We are at the end of this 9-part series with three wonderful groups who released albums in 1970 on the Harvest and Vertigo progressive labels. Unlike many of the artists reviewed in this series, our first band was able to sustain a long recording career. In 1970 they released their second album.
Magna Carta formed in 1969, a trio consisting of Chris Simpson, Lyell Tranter and Glen Stuart. Simpson says about their choice of name: “I originally wanted to call us Village, but producer Brian Shepherd said there was a blues band with that name. In those days groups had weird names like Procol Harum and Jethro Tull. I came up with Genesis because I had background in theology. Brian goes: ‘Genesis? Too Biblical.’ The next name on my list was Magna Carta. He says: ‘I like that one. What does it mean?’ I explained it was the great agreement between King John and The Barons, a charter of freedom. He goes: ‘Freedom, freedom…protest song…that’s the one!’ I can’t stand the bloody name actually.”
The band released their self-titled debut album in 1969 and in early 1970 played a gig at London’s Lyceum Theatre supporting Pentangle. In the crowd was producer Gus Dudgeon, then fresh from working on David Bowie’s landmark 1969 single Space Oddity. He liked what he heard and asked to produce their second album. The band signed with the progressive label Vertigo Records and entered Trident Studios to record what became the album Seasons, released in 1970.
Simpson talked about that second album: “Seasons was a concept album about the changing landscapes on my beloved Yorkshire Dales. I wrote the lyrics on the backs of cornflakes packets that I turned inside-out. After our first, rather DIY album with Brian Shepherd, it was incredible to record where The Beatles had recorded Hey Jude.” The album includes contributions by a number of fine musicians. Tim Renwick plays recorder, Spike Heatley on double bass, Barry Morgan on drums. Gus Dudgeon brought along a number of stellar artists who worked with him already – Tony Visconti, who wrote the string and bass arrangements, and Rick Wakeman on piano and organ. You can hear Wakeman accompanying on organ here:
The first side of the album is made of the epic title track Seasons, about which Simpson said it is, “based on the life journey of the soul, and the rounds of the Seasons in my beloved Nidderdale”. After recording of the album was completed, Tony Visconti invited the band to his house in Beckenham. He wanted them to play the album to his friends, who turned out to be non-other than David Bowie and his then-wife, Angie. Simpson: “So we played Seasons for them, just two acoustic guitars and voices. After we’d finished, David said, ‘That was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.’”
Of note is the work of excellent guitarist Davey Johnstone. Chris Simpson was impressed when he saw him at The Cambridge Folk Festival playing mandolin with Draught Porridge. He guests on this album, and later joined the band full time for their next album, before finding fame in Elton John’s backup band. Simpson had nothing but compliments to say about Johnstone: “He was one helluva dude! He is one of the greatest musicians I have ever known. He’s not good – he’s frightening.”
Another standout song on Seasons is Airport Song, released as a single. Simpson: “Its horrendous original title was Heathrow Fogbound, but it turned out to be an important song for us.”
Unlike Magna Carta, our next two bands sadly released their last album in 1970, both ending a short recording career yielding only two albums each. Forest started in 1966 when brothers Martin and Adrian Welham and school friend Dez Allenby found that their voices gelled well together and they sang unaccompanied traditional folk music in harmonies, not unlike The Watersons and The Young Tradition. They named themselves The Foresters of Walesby, later shortened to Forest after they moved to Birmingham in 1968. They started writing their own songs and in 1969 got their first break. Martin Welham tells the story: “We were booked as support to Joe Cocker and the Greaseband just as their superb rendition of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ was climbing the charts in the direction of No. 1. This gig was at our old university and hosted by John Peel who heard our set, which received a hostile reception. John berated the soul-seeking audience for not listening.” John Peel became a strong advocate and a friend of the band and would later write the sleeve notes for their debut album.
Music categories were much less defined at the time, and the band toured and socialized with many artists playing different kinds of music, including The Spencer Davis Group at Cannon Hill Arts Festival. Dez Allenby remembers: “We used to see Ozzie Osborne and share impoverished fags together at our agent’s, and John Martyn with whom we lost much of our minds.” The band recorded a few demos that were accepted not by one label but two: Fontana and Harvest. They opted to join the like-minded underground progressive Harvest Records, which was just starting operations in 1969. Like Magna Carta they released their self-titled debut in 1969 and continued to record their second album in 1970.
Their debut album was developed and arranged when the band gathered in Abbey Road studio, with band members picking up instruments left from classical recordings such as harmonium and cello. For their next effort, they decided to have a better planned approach. When the songwriters arrived at the studio, they had an established idea of how they wanted their songs to sound like. Adrian Welham: “The instrumentation was more economical, more measured and thought-out. As we each developed as songwriters, our ideas and visualizations for our compositions might call for specific motifs, instrumental passages or ritornellos, and so forth.” The result was the excellent album Full Circle.
John Peel wrote this on the sleeve notes to their debut album: “The music, perhaps curiously, is full of sunshine, leaves and running water. It would be a waste of time to try and describe the rare treasures without price contained within. It would be nice for the Forest if you purchased these results of their lives and labors – but nicer still for you.”
