Mike Heron "Smiling Men with Bad Reputations" (3.5*)

Looking back on the British music scene in the late sixties from the cold hard light of twenty-first century reality there are a couple of things that tend to leave a definite impression. One of them, in an era where some major acts struggle to produce an album every couple of years is the sheer volume of music bands were able to churn out back then.

Quantity, of course, doesn’t always equate to quality, but in the hot house scene that operated then anyone who wasn’t delivering quality product that could be moved tended to vanish into oblivion fairly quickly.

In terms of quantity most acts would have been pushing to match the volume of releases the Incredible String Band rolled out between 1966 (The Incredible String Band) and 1974’s Hard Rope and Silken Twine. There’s a full dozen titles, two of them double albums in that nine year span, and that’s without Mike Heron’s Smiling Men with Bad Reputations (released in 1971) and Robin Williamson’s Myrrh (1972).

Prolific seems rather close to understatement, and the quality was pretty good as well.

Unlike Williamson, who’d started the ISB with fellow folkie Clive Palmer, Heron had been a rocker, something that’s obvious from the beginning of the quite boppy Call Me Diamond, with squealing sax from South African avant-gardist Dudu Pukwana and decidedly rocky piano from Heron himself. Decidedly non-Stringy, but mighty fine fun. Flowers of the Forest sits in more familiar territory for ISB fans, though it’s somewhat rockier than his work in that setting with Richard Thompson’s electric guitar running through the ramble.

There’s something that sounds remarkably like a harpsichord in the introduction to Audrey, which is heading back towards ISB territory with a trace of A Very Cellular Song in the harmonium while he’s expressing a desire (or an intention) to take your clothes off.

Brindaban evokes Hindu mythology, in particular legends involving Krishna and the milkmaids in the town of Vrindavan over an evocative string arrangement, while Feast of Stephen works Cat Stevens territory quite magnificently. A great song that’s on a par with almost anything he managed with the ISB and finishes well ahead of most of the pack. Spirit Beautiful is much more obviously Indian in inspiration, with tabla tapping away and the veena and tambura droning away in the background, a swooping, swirling chorus that includes the members of Dr Strangely Strange and a Very Cellular jaw harp in the instrumental play-out.

By contrast, with instrumental accompaniment from Tommy and the Bijoux (Pete Townshend, Ronnie Lane and Keith Moon) Warm Heart Pastry heads straight towards full-blown heavy rock. In the end it mightn’t quite get there, but it winds up in a reasonably adjacent postcode as Moon flails away and Townshend’s guitar picks its way through an intricate little riff.

There’s a synthesiser lead into Beautiful Stranger, where a (presumably, it’s got that sort of tropical island vibe) native beauty looks after a wounded traveller, soldier or sailor coming out of a fever over an instrumental track that’s rather muddled and cluttered and the album proper ends with an intimate No Turning Back with sparse acoustic guitar and a mysterious lyric that might involve a premature departure from a loved one delivered in a hesitant manner.

The album reappeared in 2004, remastered with two bonus tracks, an uptempo Make No Mistake and the decidedly rocky Lady Wonder that combine to take the remastered version out with a bang rather than a low key semi-whimper and point towards the increasingly rock orientation to come on the later Incredible String Band albums.

All in all, a fairly eclectic collection of material that probably wouldn’t have fitted into the earlier incarnations of the ISB and breaks new ground, largely due to John Cale’s brass and vocal arrangements and the extra tonalities he delivers on viola, harmonium, piano, and bass. Maybe not essential, but definitely interesting.

Kevin Ayers "Whatevershebringswesing" (4*)

While The Whole World didn’t last, and, on the surface you wouldn’t have expected it to, David Bedford and Mike Oldfield stayed in the picture for the 1971 sessions that produced Kevin Ayers’ third, and arguably most acclaimed album. In between Shooting at the Moon and Whatevershebringswesing, Ayers had been gigging across Europe with Daevid Allen's band, which explains the presence of saxophonist Didier Malherbe after the departure of Lol Coxhill,

Having worked through Joy of a Toy and Shooting at the Moon the collision of disparate styles hardly comes as a surprise, but here the different styles work together better than they had in the past, from the symphonic notes that start There is Loving > Among Us > There is Loving through to the end of the Didier Malherbe flute solo on Lullaby, with plenty of territory covered in between.

