The Doom that came to Sarnath
A bonanza of obscure 1970s UK Prog-Rock reissues
Original position in magazine: pp 52-58
Contents: Andromeda, Dark, The Wicked Lady, Second Hand, Astral Navigations, Arzachel, Octopus, Steel Mill, Latin-American psych and prog, Kris Kringle, Aguaturbia, Kissing Spell, Laghonia, Traffic Sound, Ladies WC, false nostalgia, reissues
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In this brief overview we can only hope to scratch the surface of this rather specialised field. Quite simply, I’ve bought so little of it. I went looking for certain elements: free-form improvisations, a pretentious ‘cosmic’ consciousness, extended and overblown solo histrionics in the performances. What I’ve found has been enjoyable enough, but it never quite delivers the goods…in the way that obscure Krautrock can for example, which is why I’m investigating that area with more attention. Here however a random run through a few of the aesthetic delights offered by these doomy 1970s English bands who rise up out of the murk like a Lovecraftian beast. Knowing next to zero about which of these might be listenable and which might prove to be total dogs, I’ve bought blind - and as a consequence, I’ve also had to listen deaf - and it shows. Decisions were partly informed by a vague and nebulous conception lurking at the back of the brain - a prejudged notion of what decent prog rock could be. More on this wispy conceit below.
Starting in the 100% gloomoid zones, Dark and Andromeda are true masters of portentous moanings. Andromeda, Return to Sanity, Background HBG 122/5 (1992) is a reissue of 1969 recordings. The sleeve notes connect the personnel with pop-psyche band The Attack, who once sneered at the vacuity of the fashion world in ‘Created By Clive’; and The Five Day Week Straw People, whose sole LP is a nasty satire of ‘The Straights’ in then-contemporary society. With Andromeda John Du Cann directed his spleen against the hypocrisies of the drug culture. This record is quite simply the sound of the hippy dream already beginning to turn sour - the lyrics are filled with disillusionment and bitterness, sentiments backed up by the doomy music. The title track alone is a horrible anthem of doom, marching its listener towards a terrible fate, martial snare drums punching home the power riffs; although it soon segues into some nice chanting monk voices over a deep river riff, perhaps anticipating ‘Width of a Circle’ two years later. You could read ‘return to sanity’ as a stark warning to the hippies, ie stop taking LSD now and rejoin the real world! - and ‘Garden of Happiness’ is no less acerbic about the empty promises of the Woodstock era. Du Cann’s critical stance and austerity may be a key to the development of prog out of psychedelia - that is, Prog Rock represented a movement fuelled by a cynical ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ scepticism - although few recorded items I’ve yet found are as specific in this way.
Incidentally I feel this pessimism paves the way for the later Apocalyptic Message-of-Doom Progressive Rock, as typified by ELP and early King Crimson for example. This may be largely attributable to the lyrics of Peter Sinfield. His classic phrase ‘Confusion will be my epitaph’ is surely axiomatic to any understanding of Prog. No crasser example of his overblown pretensions exists than the absurd paranoia of ‘Karn Evil 9′ on Brain Salad Surgery, 1973.
Dark feature quite good guitar work from Steve Giles and Martin Weaver, who when they finally reach their solo platforms can often shine brilliantly; concentrate on their playing and don’t judge them on their sometimes rather indifferent and clunky songs. They crank up the distortion, but never layer on quite enough of it; although ‘ZeroTime’ features one of their more successful riffs and disruptive wah-wah stabs. The lyrical content usually defaults to vague images of a lonely cheated man (never a woman!) facing the vicissitudes of a cruel and elemental world; not much further on from King Lear, in fact. Two reissues which appeared in the 1990s are Dark, Kissing Spell KSCD 9204 (1992) a comp of 1971-72 recordings, and Artefacts from the Black Museum, Acme AC8009LP. There is some duplication between these, although the latter features much more fitting sleeve art, and extra track ‘All Through the Night’.
