by Will Romano
“Dave Swarbrick is a big antique hunter, and he was in a shop, and there was a huge pile of papers all about the story of John Lee,” says Mattacks. “He bought this package, and in it were a bunch of newspaper articles about him. It had its basis in reality.”
“I thought it was an urban myth or whatever,” says Nicol. “Apparently it had actually happened, and in 1908, Lee published a series of articles in the first person about his story, and this inspired Dave and the rest of us to write and produce an album telling a story through this young man’s eyes. In those days it was okay to do a concept album, and this was like a mini opera, if you will, without being too pretentious.”
For years after the mid-1970s, Fairport became known primarily as a live act and, as of this writing, they continue to perform and host an annual music festival in Cropredy, England, in the heart of what Nicol jokingly refers to as the “folk belt.”
“It is a self-mocking thing, I suppose,” says Nicol. “We all tend to live around here, but it’s not as if it’s a great wellspring of folk-based musicians. We’ve just made it our own.”
BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST
Formed in 1967 in Lancashire, Barclay James Harvest (BJH) sat on the edge of the progressive genre with their blend of acoustic folk, Mellotron-drenched doom rock, and orchestral accompaniment on records, while dabbling in symphonic rock on Barclay James Harvest and Other Short Stories.
“My interest lies in turn-of-the-century Vienna, turn of the nineteenth century,” says keyboardist Stuart “Woolly” Wolstenholme, who was a member of a band called the Sorcerers prior to joining Barclay James Harvest. “I’d like to go back to a time when music started to question itself, rather than being a landscape on the wall. I think that is what Barclay James Harvest was about, in a way. It was not a straightforward rock band. It could be abstract. We were English. Even when we attempted to do rockers it was in a kind of twisted English way.”
BJH released their self-titled debut in 1970, produced by Norman Smith (who was so instrumental in helping to shape early Pink Floyd’s sound), which was a mixture of riff-based and orchestral folk rock (e.g., “Dark Now My Sky”).
“After the first album ... I think we had found a [musical] home with the fusion of the band sound with an orchestra,” Wolstenholme says.
As one of the first few acts to be signed to EMI’s Harvest label (Wolstenholme claims it was Barclay James Harvest that not only inspired but came up with the name of the label), BJH went from an underground to a full-blown mainstream pop band with prog sensibilities, their evolution to a large extent mirroring that of Genesis.
“With 1976’s Octoberon we began experimenting with things like strings and a choir, although Barclay had used string orchestras in the early days when they worked with their arranger Robert Godfrey, from the Enid,” says David Rohl, recording engineer and assistant producer. “Among the things we did was, we had Les [Holroyd, bassist] ... sing into mirrors and recorded the sound bouncing off the glass to give his vocals a real crystallized feel.”
“When we were signed to EMI, there were no specific label for pop bands,” says Wolstenholme. “When it became obvious that there was an underground music that was not about singles, EMI wanted to dedicate a label to these sounds. Because the artists on the label were becoming more and more diffuse, in the sense that Harvest was collecting artists who were more pop-oriented, we went to Polydor. It was a more mainstream label, and this was one step in our development, if you want to call it that, toward being a mainstream band.”
Through the mid-1970s, records such as Everyone Is Everybody Else, Time Honoured Ghosts, and Live were built in large part around the songwriting craft of guitarist/vocalist John Lees, Wolstenholme, and bassist/vocalist Les Hollywood, and the power of the Mellotron.
“There was evidence, through the work of the Moody Blues and King Crimson, that the Mellotron was becoming a standard piece of rock equipment alongside the Hammond and even the piano,” says Wolstenholme.
Songs such as “Beyond the Grave,” “Hymn for the Children,” “In My Life,” “Titles,” “Child of the Universe,” and “The Great 1974 Mining Disaster” ranged in purpose and topic from paying homage to the Beatles to raising social consciousness.