The Whatever sessions started before the demise of The Whole World, which accounts for the David Bedford writing credit (Among Us) stuck in the middle of the two slices of Ayers’ There Is Loving. There’s a fair slice of similar vibe to Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother here, in Bedford’s symphonic, brass heavy orchestral arrangement, but after an avowedly experimental beginning Margaret turns out to be a rather straightforward ballad, intimate in a perfectly romantic setting with understated orchestration.

From there light and shade factors and what comes next probably explain the lightweight New Orleans vibe that runs through Oh My, three minutes of lightweight before the sombre introduction to Song from the Bottom of a Well, which looks back to The Soft Machine’s Why Are We Sleeping? and forwards to Dr. Dream, four and a half minutes marries an experimental arrangement with Oldfield to the fore with a cryptic lyric Intoned in a creepy voice that sounds like it’s coming from a well, tomb or grave, guttural and brimming with foreboding over a barrage of jarring sound effects and dissonant elements.

And after the subterranean spookiness, Whatevershebringswesing's extended bass solo introduction, swirling female harmonies and languid warmth leads into a prime slice of languid warmth with what’s probably the most accurate summary of Ayers approach to life in the chorus (So let's drink some wine / and have a good time / but if you really want to come through / let the good times have you*) with Wyatt's fragile high-pitched treble warbling away in the background and an extended understated solo from Mike Oldfield. Gorgeous, and, for me, the highlight of the album.

There’s a bit of competition in that department from Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes, another expression of the Ayers approach to things with classic rock and roll references, the hip exile (one imagines) faced with a stuffy maitre d’ in a restaurant with pretensions above its actual station. Catchy, old fashioned rock and roll that Ayers obviously enjoyed, re-recording it a couple of times on subsequent projects.

According to Mike Oldfield Champagne Cowboy Blues came about in two parts. Arriving at Abbey Road to find no one else had bothered to turn up on time, Oldfield and engineer Peter Mew filled the waiting time by putting together a track. You can do a fair bit in an hour and a half if you put your mind to it, and when Ayers finally arrived Oldfield had an entire track: all the overdubbing, the percussion, the guitar and bass and the studio staff singing impromptu lyrics.

Ayers mightn’t have been happy about the whole thing, but he kept the backing track, cut a snatch of the circus theme from Joy Of A Toy Continued into the middle, came up with a new set of words and the result was a lightweight drinking song that’s pleasant enough without giving the listener anything to write home about. The album proper closes with Lullaby an appropriately titled pastoral instrumental featuring Didier Malherbe's liquid flute accompanied by piano and a running brook.

As far as the inevitable bonus tracks go, with two versions, we get two sets. The 2003 remastered version delivers Stars (the B side to the Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes single), Don’t Sing No More Sad Songs and Fake Mexican Tourist Blues from Odd Ditties and a previously unreleased early mix of Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes.

Stars, with that female chorus that’ll be all too familiar half way through Bananamour, has a definite trace of Vanilla Fudge, Don’t Sing No More Sad Songs waltzes along over a jangling piano with female harmonies and Fake Mexican Tourist Blues probably goes close to redefining the concept of throwaway...

Then there’s The Harvest Years 1969-1974 box set version, which throws up Stars and Fake Mexican Tourist Blues again, but pads the thing out with half a dozen tracks from a BBC Bob Harris session (Lunatic’s Lament, Oyster and the Flying Fish, Butterfly Dance, Whatevershebringswesing, Falling in Love Again and Queen Thing).

Languid and reflective, Whatevershebringswesing delivers (largely) uncomplicated ballads, light on prog rock pretensions with some of Ayers' most appealing compositions. It might fall short of the ambitious peaks in his earlier work, but overall it’s more consistent and the average listener will probably be glad to be away from the jarring discordant elements that creep in when Kevin’s colleagues decide to go all experimental on us.