Lifting us up from this swamp of despair are the flashes of hope in The Wicked Lady, The Axeman Cometh, Kissing Spell KSCD 9307 (1993): it’s the Martin Weaver show again! An interminable racket burblingly sold to us as ‘60.24 minutes of wah-wah hell’ and stressing that it was recorded in a basement, to further plunge us into mental solitary confinement. The brutal simplicity is good, at times as primal as Pebbles garage bands, but there’s a lot of sludge to wade through before you hit a seam of glittering axe-work. The title track has added choppy ‘cello’ guitar overdubs; ‘Wicked Lady’ is fourth-rate Hendrix copyism which soon deteriorates into mediocrity. Again, the lyrical themes are nowheresville - adolescent whining about suffering at the hands of ‘evil’ women soon becomes monotonous.
What better way to end this sojourn in bleak November nights than curling up with Second Hand, Reality, Essex 1006 (ND) - recorded in 1968: Second Hand gleefully inform us at peak volume ‘ The World Will End Yesterday’. With Kenny Elliot’s keyboards battling Bob Gibbons guitars, backwards tapes, intoning chants, way too much studio echo and its general air of overproduction, this item rates as proto-prog by dint of its ponderours pretensions and sheer excess. This cut was also issued on Rubble 8 (KIRI 051) by Bam-Caruso in 1991.
And then there’s Astral Navigations, Background HBG 122/1 CD (1992), recorded in 1970. Dave Wood and Mike Levon were the talented unknown producers who called themselves (or this project) Holyground; this LP was privately pressed and has become highly sought-after as the legend of its existence grew out of proportion. It’s a good record in anyone’s book. Two bands are showcased (presumably sharing a side each of the original vinyl): Lightyearsaway and Thundermother. Lightyearsaway spotlighted Brian Calvert’s songs for four tracks, each with spot-on arrangements of outstanding crispitude, mostly acoustic guitar-led with nice organ and recorder backdrops; his ‘Fourth Coming’ has topographic and natural history imagery layered with some rather vapid philosophising, about Mankind’s journey through life. ‘The Astral Navigator’ edges into cosmic territory and has the brief Apollo 13 sample at the end; it’s charming, but so British - a Boy’s Own Space Annual vision of space travel. Then in a quite different mode, Chris Carrodus-Coombs delivers a trilogy of songs, which although a tad overlong in performance are lyrically very dense - packed with complex ideas. Particularly ‘North Country Cinderella (Tomorrow)’, a lyrical love-song spiked with determinedly gritty and urban imagery, refusing conventional pleasantries of romance. These tracks are well-crafted studio masterpieces, enhanced by fine distort guitar licks from a young Bill Nelson (later of course leader of Be-Bop Deluxe), treated pianos and harmony choirs, the overall effect coming close to a home-made movie soundtrack lushness. 10cc could have learned a lot! The second band Thundermother are more straightforward, unreconstructed gtr-drms-bass boogiemeisters but none the worse for this. Their ‘Boogie Music’ matches Zappa’s ‘Willie the Pimp’ for high-testosterone energy and usually gets me cavorting around the room. Perhaps this lack of inhibition - even a certain naivete - is what the prog collector seeks out as an antidote to the more established, popular names and their attendant familiarity - to say nothing of their stereotyped methods of playing.
I admit to a soft spot for Arzachel’s sole eponymous LP, chiefly for the Hammond organ on ‘Queen Street Gang’ - also called ‘Soul Thing’, but it evinces no soul whatsoever! This lazy 12-bar strut lumbers along blissfully ignorant of the concept of syncopation; somewhere around the 200th bar the organ player starts pushing his effects manuals and diapasons, which varies the boredom somewhat. ‘Azathoth’ would threaten to become ‘Jerusalem’ (which ELP also once memorably murdered in Grand Guignol style) were it not for the discordant instrumental break which hoves into earshot like a slowed-down ambulance siren. Most of side two is devoted to the excessive yawn-a-thon ‘Metempsychosis’, where the guitar and organ are so attenuated by the spacey production they’re practically in the next room. You too can be impressed by the singular lack of development in this flabby track - progressive rock that doesn’t actually progress. Arzachel were Egg plus Steve Hillage, so that’s Dave Stewart on the organ. The magic marker sleeve art confirms all your worst nightmares about drug-addled hippies - it’s the worst album cover in history! I have a very bad pirate copy on Satori SAT 1005, which I suspect has been mastered at the wrong speed, although an Edsel CD pressing has been sighted.