BJH took a bit of a left turn with 1976’s self-produced Octoberon. It’s a sometimes brilliant but slightly unfocused album, stretching and pulling the band’s creative energies into areas of the experimental, mystical, countrified, and symphonic with tunes such as “Ra,” the black-humor-laced “Suicide?” “May Day,” and “Rock and Roll Star.” Octoberon represents the peak of the band’s progressive period.
“We tried many things in the studio,” says David Rohl, who engineered the record. “Even if ideas wound up not working, we at least experimented whenever and wherever we could. For the song ‘Suicide?’ for example, when you hear the sound of someone walking, at the end of the song, that’s Woolly in clogs moving up and down the stairs at Strawberry Studios. We also used a plastic dummy head with two microphones attached to it—one in each ear—for a great sound effect. The stereo head had an XLR cable, forty feet long, connected to it. We climbed to the top of a hotel in Manchester and threw the head off the roof and had it crash onto the pavement below to get the sound of what it was like to jump from a building. While that’s pretty brutal, and not exactly high tech, that was an example of the kinds of experiments we were carrying out.”
“We filled every possible space, especially on the Octoberon record,” says Wolstenholme. “Plenty of rolling climaxes.”
The musical pendulum would swing in either direction throughout the band’s career from the mid- to late 1970s, as if elements within the band were fighting for supremacy. After 1977’s Gone to Earth, BJH further aligned themselves with mainstream rock, having established themselves as hitmakers not only in Britain (where they scored numerous Top 40 albums) but also in Germany.
“The arrangements on Gone to Earth were a lot more layered and complicated than [they had been] in the past,” says Rohl, who called upon his experience as the chief engineer at 10cc’s Strawberry Studios in Stockport and his time at Manchester’s Indigo recording studios for the sessions.
BJH made the same fatal error the Strawbs had a few years earlier, which was to ditch the Mellotron in the late 1970s. “By the time I left the band in ’79, the latest thing was the Yamaha CS-80 polysynth,” says Wolstenholme. “When I left the band, they dropped the Mellotron completely, because it had become a symbolic instrument of a certain sound, and also one symbolic of me.”
Though BJH would continue to make records into the 1980s, their music and audience had shifted. The band eventually broke up but returned in two competing forms (one led by Lees and Wolstenholme in the early 1990s, another by Holroyd post-2000).
Wolstenholme continues to work with his own Maestoso and David Rohl’s reformed symphonic rock studio project Mandalaband. “In the Maestoso world, I can be anything I want,” says Wolstenholme. “I can be sardonic, critical, romantic, bitter, and twisted. You wouldn’t find that on a Barclay James Harvest record. Once you’re beyond the cliché of the band setup, the freedom is incredible.”
THE STRAWBS
Intrinsically tied to the British traditional music scene, and one of the best examples of a band moving from folk or bluegrass (as the Strawberry Hill Boys) to full-on prog rock, are the Strawbs.
The Strawbs’ roots in American blues and folk and English minstrelsy, along with the band’s use of the keyboards such as Moog, harpsichord, Hammond organ, and the Mellotron, created a progressive rock that was distinct from many of their contemporaries.
“We get bracketed with bands like the Moody Blues and King Crimson because of the Mellotron,” says Dave Cousins, acoustic guitarist/leader/chief songwriter of the Strawbs. “Getting into English folk music and using those churchy, medieval harmonies, gave [the Strawbs their] individual characteristics.”
Rarely had a progressive band had the ability to allow a composition to
breathe while infusing it with such energy. Possessed of this strength, they created incredibly powerful and well-paced folk-based epics such as “Ghosts,” “Autumn,” “The Life Auction,” “Out in the Cold/Round and Round,” “The Antiques Suite,” and “The Vision of the Lady of the Lake.”
The band experienced an incredible evolution from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. But the Strawbs’ musical roots stretch back farther than modern rock. From his school days, Cousins was seduced by the music of skiffle master Lonnie Donegan, Leadbelly, flat-picking guitarist Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and banjoist Earl Scruggs.
Cousins picked up the guitar (and later the banjo) and went on to form the Gin Bottle Four with his West London mate, guitarist Tony Hooper, who shared Cousins’s love of skiffle, roots, jazz, and folk music.