Ayers: “That’s, basically, how I’ve lived my life, that’s my feeling about life.”

Todd Rundgren "Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren" (3*)

While Todd Rundgren’s second solo album was originally credited to the band (Runt) that’s probably because there were a couple of things Rundgren couldn’t do well enough yet. He wasn’t ready to play drums, and hadn’t quite got his head around playing bass, which explains the presence Norman D. Smart, John Guerin and Hunt Sales behind the drum kit and bass lines courtesy of Tony Sales and Jerry Scheff. Everything else (guitars, keyboards, synthesizer, saxophones, percussion and vocals) is Rundgren, largely worshipping at the Church of Laura Nyro and Carole King.

That’s noticeable from the beginning of Long Flowing Robe (great chorus) and on through The Ballad (Denny & Jean). Guitar comes to the fore in the riffier Bleeding, which doesn’t work as well as its predecessors, though the guitar solo is rather flashy. Wailing Wall is back in piano-driven singer/songwriter mode, pleasant enough, but pretty forgettable shuffle forward material for mine.  Better is the piano-driven The Range War which isn’t quite country & western, but is definitely Western, as in Wild, the Hatfield and McCoy feud sort of rewritten into Romeo and Juliet territory.

Don’t take yourself too seriously/there are precious few things worth hating nowadays, and none of them are me are the opening lines to Chain Letter and they’re probably the best thing about the track, at least until the sort of  anthemic “carry on” ending kicks in about half way through the track. Clever but, in the long run fairly pointless.

There’s some pleasant falsetto in A Long Time, A Long Way to Go, but the song itself is bordering on the fluffy side. Any lighter and it would blow away, and you could say much the same about the multilayered vocals on the piano-driven Boat on the Charles, which delivers some atmospherics sounds pleasant enough but doesn’t quite manage to grab the attention and Be Nice to Me, which exerts a bit of fragile charm, but doesn’t really insist on it.

Hope I'm Around is a tad catchier, another piano ballad that works rather well, building to a mildly anthemic ending and Parole brings the guitars back to the fore on a sort of I Fought the Law vibe that’s a little too clever to reach outlaw territory. Fifty seconds of Remember Me winds things up, concluding a collection of songs that are obviously the work of a skilled operator and, now that the play count has climbed to 8 aren’t likely to progress too much further.

Sure, there’s a degree of wit there and the album has its own charm, even if it’s a rather low-key who’s a clever boy then sort of charm, but in an environment where a track will need to grab the attention before Hughesy hits the shuffle button I don’t like their chances (assuming the play count reaches the point where they’re in the Top 5000 Most Played.

And for the Top 1500 in a library that’s crawling towards 40,000 tracks? Two words. Iceblock and Hades.

Albion Country Band & Shirley Collins "No Roses" (4*)

Having left Fairport Convention because he wanted to explore traditional material rather than attempt to recreate a traditional vibe through original material and been pushed out of Steeleye Span, the band he formed to explore that inclination when they elected to pursue a more obviously commercial direction it probably comes as no surprise to find Ashley Hutchings launching another project in the same territory with his wife Shirley Collins.

Fairport Convention had started life as an outfit blending American singer-songwriter material, along with original compositions along the same lines on Fairport Convention, What We Did on Our Holidays  and Unhalfbricking before veering towards traditional material when fiddler Dave Swarbrick joined the band for Liege and Lief. An emerging interest in traditional material had Hutchings searching through the material collected at the English Folk Dance & Song Society Library at Cecil Sharp House, and the research had driven the contents of Liege and Lief, and the electrified versions of traditional songs on the first three Steeleye Span albums (Hark! The Village Wait, Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again).

A good ten years older than her second husband, Shirley Collins had grown up in an East Sussex family with ties to the area's traditional music, moved to London to attend teachers' college in the early fifties and through the early folk revival movement became involved with the likes of Ewan MacColl, who introduced her to American folk archivist Alan Lomax, in London avoiding the McCarthy era witch hunt in the United States. She’d collaborated with Lomax on the song collecting journey through the American south between July and November 1959 that produced the recordings released on Atlantic Records as Sounds of the South that went on to become a key ingredient in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou and once she returned to England recorded the jazz-folk fusion Folk Roots, New Routes with Davey Graham and collaborate with her sister Dolly (The Sweet Primroses, Anthems in Eden, Love, Death and the Lady) and the Young Tradition (Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood and Royston Wood).