So with some relief we turn to Octopus, Restless Night, Essex 1013 LP, ND (1970 recording) and Steel Mill, Green Eyed God, Essex 1012 LP (1975 recording): both more in the song-writing pop-psych vein and not too far away from the Rubbles series that enriches my life so much. One of many fifth-division bands who learned their lessons perhaps from Walrus-period Beatles, Octopus make a highly agreeable noise, a crisply played set of well-constructed songs and a prime example of journeyman period work; we veer from visions of grim Tower-Block Britain (’Council Plans’) to gypsy fantasies (’Queen and the Pauper’). Steel Mill are even less exceptional, and sadly don’t really deliver the promise of their wonderful bargain-basement surrealism sleeve.
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The Doom that Came to Venezuela
Latin-American Prog
I wanted to make a plea for this fascinating sub-genre, if such it be. In no small measure we have to thank the great Hugo Chavez-Smith for reissues on his Essex ‘Serie Delujo’ label, and his Background label. You’d never stand a chance of seeing or hearing original issues of these gems, which now command excessive collector’s prices. I just find something touchingly sincere about all these bands - their music is simple, direct and naive, some would even find it childish. As examples of an idiom they’re probably relatively unimportant - derivative of a scene that is not their own, mimicking sounds and gestures of UK bands (which in their turn were mimicking USA musicians), in no way influencing others, or developing this mode of music. Yet as examples of the pure joy of music-making these records have few equals. If we grasped at a visual parallel, you could seize upon the currently well-known and very popular Mexican Day of the Dead art. This is an example of a genre that gets stuck somewhere (and becomes very stereotyped, but remains powerful) - introduce Catholic liturgical art to a peasant culture, and they’ll mix it up with their own preoccupations about ghosts and death. Sugar skulls and papier-mâché skeletons of enormous potency and vibrant colourful design result.
If this sounds like some I’m edging towards a patronising Third World field study, please pass on to the next page. But don’t pass up hearing a record as unhinged and perplexing as Kris Kringle’s Todos Los Derechos Reservados (1968). True to its seasonal name this offers a real Christmas gift in gaily coloured wrapping paper, and accordingly presents us with a child’s eye view of psych-pop. In fact, the band themselves seem childishly overjoyed to be making a record at all, and treat the studio like the world’s biggest sweetshop. They make bizarre use of sound effects, for example we start off with a young man humming a tune to himself before he slips off the embankment and is crushed to death by a passing steam train. On one track harpsichords and trumpets dance a gavotte like children at the school fancy dress party in Victorian costume. As the record is sung in the native tongue, I’m excused the impossible task of interpreting these lyrics - whose content may not be as exotic as I choose to imagine, especially in the case of the varispeeded voice on ‘Historia de un Loto…’ delivering some mock-solemn chant over a conventional 12-bar backing - sounding like a forgotten cousin to Speedy Gonzales. Angle Records booted this as Angle 45 in 1993, and pressed 300 copies working from the only known existing original copy. The Genocido en Vietnam cover was aptly described as Francis Bacon meets OXFAM!
[Correction 20th June 2003: This story is apparently untrue…we recently received an e-mail from a knowledgable chap who reports: “The actual music playing is by another South American band, Los Speakers - it’s their 4th and last album titled En El Maravilloso Mundo De Ingeson, released in Mexico in 1968 on the Polydor Label. Los Speakers actually hailed from Columbia, whereas Kris Kringle were from Argentina. Further, the cover image is actually taken from the 3rd face of the gatefold sleeve from the Los Speakers LP. It’s still a wonderful and elusive record…but not by Kris Kringle.”].
