar treatments to the instrumental highlight of the album, the wonderful East Of Echo. A space rock opera from The Latino Space Agency, Cuban heels click to Phil's spidery guitar and Wetton's unusually funky bass as we head off into the cosmic dust to be greeted at the apex of our orbit by MacDonald's bagpipes fed through a synth patch, shards of otherworldly echoing guitar leading into the fade-in of Lagrima.

After the full-on epic treatments of its predecessor, Lagrima is a simple flamenco introduction on Phil's Spanish guitar, accompanied only by Andy McKay's oboe. In this dream home the heartache is over, the weary soul has accepted its fate. Without warning the initially upfront Alma crashes in, soon to establish its melancholy urban dislocation with Bill MacCormick's lyric and Phil's wistful tune. The redemptive and defiant outro ups the ante and rides out on another rare spotlight-grabbing moment from Phil; bloody glorious it is, too.

After Alma I usually stop the CD, as this is the proper end to the album. The bonus tracks are interesting, nothing more. Carhumba features some stellar guitar from Phil and great trumpet playing from Mongezi Feza, while Corazon Y Alma is a low-fi demo of snatches of tunes that would end up on Diamond Head, recorded by Quiet Sun as far back as 1971. This goes a little way to explain how Manzanera managed to record this album in such a short space of time and seemingly with little rehearsal, as it appears these are old tunes that Phil already had at least partly worked out in his head.

Diamond Head was Phil Manzanera's first solo album and it is the sound of a musician riding the crest of a wave of unfettered imagination. In my opinion it remains his best work outside of Roxy Music. Diamond Head is a joyous affirmation, and even all these years later it still sounds as fresh as a daisy. That's the wonder of the tundra!

Tracklist:

1. Frontera (4:02)
2. Diamond Head (4:30)
3. Big Day (3:44)
4. The Flex (3:32)
5. Same Time Next Week (4:45)
6. Miss Shapiro (6:29)
7. East Of Echo (5:45)
8. Lagrima (2:35)
9. Alma (6:48)

Bonus tracks
10. Carhumba (4:48)
11. Corazon Y Alma (10:24)

Total running time - 57:35

Line up:
Phil Manzanera - guitars, keyboards, bass, fuzz bass, string synthesizer,
Robert Wyatt - lead vocals, timbals, cabasa, backing vocals
Brian Eno - backing vocals, guitar treatment, rhythm guitar, piano
John Wetton - bass, lead vocals, mellotron
Brian Turrington -bass
Paul Thompson - drums
Eddie Jobson - strings, fender piano, electric clavinet, synthesizer
Andy MacKay - soprano sax, alto sax, oboe
Bill MacCormick - fuzz bass themes, vocals
Charles Hayward - percussion
Dave Jarrett - keyboards
Ian McDonald - bagpipes
Sonny Akpan - congas
Doreen Chanter - lead vocals
Chyke Hainu - drums
Danny Heibs - bass
Mongezi Feza - trumpet 

Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance

Having neglected my "Formative Years" series for far too long, here's an album that, after The Faust Tapes, was my second tentative step in the direction of the strangely strange. Suitably enough, as if an excuse is needed, this month sees the (gulp) 35th anniversary of the release of The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu.

Becoming something of a musical sponge since the sharp left turn that my musical education masterclass (aka The John Peel Show) took at the tail end of 1976, coupled with the influence of The Bible (aka the NME), I ventured into town in April 1978 and towards its indie emporium of choice already emboldened by a liking for the more accessible end of Beefheart, Zappa and Robert Wyatt, all thanks to Mr Ravenscroft, and took a plunge on the NME's recommendation and bought the Datapanik In The Year Zero EP by a mysterious and faceless band going by the name of Pere Ubu hailing from Cleveland, Ohio. Yes, the same state that gave birth to Devo, sweet little puppies in comparison to this odd bunch of socially excluded misfits, for sure.

