MARCO ROSSI travels back to a time when prog rock bands roamed the earth and grown men in floppy hats squabbled over mellotron settings while spotting connections between Bach and The Hobbit.
Some compilations just work, don’t they? The true compiler’s art is not merely selecting what tracks to include, but also taking into account how they rub up against each other, snap at each other’s heels and appreciatively sniff each other’s bums. The ebb and flow, the laughter and tears… the pathos, bathos, Aramis and D’Artagnan.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Spirit Of Joy: Tales From The Polydor Underground 1967-1974 (Polydor/ Universal) works so unfeasibly well for me as a compilation that for a moment there I strongly suspected that I might have compiled it myself, but got so euphorically hammered while doing so that I retained no memory of it. The only way I know that I didn’t is that I would arguably have chosen, say, ‘Necromancer’ over ‘The People You Were Going To’, or ‘Valley Of Sadness’ over ‘Magic Mirror’, or ‘Memories Are New’ over ‘No Tree Will Grow’… but these are piddling considerations, besides which I’m getting ahead of myself already.
This wholehearted three-disc nose through Polydor’s paisley-patterned laundry kicks off with three tracks from that astounding ’68 Crazy World Of Arthur Brown album and, well, I’m ashamed to admit that over the years I’d somehow allowed myself to forget how great it is. Arthur Brown’s vision of damnation just sounds like the grooviest subterranean club in the cosmos – all percolating Hammond, dancers in cages, body paint and Ikette sweat. If Hell is like this, I’m whipping my cassock off right now to reveal the nipple tassles and split-crotch trolleys beneath.
Magnificently, the clattering, swinging brimstone of ‘Fire’ gives way to the thudding, warped and gibbering ‘How Does It Feel To Feel’ by The Creation – super-tense due to that wonderfully approximate tuning between the monolithic guitar and bass. Next up comes ‘Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’’ by my favourite free-thinking subversives, the Mk 1 Soft Machine, and by now I’m just… transported. Seriously, the first CD in this set is the best party I haven’t yet organised – and if I’m to devote any brain-ache to the other albums on this page I suppose I’d better get a shift on.
I’m experiencing great difficulty in getting of off the subject, however. Spirit Of Joy is one of those rare albums which, like Limahl’s hair circa ’84, predominantly consists of highlights. There’s ‘Firebrand’ by the nascent Van Der Graaf Generator, with a stupendously offensive, theatrical, declamatory and altogether brilliant vocal from the young Peter Hammill, the Withnail of rock. There’s the aforementioned ‘Magic Mirror’ by great Greeks Aphrodite’s Child, with their macraméé waistcoats and “I keel you” stares. There’s the bowel-loosening orch-psych bedlam of ‘Reality’ by Second Hand, and the full-bore jazz-rock scribble of ‘Extrapolation’ by John McLaughlin.
Lob in Supersister, Faust, Julie Driscoll, Taste, Jack Bruce, Thunderclap Newman, The Who, Cream and The Web, and you have a cast-iron excuse for never feeling the need to leave the house again.
In other news, I’ve been struggling all over again to make sense of my feelings regarding QUINTESSENCE. I think what it is is that I’ve always liked the idea of them more than I actually like them, if that makes sense. Back in the day, the band I heard in my head – doggedly pursuing ultimate no-mind transcendence via Indian modalities when they weren’t heroically fronting community sit-ins in Ladbroke Grove – sounded considerably headier than the real Quintessence, whose music always struck me as, frankly, a bit wet.
Self (Esoteric), their fourth album from ’72, doesn’t do much to significantly alter that perception, I fear. It’s weird, I still really admire them in theory, in principle, but somehow their albums consistently fall short of delivering the means by which you, the listener – by which I mean me, the listener – can disassociate into a trillion tiny orbs of glowing light, a miasma of purest bliss. Those earnest flute-led communal jams sound like bags of fun to have participated in, but as a listening experience one may find that one’s chakras remain stubbornly unaligned.
Speaking as we just were of “a bit wet”, there’s no getting round the fact that RENAISSANCE were wetter than a remake of The Deep set in Saltcoats in January, what with their Ocean Gypsies and their Scheherazades and all of that inadvisedly diaphanous malarkey, yet I must confess that I nevertheless lapped up Live At The Carnegie Hall (Repertoire) almost as unconditionally as the audience on the night did in ’75. Go figure.
Something about the innocence of the whole endeavour is immensely bracing: the creative writing class lyrics, the curiously old-fashioned formality of those fiddly, finicky melodies – and the fact that there was a massive American market for it. Carnegie Hall finds Renaissance at the top of their game with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in tow, and is an altogether lovely window into a vanished time when, for example, audiences thought nothing of rapturously clapping along with a bass solo.
The peculiar bloodless coup that resulted in the total dissolution of the original Renaissance line-up delivered Annie Haslam into the fold, and it is her unmistakable dulcet tones which lend this set much of its warmth. She biffs every single note smartly on the nose with that airy and ageless voice, and on several occasions nails notes so stratospherically high that they are off the charts entirely. Next to this, the common-or-garden dog whistle sounds like Tom Waits belching. ‘Scheherazade’ is the defining proggy performance on here – all half an hour of it, near as dammit – but the comparatively miserly 23-minute ‘Ashes Are Burning’ runs it close.
To conclude, two neo-psych albums have just fallen into my lap and, it has to be said, are currently nestling there as comfortably as Blofeld’s cat. 1967?_ (Ambient Live) by MOOCH is sweet-natured, disarming and very, very English with its songs about hedgehogs, ladybirds, buses, trams, Guy Fawkes, truth fairies, raspberry lollies, cups of tea and soldiers selling daisies. Take careful note and investigate with confidence, Robyn Hitchcock fans.
Meanwhile, Oregon’s OBSCURED BY CLOUDS are very much the other side of the coin, despite the stated Floyd influence. Tough, fervid and intense, at various times over the course of Psycheclectic (Psych Eclectic) they resemble a more inspired Soundgarden with a bigger paintbox (‘Cast Close The Gate’, ‘Consider This A Message’), a characteristically glowering Thin White Rope (‘Zoe Zolofft’) and an even more raucous Nomeansno (‘Hot Little Box’).
It’s surprising and instructive to discover how well their brawny, muscular, scruff-of-the-neck acid rock offsets and complements Mooch’s birdsong, sitars and British pallor. It’s an aural entente between UK and US psych templates, no less…
www.esotericrecordings.com
www.psycheclectic.com |