Aguaturbia were a nifty beat combo from Chile with added bonuses of psychedelic guitar solos and, best of all, the wild voice of an unknown female singer. This shrill wailing of hers stops you in your tracks and dislocates your hearing bones inside your skull - she’s a real Throatwobbler Mangrove! Their name means ‘Choppy Waters’ in English, and hearing this de-centred vocal is certainly only one stage away from being set adrift on the Cape of Good Hope in a rubber dinghy. ‘Rock de la Carcel’ here unsurprisingly turns out to be ‘Jailhouse Rock’, sung in English in such ways as to make you wonder if she has any idea of the lyrical content? No matter, they get down with the song and take it at breakneck pace. They made Volume 2 in 1970 and a bootleg surfaced in 1991 on Mexcal (LP 1) with Mexican art on the cover; it’s the Essex version (1002 LP) you need as it faithfully reproduces the crucifixion cover. This is a stunning bit of photography collage, the flattened perspective of the girl on the cross bringing to mind Dali’s famous visionary painting of St John of the Cross. My guess is that no irony or commentary is intended by this invocation of the crucifixion, which there emphatically would be if this was a UK Prog band.
Also of interest: Kissing Spell’s Los Pajaros, Essex 1001, contains the touching song ‘Jim and the Blind Man’ opening with some lush major seventh chords strummed over the sound of the ocean, leading into a charming story where Jim is taught to play the flute - ‘Oh that will be grand!’ he chortles, as a recorder plays sweetly over seagull cries. A real moment of tenderness…maudlin perhaps, but so what? It beats McCartney any day….
Laghonia’s Etcetera, Essex 1004, rarely disappoints - at last a druggy reference in ‘Mary Ann’, endorsing her unique properties for inducing mental oblivion, they warble ‘Oh you take my mind away!’ over a heavy bass and slow pulse, before freaking out with a ‘wild’ guitar solo over clunky bongos; and they manage low-grade social criticism in ‘I’m a Nigger’ - ‘Everybody hates my race!’ The closest of the Argentine rockers to Pink Floyd perhaps, although ‘Everybody on Monday’ is sheer poppy delight and ‘Speed Fever’ is an unaffected motorcycle paean - ‘the wind blows your hair, the sun makes your glasses shine’…
Traffic Sound, Background HBG 122/13 (1993) is closest to the spirit of 1967 of this batch, the nearest model perhaps is The Notorious Byrds Brothers - although their producer is no Gary Usher! This is most noticeable on ‘Chicana Way’ which overdubs Jean Pierre Magnet into a one-man horn section while the lead guitarist approximates a pedal steel sound. Traffic Sound achieve some pleasing melodies and bright sunshiney chords, although we’re a tad let down by the tepid vocals of Manuel Sanguineti - still, his dissipated tone is very apt on the opening druggy cut, ‘Tibet’s Suzettes’, which proposes that we all start gobbling hash balls like pancakes. Lyrically, the strikingly clumsy grammar of this ritornello is the closest they come to a Bob Dylan humouresque…
Ladies WC, Essex 1009 CD is also squarely in the Beatles-Stones-Dylan camp, but layered with more US West Coast psychedelia influences - as Edwin Pouncey points out in his humourous fictionalised account of the band meeting up in the Amazonian rain forests. Indeed, every other cut here could be by any faceless British R’n'B band with harmonica / tambourine driven riffs. But the LP is redeemed by its amusing use of sound effects segueing each song - starting with a toilet flushing, the sequence leads through a boxing match, an orchestra tuning up, a jet taking off (edited next to ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’, yet another Byrds link: ‘Eight Miles High’ / ‘Lear Jet song’), a car crashing, glass breaking, a fairground pipe organ. A gurgling brook fades into ‘To walk on water’, a winsome peace-n-love ditty replete with spanish guitars, recorders, and the most inept use of a xylophone ever put to recording tape; melodically it’s a virtual simulacrum of ‘As we go along’ from The Monkees’ Head, so I would suggest you try using Ladies WC as a possible alternative soundtrack to this film - a little programming is all it takes!