Datapanik was an EP combining five tracks lifted off impossible to get singles from 1975 and 1976, a release only made possible by the championing of those same twin pillars of left-field music the NME and Peely, and put out in April 1978 on Radar Records. An odd choice of label really, the Stiff Records spin-off having been set up as a home for Elvis Costello and The Attractions. Anyway, I was hooked and the next week went back to Spinadisc and bought The Modern Dance.

If anything the album was in places even bleaker than the EP, which contained pleasant tales of the dropping of A Bombs on Japan, skewed visions of nirvana and the dark psychological outpourings from the troubled mind of guitarist Peter Laughner, who would die as a result of complications arising from drug and alcohol addiction in 1977.



All the songs on The Modern Dance are group compositions with the exception of side two opener Life Stinks, a short angry burst of misanthropy from Laughner: "Life stinks. I said I'm seeing pink. I said uh I can't wink and now I can't blink. I said I like the Kinks cuz I need a drink. I can't think cuz I like the Kinks. I said life stinks. I said I need a drink. Yeah life stinks. I said life stinks. I said Yeah", snarled to a wiry punky guitar scratching, which just about summed up his sorry exit from the world.

Fusing a mixture of punky aggression, wilful Faustian/Beefheart experimentation, and the knack of writing some very odd skewed pop songs, the music on its own was a treat. Undoubted instrumental star of the show was Allen Ravenstine whose occasionally violent sax honking and primitive synth lines slap the listener round the ears with alarming irregularity. Right from the off, when a very high-pitched synth pulse introduces and permeates the otherwise straightforward fast guitar chords of Non-Alignment Pact you know this isn't your average punky fare.

Of course, the lyrics of one David Thomas are what really makes this stand out. That opening song is a lyrically clever if musically simple call for a truce with numerous ex-girlfriends, but from then on in it is never that easy. The Modern Dance, an earlier version of which appeared as Untitled on the Datapanik EP, is a sideways glance at inertia-inducing inhibitions: "'Cause our poor boy believes in chance (merdre merdre) He'll never get the modern dance (merdre merdre)". Each line calls, and the response each time is a throwaway "shit shit", and it still makes me smile. The song mixes robo-funk on an electric piano with more Faust-like synth scratchings evoking a very disquieting atmosphere. Crowd laughter and applause presage a mad strangled guitar break, all the while David Thomas' tremulous warble bemoans our hero's self-consciousness.

Free-jazz sax wailing sprawls all over the loose-limbed intro to Laughing until it ups the pace to lurch along drunkenly. A romantic tale, David gets all wistful: "My baby says we can live in the empty spaces of this life"..."If the Devil comes, my baby says, shoot him with a gun". Street Waves is a fast-paced love song infused with urban excitement including another one of those "lets hit this synth patch and see what it does" moments that makes this so musically exciting, and, it hasn't aged in the slightest unlike a lot of music from that era.

Chinese Radiation is a very obtuse and strange song from the standpoint of star-crossed Chinese Communist lovers...possibly. After all these years I'm still not sure. If that was odd, by far the most unsettling thing on this record is Sentimental Journey, and to this day it remains one of the most genuinely scary songs I've ever heard, and I've heard more than a few. The sound of a psyche falling apart.

But, before that we have Life Stinks, as already mentioned, and Real World, my favourite piece of music on the record, sounding like Talking Heads on drugs aimed at controlling schizophrenia, a blurred visage of a warped mind in awe of the modern world. Over My Head is space rock for a rocket that never leaves the ground, with an almost conventional guitar break, and a very oblique lyric that is best left unanalysed.

Sentimental Journey starts with the sound of bottles being stacked and smashed to a very minimalistic backing, slow chording, sax wailing, David Thomas muttering and mumbling incomprehensibly, falling over his tongue with frustration building, spitting and tripping over the words that do come out. "Ah. Oh oh, unh-hunh. Table and chair and tvs and books and lamps and other stuff. It's home. It's a rug it's a home it's a rug it's a window. I don't...Phhght! Ah-pa. I'll go home. I'll go home. It's home. It's home. Umm", and wherever that home is David, I hope you are very happy there!