The two school friends recruited mandolin player Arthur Phillips and formed the Strawberry Hill Boys. A series of personnel exits and entrances occurred until the band finally settled on the name “the Strawbs,” then featuring double bass player Ron Chesterman and future Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny.
Though not together for very long, this lineup cut the Strawbs’ first album, All Our Own Work (which did not see the light of day until 1973, but included a version of Denny’s famous “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”)
By mid-1968, Denny had split for Fairport, and, strangely enough, the Strawbs became the first British act signed to the American independent label A&M. The band went on to record their self-titled debut for the indie—a conceptual, orchestral affair with overtures to Middle Eastern music produced by Gus Dudgeon (later of Elton John fame) and featuring the haunting symphonic closing piece “The Battle.”
Despite arrangements by Tony Visconti and appearances by session musicians, including John Paul Jones and Nicky Hopkins, A&M hated the end result (they’d thought they were getting a folk band but instead received a faux-symphonic folk rock band) and forced the Strawbs to record new material.
“Initially A&M were only really interested in Sandy,” says Cousins. “But they figured they owed us goodwill, so they sent us money to record.”
The Strawbs: Bursting At The Seams (1973)
Undeterred by the label’s reaction, the Strawbs continued their spiral toward progressive folk rock, releasing such records as Dragonfly, produced by Visconti and featuring cellist Claire Deniz, with keyboardist Rick Wakeman serving as a session player on piano.
The album’s centerpiece, the sprawling “The Vision of the Lady of the Lake,” expands upon the Arthurian legend and reconfigures it with Greek mythological /Christian symbolism, featuring Leslie-effected Hammond organ.
“‘The Vision of the Lady of the Lake’ was written about the seven deadly sins,” says Cousins. “But I twisted it by turning it on its head. In order for [the hero] to get the woman of his desires, he had to kill her, but he just couldn’t do it. In the end, he is overwhelmed by the sins coming back at him. It’s ultimately about sacrifice, and I think I have made sacrifices in my life that helped me write about it.”
Personnel changes threatened to derail the band (notably, Deniz and Chesterman both left), but the Strawbs pushed on. Added were key members Tony Hudson, a percussionist and sitar player, and electric bassist John Ford, taking the band farther from its bluegrass/rootsy beginnings.
The Strawbs recruited Wakeman as a full-time member and recorded the live album Just a Collection of Antiques and Curios, for which Cousins employed a multitude of banjo tunings. (“I would put the banjo in different tunings to get the modal drones,” he says. “These tunings were not discordant in and of themselves. But if you try to play those notes on the piano, it may become discordant. Rick had to ripple around the chords, and that was what gave the Strawbs its sound.”)
Wakeman and Cousins quickly became friends, and Cousins was ecstatic when the Royal Academy of Music trained pianist, whose haunting Mellotron work on David Bowie’s 1969 hit “Space Oddity” caused a major stir in many musical circles, agreed to be a member of the Strawbs.
“I was never more surprised than when he said yes,” says Cousins. “Then I thought, ‘Crikey: We are now a band. We have this guy who plays organ like a loony.”’
The public and press paid special attention to Wakeman (Melody Maker called him “tomorrow’s superstar”), who was sending the Strawbs farther down the path of electric folk and progressive rock.
Wakeman seemed to enjoy the spotlight: When the Strawbs appeared on the television show Top of the Pops in 1971, the young keyboardist pressed a paint roller onto the keys to produce sound in the song “The Hangman and the Papist.”
“If it hadn’t been for that or the fact that he was in the Strawbs, I don’t think [Wakeman] would have become as quickly famous as he did,” Cousins says.
On the strength of the U.K. Top 30 Antiques and Curios (the Strawbs’ first foray into British chart success), the band recorded From the Witchwood, a British Top 40 success.
Everything was going well until Wakeman decided it was time to leave his mate Cousins and take advantage of a more lucrative opportunity. While on tour in the States with the Strawbs, Wakeman had agreed to claim the keyboard chair with Yes, who had been making big noises with a new guitarist, Steve Howe, and record, The Yes Album.