The collaborations with her sister were built around Dolly’s pipe or flute organ with additional light and shade from the medieval crumhorns, recorders, sackbuts and viols of London’s Early Music Consort with 1969‘s Anthems in Eden featuring a twenty-eight minute song cycle about changes in rural England and destruction of ancient traditions that came about after the First World War.

After marrying Hutchings in 1971, the couple set about recording No Roses at Sound Techniques, and Air Studios in London, with Collins’ vocals backed by a selection from a core group that included Hutchings on bass, Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol on guitars, Roger Powell (drums), and Dave Bland (concertina and hammered dulcimer), with additional toning added by what must have seemed a bewildering array of twenty-plus other musicians in various permutations and combinations.

That wasn’t the way things were supposed to go, but as different faces appeared at the studio door, it probably seemed a pity to let what they had to offer go to waste. Apart from that core group, the album included vocal contributions from Maddy Prior, Royston Wood, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Nic Jones, who also played fiddle (as did Barry Dransfield).

Additional instrumental tones were added by Dolly Collins and Ian Whiteman (piano), Dave Mattacks (sticks and drums), John Kirkpatrick (accordion), Tim Renwick (acoustic and electric guitar), Lol Coxhill (alto sax), Alan Cave (bassoon) and Steve Migden (French horn) with more esoteric notes added by Northumbrian small pipes (Colin Ross), melodeon (Tony Hall), hurdy-gurdy  (Francis Baines), ophicleide (a brass keyed-bugle that seems to have been an antecedent of the saxophone, played by Alan Lumsden) and the more prosaic jaw harp (Trevor Crozier).

But it’s all about the music, and having worked through Anthems in Eden and Love, Death and the Lady what’s on offer here has a more contemporary feel, sounding like (as someone put it) Shirley Collins backed by Fairport Convention, which is close to the money, but not quite on it.

Collins’ vocals are as Albion as they were on the preceding recordings, the instrumental work has a recognizably Fairport orientation, but the more exotic sonic contributions take it a step away from the early seventies folk rock scene but not as far as the pseudo-medieval early music present on Anthems in Eden.

As far as the material itself is concerned, we’ve got the returning sailor the faithful girlfriend fails to recognise (much the same territory as John Riley) on Claudy Banks (from Sussex’s Copper family), Romany fortune tellers who end up with the well-born squire (Little Gipsy Girl, from Louise Holms of Hereford), rejected suitors deemed unsuitable by wealthy parents (Banks of The Bann, from Bert Lloyd), notorious killings such as the Murder of Maria Marten (from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), cautionary tales for would-be poachers in Van Dieman's Land (collated by Ashley Hutchings), returning lovers (Just As The Tide Was A'Flowing, from Aunt Grace Winborn, Hastings), cross-country hunting (The White Hare from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), historical and mythical themes in Cornish mystery plays and spring rituals i.e. Hal-An-Tow (part of the May ritual in Helston, Cornwall) and the discovery and burial of unknown women (Poor Murdered Woman from Mr. Foster of Surrey).

All in all, the product of musicians with a deep love and understanding of the English music heritage and a desire to set the tradition in a more contemporary setting that works well provided you’re not put off by the breathy, slightly unearthly Collins vocal character, which may be a tad on the trad folkie finger in the ear style for some listeners.

Still, placing No Roses alongside the likes of Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief and Full House or the early Steeleye Span it’s an interesting variation on emerging themes. More obviously traditional than Fairport, not quite as rocky as Steeleye....

Having delved back this far, I’m looking towards the albums that followed, or those that are available through iTunes (The Albion Dance Band’s The Prospect Before Us, Shirley and Dolly Collins For As Many As Will being prime candidates).