The album is shot through with very black humour, and as David says in the closing uptempo Humor Me, pop handclaps and all, "But what a world to be drowned in. It's a joke, man".

As far as I know, and I'll admit to not having heard every album they have released since, this was probably as out-there as Pere Ubu got, and although Dub Housing, The Art Of Walking and Song Of The Bailing Man certainly have their moments, and it could be argued that ...Walking was even weirder, it was the freshness of The Modern Dance that shocked this then naive listener.

The band later moved on to very left-field pop masterpieces like Cloudland and Worlds In Collision, and having never split up and releasing an album every few years their discography now numbers some 15 albums, with this year's Lady From Shanghai being the latest, and one I fully intend to hear.

As David Thomas has said "Pere Ubu is not now nor has it ever been a viable commercial venture. We won't sleep on floors, we won't tour endlessly and we're embarrassed by self-promotion. Add to that a laissez-faire attitude to the mechanics of career advancement and a demanding artistic agenda and you've got a recipe for real failure. That has been our one significant success to this date: we are the longest-lasting, most disastrous commercial outfit to ever appear in rock 'n' roll. No one can come close to matching our loss to longevity ratio." Except perhaps The Fall, eh?


All lyrics by David Thomas, © 1978 Ubu Projex, administered by Bug Music (US/Can).
© 1978 EMI Music (ROW).


Find out more than you ever wanted to know about Pere Ubu over at the ubu projex, and they are on tour in the UK this month. See gig dates here.


Track listing:
Side one
1. Non-Alignment Pact – 3:18
2. The Modern Dance – 3:28
3. Laughing – 4:35
4. Street Waves – 3:04
5. Chinese Radiation – 3:27

Side two
1. Life Stinks - 1:52
2. Real World - 3:59
3. Over My Head - 3:48
4. Sentimental Journey - 6:05
5. Humor Me - 2:44

Line up:

David Thomas – vocals, musette, percussion, production
Tom Herman – guitar, backing vocals, production
Allen Ravenstine – EML 101 & 200 analog synthesizers, saxophone, tapes, production
Tony Maimone – bass, piano, backing vocals, production
Scott Krauss – drums, production
Tim Wright – bass guitar on "The Modern Dance" and "Sentimental Journey", production

Amon Düül II - Phallus Dei

Another album from my formative musical years...

Way back in the early 70s Liberty Records ran a budget subsidiary called Sunset that reissued albums from the mid to late 60s at less than half the price of the “proper” Liberty versions. Among the endless middle of the road American pop featured on this label were a few albums by Canned Heat and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and most curious of all Phallus Dei by Amon Düül II.

To a young lad barely into his teenage years, having sampled the “whites play the blues” of Canned Heat and chuckled at “the blues playing the whites” of the Bonzos, this strange looking slab of vinyl was too much to resist. Of course I had no idea of what might lay within the single sleeve of this low-price offering, and even less idea of what “Phallus Dei” actually meant. Needless to say I don’t think my church-going parents were overly impressed, but being liberal in outlook they did at least allow me to keep it.

Anyway, that is the story of how I came into possession of what remains to this day one of the strangest but most compelling 40 minutes of music in my now vast music collection.

Now for the review (“at last” I hear you cry!)….

Amon (from the Egyptian sun god) Düül (a German-Turkish derivative of Moon) were a 60s student hippy commune based in Munich, in what was then West Germany. Among their various expressions of free living they occasionally performed rudimentary music where anything went, and being at all proficient was more of a hindrance than a way in to one of their performances, which were mainly for their own amusement anyway. 

Guitarist and violinist Chris Karrer, frustrated at the lack of direction, along with John Weinzierl (guitars) Falk Rogner (organ), Dieter Serfas (drums) and Renate Knaup (vocals) broke away to form a more focussed musical unit, adding the suffix “II” to the commune name possibly to maintain their links with the ideology that also gave birth to the notorious Red Army Faction. Four albums worth of material recorded by the original Amon Düül in one long session in 1968 were later released by Metronome on the back of II’s success, and all I can say about them is avoid like the plague. They did make one “proper” album, Paradisewärts Düül, which is ok, but really only for the Krautrock aficionado.