“Rick needed to expand musically, and [Yes] offered him a lot more money than we could have,” says Cousins, laughing. “I learned an awful lot from watching Rick play the piano. I’ve learned to play octaves [with my] left hand, and that’s how a lot of the Strawbs’ songs have developed since then.”
More changes followed. Hooper, thinking the band had gone too far afield of its original sound, left after the recording of 1972’s semi-concept record Grave New World, a reflective and spiritual album that follows a character’s life from birth to death and features an all-important keyboardist /Mellotron player Blue Weaver (Wakeman’s replacement) and the electric guitarist Dave Cousins.
By the time the band came to record 1973’s Bursting at the Seams, the Strawbs had further cemented their path toward full-on (prog) rock by adding a full-time electric guitarist, Dave Lambert, a friend of Cousins, which helped to develop an audience in the States. Unsurprisingly, it was the band’s highest charting record in the U.S. (it reached number 121) at that time.
Fans immediately responded to the diversity of tones and colors on Bursting, be it the short, haunting track “The River,” the midtempo power-chord rocker “Lay Down,” the music hall–esque Ford/Hudson composition “Part of the Union” (a Top 2 song in Britain), or the Mellotron-laced epics “Down by the Sea” and “Tears and Pavan.”
The Strawbs would continue to explore their progressive side on their U.S. breakthrough records, 1974’s Hero and Heroine and ’75’s Ghosts (arguably the band’s creative pinnacle), for which the band saw further personnel changes: Ford and Hudson left to pursue opportunities together as songwriters (under the moniker Hudson Ford), and Weaver bailed (later to resurface on the Bee Gees’ sessions for Saturday Night Fever).
Cousins and Lambert recruited drummer Rod Coombes (Stealers Wheel), bassist Chas Cronk (who appeared on Wakeman’s Six Wives), and classically trained pianist/keyboardist John Hawken, late of the original Renaissance.
By the time the Strawbs came to record Hero and Heroine, everything was falling into place: high studio production value (producer Tom Allom layered Mellotron to achieve a thick wall of sound), lyrical themes brought to life by often restrained playing, and epic and superior material; chief songwriter Cousins was at the top of his game.
“Dave is the most incredible writer,” says Hawken. “I don’t know where he’s tapped into but it’s the same sort of line that people like Paul McCartney and Elton John are tapped into. He certainly hasn’t received the notice he should have . . . To me he should be way, way up there and receive more acclaim than he ever did. He has been consistently writing for years, and you’d think that he would eventually run out of ideas. He doesn’t.”
From the opening, croaking Moog synth tones and the heavily chorused E-minor string sound of “Autumn,” audiences knew immediately that this was a changed Strawbs. The song and the entire record breathe and throb as nothing else in the band’s history.
“Hero and Heroine had an advantage inasmuch as we went down to Devon, where [Cousins] was living at the time, during a very lovely summer, and we rehearsed in this little peaceful country hall with nothing around for miles,” says Hawken. “Dave did a lot of writing in that neck of the woods—tremendous appeal and stunning countryside. It’s very inspirational.”
Songs such as the drenched-in-vocal-harmonies “Shine On Silver Sun,” the Mellotron-monolith title track (which was “written about cocaine, I suppose, if you want to simplify it,” says Cousins. “But it can also represent lovers, of course”), and the suicidal “Out in the Cold”/“Round and Round” account for some of the Strawbs’ best-loved material.
Because Hero and Heroine scored in the Top 100 in America (Top 40 in the U.K.), and the band went on an international tour to promote the record, all of a sudden fans of Yes (which Wakeman had left by this time) and Jethro Tull were mentioning the Strawbs in the same breath.
“There is only one other band that I think has any resemblance to us, and that is Jethro Tull,” says Cousins. “We can headline . . . a folk festival in Canada and at the same time headline a prog rock festival in America, within three months of one another. There are very few bands that can do that.”
“We used to call it gothic rock,” says Hawken, “which I think filled it beautifully.”