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False Nostalgia - don’t trust it
I have contrived this completely artificial journey through what I perceive as some of the varying modes of prog-rock - moving myself ‘Out of the Dark and Into the Light’, as per The Wicked Lady’s suggestion. We can make no apologies for the sketchiness of this trajectory, which neglects countless key names from the history of obscure prog. Note that some of the items above were not on major labels - originally private pressings, or produced out of the group’s own pocket, underscoring that whatever success they enjoyed was largely provincial and local. At best what I can glom from this sampling is a kind of nostalgia - which I freely admit to - a nostalgia for a time I never had. There were brief exposures to flashes of then-unfamiliar records during my sojourn at boarding school in 1973 - etched in my memory are little fragments of this time, like the LP cover to Budgie (an atrocious Welsh HM band); the riff to ‘Pick up the Pieces’ by Hudson Ford; and most emphatically ‘Spirit in the Sky’ by Norman Greenbaum. Even today you can practically hear the long hair and beards in these snippets.
But Prog for me really starts in 1975, when I first started buying records in a big way, and with no thought at all yielded to pressure of fellow sixth-formers at my school in Everton - going for the obvious big-sellers and major players. Such a list comprises Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, Supertramp, Rick Wakeman, King Crimson…and in the hard rock mode, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. In such a context, even bands like Camel or Barclay James Harvest seem slightly recherche! The camp of pseudo-intellectual pompery fell by the wayside for me, although I now return to the Sabs and Zep with a renewed appetite.
The point is that in 1971-1972, surely the years when heavy-duty prog throve, I was still mired in the delights of Radio One and the charts, contented with a diet of teenybopper (Donny Osmond) or Glam (Gary Glitter, The Sweet). Only in thinking back do I madly imagine I was (somehow) listening to the ghosts of prog and krautrock which might be swimming around somewhere in the atmosphere. Which is conceivable in a way if you believe that sounds never really ‘die’, they just keep echoing around the universe. From the droning extended passage in The Aztecs’ ‘Most People I Know think that I’m Crazy’ - which was in the charts in 1972 - it may have been possible to conjecture that somewhere out there, whole LP sides (not just 60 seconds instrumental break on a 45 rpm single) were devoted to making noises like this. This is what I mean by a false nostalgia. We’re slipping into some metaphysical nonsense here - a low-grade form of time travel perhaps.
A simpler view is that I just like to dig up weird records which were around when I was alive, but by no stretch of the imagination could I ever have bought them (or even seen them, in most cases). The truth is hardly anyone bought this stuff at the time. Much of your fourth-division UK prog was issued on budget-priced labels, probably poorly distributed, and destined to end up in the bargain bins at WH Smiths in no time, or else recalled to be melted down in the vast bubbling cauldrons of reprocessed vinyl - Purgatory for LPs!. If you have any music publications from the 1970s, a glance through the adverts will reveal what music was prominent at the time. I have ZigZag 37 from 1973 in front of me, with full-page ads for such blandies as Stealers Wheel, Kiki Dee, Gallagher and Lyle, Donovan. All of these examples above sadly demonstrate the kind of confidence and faith a record company had in their roster of prog bands.
Of course, the listeners can be equally revisionist. John Bagnall has suggested how significant the punk ‘movement’ in this country was, and how after 1976 a new orthodoxy quickly took hold, and we couldn’t wait to throw out any music associated with Dinosaurs and Boring Old Farts. For many years, to listen to anything remotely proggy was admitting to the love that dare not speak its name. This reissue phenomenon - and the apparent growth in the collectors’ market for 1970s records generally - shows that there is still a presence, still an interest. Perhaps the hippies and druggies never go away - or spawn new generations of their ilk. Mark Robinson has noted this depressing ‘inescapable miasma’ phenomenon, possibly unique to UK culture.
Another way to account for the appeal of an obscure prog item is principally its obscurity - the simple fact of its unavailability and uncommercial nature somehow associates it with other obscure, unavailable and uncommercial musics - eg free improvised music, and by a twist of thinking this can justify the quality of the music. A dangerously elitist thought-crime, mayhap! There’s something of an illicit thrill in dissing the (popular) Pink Floyd on the one hand, but smugly asserting that (relative unknowns) Dark were a fine band - a kind of ’safe’ way of enjoying a generally despised genre.