So, what we have here is no ordinary rock’n’roll band, and you also have to remember that the nascent German underground music scene did not start from a launching pad of American blues as did their counterparts across The Channel and further across the Atlantic ocean.  This meant that the music of Amon Düül II did not sound like anything that had gone before, and along with compatriots Can with their Monster Movie album can be said to have created Krautrock from…well nothing at all really, a sort of Deutsch musikalischer Urknall if you will.

From the opening slow march of Kanaan one is transported back to the heady idealistic days of ultra-leftist politics, free psychedelics, and even freer music. If there is an olfactory form of synesthesia then to a sufferer this record must reek of pots of simmering psilocybin. Chris Karrer’s cod-operatic falsetto intones the first lines of the poem Dem Guten Schönen Wahren (To The True, The Beautiful, The Good) over eerie organ, guitars and violin backing. The production is sludgy and righteous as the song descends to an outer ring of Hell while Chris whoops and hollers as the Shaman-with-mad-eyes. 

Dominating the music is the dual drum line up, where, along with Dieter’s conventional kit and electric cymbals, Holger Trülzsch is pounding away at Turkish hand drums. This gives proceedings a distinctly tribal feel, as the guitar and violin are used primarily (and primitively it has to be said) in a rhythmic capacity. Luzifer’s Ghilom introduces Renate Knaup’s ethereal backing vocals, swooping around like a mythical bird of prey while Chris intones gibberish words like he means it baby. This is a Germanic mini-operetta featuring naked painted bodies shuffling in stoned ritual around and around a huge burning fire, where perhaps a sacrifice was made, who knows? Henriette Krötenschwanz rounds off side one with two minutes of Teutonic folk song with a military backbeat. Strangely strange but oddly normal.

You cannot imagine a modern mainstream record label letting one of its bands release an album called God’s Penis can you? Such was the artistic freedom allowed at the end of the 60s however, that Liberty execs were probably patting themselves on the back for being well hip cats. Phallus Dei sprawls all over side two of this chunk of parallel universe space-rock like a louche b-movie actor strung out on a massive LSD trip. Partly structured, partly insane this is the sound that you are not supposed to hear, a bit like seeing that tree that was supposedly unobserved fall over in the forest. It makes a nonsense of whatever you may have heard up to that point on a rock’n’roll record. Remember this is 1969, and twenty minute wigouts, although nothing new, were never this strung out. The closest I can conjure up is Hendrix experimenting on side three of Electric Ladyland. Well, imagine that but with a budget of not much more than zero, and relying on atmospherics rather than studio trickery and guitar wizardry to achieve its equally awesome ends.

The thing meanders along in a furious stupor until halfway through a declamatory and slightly off tune violin section over a tramping beat morphs into a country hoedown on baaad drugs before the massed percussion takes us back around ye olde campfire where more hallucinogenics are greedily gobbled up as crazed whoops and desperate yodels from the naked and writhing massed altered-state beings take us down down to the next level. A joyous pagan knees-up follows as things get real wild. We are then told that “the seraphim cries out, he broke his magic stick, oh I’m getting sick”. Hardly surprising really, and the comedown will be long and blissful.

Amon Düül II would never make another record quite as unhinged as this glorious piece of chemically fuelled madness, and although I dig their other work this remains my favourite LP of the band. If you’ve never heard this before, go to Grooveshark or somesuch, try to forget all your preconceptions, leave your post-modern cynicism at the check-in and put yourself in the almost charming but still frightening frame of mind that gave forth this record and enjoy. Or, as Krautrock fan Timothy Leary would say, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.

Track listing:

Side One

Kanaan (4:02)

Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren (6:12)

Luzifer’s Ghilom (8:34)

Henriette Krötenschwanz (2:03)

Side Two

Phallus Dei (20:48)

Line up:

• Shrat – bongos, vocals, violin
• Peter Leopold – drums
• Holger Trülzsch – Turkish drums
• Dieter Serfas – drums, electric cymbals
• John Weinzierl – guitar, 12-string bass
• Falk Rogner – organ
• Christian Borchard – vibraphone
• Chris Karrer – violin, guitar, twelve-string guitar, soprano saxophone, vocals
• Renate Knaup – vocals, tambourine
• Dave Anderson – bass on "Luzifer's Ghilom"

Faust - The Faust Tapes

Another in ""The formative years" series.

As a 13 year old in 1973 I had a meagre income from washing neighbours' cars and suchlike, but pocket money from Mum & Dad was in short supply. The financial necessity of having to feed the stirrings of what would become an all consuming vinyl habit by trawling through remainder bins in my local discount supermarket led to my purchasing some truly oddball classics that were far below any commercial radar. The average price of these albums as I recall was about 75p, which I could just afford. Most of those albums are now worth at least three figures now. I may have mentioned before that my best mate of the time had an older cousin who used to play us all sorts of strange aural delights, so these circumstances combined led me to taking a strange parallel musical journey alongside digging the usual mainstream rock and prog music of the time beloved of my peers.

In that same year a certain Richard Branson was beginning to make a healthy living from his new record label Virgin Records on the back of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, and they began a short series of bargain releases promoting the more obscure artistes of the time. One of these albums was The Faust Tapes by German band Faust, whom I naively thought then were pronounced "Forst". I was only 13, that's my excuse! Extensively advertised in the NME (my bible for alt music of choice, and faaaar cooler than the starched shirt collar that was Melody Maker, it's main rival) as an album for the price of a single, then 49p - how could I resist?

Rushing home with this enigmatic looking record housed in a simple b&w sleeve the front cover boasting waveforms inside a square standing on one of its corners (Bridgit Riley's The Quest)...

...and a series of quotes and reviews in newspaper column style on the back, with no track listing, only left me more curious.

Although I had heard snatches of Faust on the John Peel show - very lo-fi, one ear-piece, under the covers - nothing prepared me for the sonic assault that would emanate from the Dansette when I got it home. The album ranks even now as having some of the oddest sound sequences I've ever heard. From the moment the stylus hit the vinyl I was hooked. A lifelong obsession, first with what was known as "Krautrock" and latterly with all things sonically complex and/or off-kilter, was about to begin.

Not actually recorded as an album as such, The Faust Tapes is a compilation drawn from hundreds of hours of tapes laid down at the band's Wumme studios, the same tapes also being the source of their first two albums "Faust" & "So Far" for their former label Polydor gmbH, who, for reasons best known to themselves, thought they had signed the German Beatles. Polydor gmbH threw thousands of Deutschmarks at the band so they could build a studio and come up with the German Sgt Pepper. I think they may have been a wee bit surprised with what was delivered to them to release! After the first two albums flopped bigtime the band were duly kicked off Polydor gmbH and out of Wumme studios. Bolstered by the patronage of the inevitable John Peel, Virgin took a gamble on the band who arrived at the label armed with the tape reels. Needing something to whet the punters' appetite The Faust Tapes was the result.