The conclusion I draw from all this is an issue of redemption - it’s a feeling of ‘rescuing’ some poor unknown record from the limbo of poor sales performance, and by giving it more airings than it could possibly have enjoyed first time around, one is taking part in a sort of grand altruistic project - like adopting war orphans or something. The big guys have had their due, now let’s hear from the nameless forgotten souls! The reissuing of these obscurities is a healthy riposte to the major record companies - who I feel have a vested interest in maintaining a pecking order in the minds of record-buyers - ‘A Lists’ and established hierarchies of so-called ‘Great Rock bands’. The more past music there is available, then it can only improve our perception of what’s good and what’s bad, and help us to rethink the accepted lines of development and influence in rock music. It expands history. This is why I believe that if I choose to privilege even something relatively ordinary like Octopus in favour of what the rock establishment pushes my way, it can be something more than just acting like some foppish elitist who dabbles in obscurity.
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Who is reissuing these records, and why?
Tread with caution here and let’s try and separate out the different strands of activity here. The first two categories are official, record-company based records; the second two are in the bootleg-ish area.
An official reissue by the originators
Brought out by the record company who owned the original recording. Thus for example the recent ‘deluxe’ edition of the first Black Sabbath album - in proper gatefold mode and pressed on heavy vinyl. A record like this has probably remained in print with its parent company ever since its first issue. At least in a case like this they should have access to master tapes and original printing plates, unless they’ve been carelessly discarded.
An official reissue, but done by another company
For example, the Decal reissue (LIK 12) of On the Shore by Trees, a 1970 album originally on CBS 64168. The principle is that Decal paid for the rights to do this, so presumably mechanical royalties continue to be paid. The reissue features original sleeve art or a good facsimile of same. They probably used master tapes.
‘RE’ = An unofficial reissue by fans
The aim is to produce a replica LP, a reproduction of a prog rock item so rare that you’ll probably never see an original copy in your life. The vinyl is remastered working from the best available copy. Modern technology allows the possibility of removing crackles and clicks, by sampling either side of such a glitch. The sleeve art is rephotographed and replicated exactly as in the original issue (eg Spring’s triple gatefold photograph by Keef, easily a match for his fine work on Black Sabbath). And Essex’s Octopus should win a prize for that gatefold cover alone, a true masterpiece of 1970s kitsch painting. The original catalogue number is used. The label is the same. Nobody tries to pass it off as an original copy at a ridiculous price (unless they’re stupid), it’s just a public spirited gesture by members of the collector-fan fringe, to share neglected music. An aural fanzine! However, it is my guess that neither record label nor artistes make any money out of this. On the other hand, it’s equally likely that the people doing the RE also lose out financially. There may be a strain of RE manufacturers who do try and palm off their product as an original, but I have not encountered any; in any case, rephotographed sleeve art announces itself immediately to anyone with a pair of eyes. One of my favourites in this vein is a vinyl RE of Tone Float by The Organisation (SF 811); the sleeve reproduced had a portion of the art torn off, which the fan-owner had attempted to restore with his Derwent coloured pencils. Further, the paste-up artist (who knew little about process blacks) cut out and repasted the title and the RCA Victor logo.
Re-Treads
Similar to a RE, except these are quite often on CD format instead of vinyl. They might feature new sleeve art and new catalogue numbers. ACME items on vinyl always come issued in a plain master bag; the sleeve art and notes are printed on A3 glossy paper, spray-mounted and wrapped around the master bag, thus sealing it. Sometimes Retreads are more like compilations, in that they add bonus tracks not part of the original release. Some of them (eg Andromeda) appears to have been done in collaboration with a member of the original band, which reassures one that payments are going where they’re due.
It is only through the medium of the reissue that I’ve stood any chance of hearing this turgid nonsense - CDs (and limited edition vinyl) have rescued these hidden treasures from the dustbin of fashion. The only other option would be to spend enormous sums at collector’s fairs. This price tag aspect is not one I have cared to dwell on at this time, yet it seems to be a useful frame of reference for some. Some dealers can tell us nothing about a rare record other than it commands a hefty dig into one’s wallet.
ED PINSENT