The album opens with what sounds like an attempt to hit all the keys of a piano at the same time, which if nothing else grabs one's attention. This abruptly cuts into some rhythmic shouting and percussioning, and then we're at the first song proper, the lazily atmospheric piano led Flashback Carouso* whose mad cut & paste lyrics include such phrases as "Inside a stone of cream there is a language, Bring our minds together press them tight". Exercise With Voices follows, sounding like the formative rumblings of a bad trip, then the crazy "J'ai Mal Aux Dents" (My Teeth Hurt) which lurches along like a determined drunk stumbling along a train corridor, a hugely catchy chord pattern repeated ad infinitum with mucho sax blowing. The song slides into a psychedelic wig out over the revised repeated refrain of "Schempal Buddah, ship on a better sea". Who cares what that means, it's fab! Ending abruptly, we are now in what seems to be a German café listening to the German speaking clock, then, without warning we are hurtling along on a Teutonic subway, or that's my impression anyway! Several more bizarre soundscapes roll past featuring church organs, treated pianos, sundry found sounds, tape effects - it's as mad as a spoon, or Lewis Carroll on bad acid. There's one part with slowed down and speeded up voices, road drills and a church organ that is the stuff of nightmares. Suddenly, a tune, but only for a mere 48 seconds, natch. There's so much going on here it's hard to keep up, and remember, they did all this without the aid of digital editing. We're now up to "Untitled - All on saxes" which is laid back cacophony, followed by an "Untitled" piece starring recorded thunderstorms and heavily treated guitar noodlings, all highly charged and atmospheric. Rudolf Sosna, who is credited with writing the few actual songs up to this point, then gets to lay some lounge jazz piano on us, and then we're back on the cosmic underground train, coming back up for air in this strange land as multi-coloured skies drift by in a torpid fashion. I know, let's have some proto-Clangers noises but a couple of octaves lower and slow them down to a stop...reprise the treated guitarisms, and round off this strange thing with three songs! Stretch Out Time is probably the most "normal" thing here, you could almost dance to it, after a fashion. The final two songs are both written by the only non-German in the band, Jean-Hervé Peron. Der Baum (The Tree) with a sort of More period Floyd feel has lyrics that make sense for once, not that it matters "See her lying on the grass, Must be a nice feeling for her ass" indeedy. Finally we have Cherè Chambre - a spoken word stream of consciousness poem in French, over some lovely acoustic guitar picking.

Breathless now? I certainly was on first listen, and although the album is, some almost 40 (!) years later, very familiar to me, I still hear new things in it. I've attempted and probably failed to do it justice with my ramblings above, but you really need to hear it to fully appreciate its stunning uniqueness. The ever enquiring Julian Cope loved it while according to legend, future "Rock Star" Jim Kerr used it as a frisbee. Says it all really!

True musicologists may say Stockhausen and music concrete is where this is coming from, but Faust have a playfulness absent from that serious scene. Best listened to on headphones in the dark for full frightening effect, and not for the unadventurous! If you take the plunge and like it go back to "Faust" & "So Far" for more of the same, but, in my opinion they are not as good as this monstrous construct.


5 out of 5
#34

Deep Purple - Burn

This is part of an occasional series of reviews of old albums that played a significant part in my formative years of musical appreciation.

What is rightly regarded as the classic Deep Purple line up fell apart in 1973 after a constant round of management propelled touring recording and touring again proved too much for Ian Gillan and Roger Glover who both quit that year. Their replacements were Glenn Hughes from funked up blues rockers Trapeze, and an unknown blues wailer from the North East of England, one David Coverdale. With this line up in place they had recorded and released Burn by February 1974, a year in which I was a mere 14 and this was my introduction to the "Purps", as they were known.

Although I was later to agree with the majority that the "MkII" line up of Blackmore/Lord/Gillan/Glover/Paice was indeed the best line up of the band, Burn still holds a special place in my aural vista. If you get past the fact that Coverdale was little more than a Percy clone, you have to admit that as a singer he had a better range than Gillan, and although he couldn't match Gillan in the blood-curdling scream department, he still had a good powerful bluesy voice. Glenn Hughes contributes a lot to this album, getting co-writing credits on five of the eight songs, and his funky style is all over songs like Might Just Take Your Life, the barrelhouse funky What's Going On Here, Lay Down Stay Down. Even on Sail Away which is credited to Blackmore & Coverdale, the funky swagger of the backline sounds like it comes from Stevie Wonder on downers, and has Hughes all over it.
The only conventional "Purps" sounding song is the storming opener and title track, which I reckon stands alongside any of their more uptempo MKII efforts. Showpiece song on the album is the seven minute blues Mistreated where Blackmore gets to show his blues chops, and you can almost hear the glove being thrown down to Jimmy Page! Co-written by Blackmore & Coverdale the singer puts in a fine shout too.

A varied if atypical Purps album that still sounds good to these old lugholes, and is well worth investigating. This line up only lasted until Blackmore left in 1975 and produced one more LP at the end of 1974, Stormbringer, which is not a patch on this album.

4 out of 5
#26

Clear Blue Sky - Clear Blue Sky

A blast from the past this one. Released in January 1971, I bought this from a remainder bin in 72 or 73 and I still play it now.

Although following the power trio format popular of the time, their sound is actually quite distinctive with a definite psych/prog crossover element. As it says on the spine of the original LP "Play It Loud" (perhaps the album was originally going to be called this, but Slade had beaten them to it?). IMO The Groundhogs sound like their biggest influence, which is no bad thing, but they do have their own sound.

The side long track Journey To The Inside Of The Sun has some great interplay, and considering these lads were only 18 at the time, it is quite an achievement. The first part of this epic, Sweet Leaf, has some good boogie action, interspersed with quieter psychy phases, follwed by Rocket Ride, played in a Groundhogs style. The track finishes with I'm Coming Home which although a little disjointed is still a decent work out.

Side 2 starts with the great You Mystify, with some basic time changes and lots of reverb on the chorus vocals. A great bit of fret wizardry too. Tools Of My Trade is very Cream like in places, but with enough style of its own to shine. builds nicely in the middle section. Things slow down for My Heaven which is the most psychedelic of all the songs and has some nice instrumentation. The closer Birdcatcher, has good riffage and a very odd ending fading away with flute and lazy hand clapping. Very stoned.

As with most Vertigo acts of the time virtually nothing was spent on promotion and unfortunately Clear Blue Sky did not get the chance to develop as they should have done, and split up soon after, only reforming many years later.
 
4 out of 5
#7

Greasy Truckers Party

Greasy Truckers were a loose cooperative charity formed to help the homeless in the austere post-hippy oil crisis hit strike-ridden UK of the early 70s. This concert, held in the famous Roundhouse venue in Chalk Farm, London, was a fund raiser for the charity, and was hosted by the then ubiquitous hippy DJ Andy Dunkley.

The original double vinyl album was released in 1973. Although the full concert is now available on CD, I will stick to the original 2-LP format for this review. The stars of show were Hawkwind, ably supported by Man, Brinsley Schwarz, and not so ably by Magic Michael, a sort of low-rent Richie Havens. Thankfully he only gets one cut, even on the expanded CD edition. Also on the bill but unable to perform owing to a power cut, were Byzantium. Their "set" is represented by two minutes of silence bookended by Andy Dunkley's apologies and requests to get it together in the dark, or somesuch, maaaan!

The Hawkwind set finds them at the height of their powers, and includes blistering versions of Masters Of The Universe and Born To Go, the latter dedicated to the striking miners, cause of aforementioned power cut! The lovely Stacia was there, but I bet she was cold - those of you old enough to remember her charms will get the point(s)! This is also the gig where Silver Machine was recorded, a tweaked version of which produced Hawkwind's biggest hit.

Second on the bill were Hawkwind's labelmates and fellow stalwarts of the benefit scene, the mighty Welsh wizards, Man. At the tender age of 13 I was introduced to this album and more specifically the 20 minute freakout Spunk Rock, and to this day it remains one of my favourite pieces of recorded live music.



Apparently the track was actually about 30 minutes long, but the tape ran out towards the end of the previous band's set, so the first 10 minutes are lost while new tape was frantically spooled. Even so this is a twin guitar epic that really needs to be heard as mere words cannot convey its psychedelic intensity. One of the bonus tracks from their set on the CD version is Bananas - "I like bananas coz they got no bones, I like marijuana coz it gets me stoned". Genius!

In contrast Brinsley Schwarz, forerunners of the early pub rock scene, provide the needed relief of mere 3 to 4 minute songs in abundance, and damn good at it they were too. Amongst their ranks was one Nick Lowe of future production fame, and most of the rest of the band became Graham Parker's Rumour.

Well worth buying the expanded CD version if it's still out there.
 
4.5 out of 5
#2