The beautiful art cover drawing is by Joan Melville, who also created the art for the band’s debut album. She was much older than the lads in the band, but well-tuned into the sub culture. Dez Allenby: “We’d actually sing songs and work with her to give her ideas about the kind of things we should have. I remember her saying that she felt that there was this darkness at times in the music.” Melvillle incorporated some of the song titles and lyrics into the cover, including ‘Graveyard’, ‘Gypsy Girl & Rambleaway’ and ‘The Midnight Hanging Of A Runaway Serf’. She also added the church in Walesby, where in their early phase the band would go to practice their unaccompanied harmonies.
The songwriting and arrangements throughout the album is superb. Dez Allenby was very complementary when he spoke about his bandmates’ talents: “I rate Martin’s and Adrian’s songs very highly. Adrian never wrote before Forest and was the last of us to write. Was he worth waiting for! Their songs are built around really interesting guitar chord progressions that they seem to understand easily and love to develop. I think as well as this, they are both touched by simplicity so that as well as the complexities of form, you get these memorable melodies or snatches of melodies. We had left the folk orthodoxies behind by then and were on our own trip. I think we had approached the traditional material in our own way too.”
Graveyard is an excellent track from that album. The song is sung by a phantom who recognizes the body it once inhabited. Adrian Welham, who wrote the song: “‘I did genuinely have a dream where I was looking at myself dead, basically. The moon was out that night, and if I’m conscious there’s a full moon I never sleep well, even now.”
Martin Welham – 12 and 6 string guitar, piano, violin, percussion, whistle, harmonium, harpsichord, vocals
Adrian Welham – guitar cello, percussion, violin, bass, whistle, vocals
Dez Allenby – harmonica, mandolin, whistle, percussion, vocals
We end this article with another album released on Vertigo Records, this one by Dr. Strangely Strange, a wonderfully wonderful band that released just one album with the label, unfortunately their last recording.
The Irish trio, with Tim Booth, Ivan Pawle and Tim Goulding, started life in a commune called The Orphanage. Phil Lynott was a frequent visitor, and later on he introduced them to a friend of his. Tim Booth remembers: “I was in The Bailey, Dublin’s then trendiest bar, when I became aware of this skinny boy from Belfast sitting by my side, dark hair falling over his eyes, a few pimples, nervous, shy and a bit twitchy, his left hand making shapes on an invisible guitar, a brown corduroy coat too tight across the shoulders. Phil said: ‘This is Gary, man, our new guitar player, needs a place to crash…’.” This was fantastic guitarist Gary Moore, who would soon form the band Thin Lizzy with Phil Lynott.
A 1970 article in Sounds magazine described the band well: “Dr. Strangely Strange are a band of many changes. There are many colors to their music, but always behind whatever they are doing lies a deep-rooted feeling for the romantic folklore of Ireland, the country that gives birth to the band.”
Another visitor was Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. He liked what he heard and recommended them to ISB’s producer and manager Joe Boyd. Their first album Kip of the Serenes was released on Island Records in 1969. For their second album, Heavy Petting, they were joined by Gary Moore. Joe Boyd: “I think I remember discussing using Gary Moore with them. The mix of acoustic and electric was in the water in those days – The Incredible String Band were using electric bass by then.” Gary Moore remembers the recording sessions: “The studio was weird because it was on the ballroom floor and they’d bring out all these screens and put them around the instruments. It was a four-track so everything had to be bounced down.”
Tim Booth talked about how the band transitioned to use electric instruments and rely more on rock rhythms: “I don’t know how we decided we’d get rockier. I think it was the influence, probably, of Gary, because it was just so lovely to play with him. He was a beautiful guitar player and he really respected our inabilities if you like. Because he was streets ahead of us as a player. But when Gary played with us, he had us on our toes and we would play much better. And he loved the music that we made, he loved our songs and he loved to play them. So when he started playing electric guitar on them, we said, oh, gosh, let’s make this one electric.“
The connection with Joe Boyd brought with it access to the huge pool of talent from the various groups he was producing and managing. Booth continues: “And then we talked to Joe and Joe said, well, you’re going to need a drummer. If you’re going to do that, then you haven’t got a drummer, and you’re going to need a bass player. I was playing bass a bit. So when we came to record Dave Mattacks played drums with us. Fairport’s drummer. He’s a superb drummer, you just couldn’t go wrong with him.”
Adopting electric instruments was also a result of practical needs in live performance. Band member and multi-instrumentalist Ian Pawle: “We were always sleeping on floors and all that kind of stuff, because we were never commercially viable. We wanted to be able to play in larger venues, and that was very difficult, playing acoustic. We also had to lug this harmonium around everywhere. We did a gig with Status Quo on Irish television. [Third band member] Tim Goulding was very impressed by their little Farfisa organ … he said: ‘I’ve got to get one of those’ – and he did. It was very handy, and it was easier to move around. But it started to alter the dynamic then, from the harmonium sound into something more electrical.”
The LP package featured an elaborate cutout designed by Roger Dean. This was one of his first hand-drawn fonts, for which he became world-famous with album covers for Yes and other artists. Dean on the cutout sleeve: “You had to treat it very gently – you can’t really slide it on a shelf next to other record covers without damaging the flaps – it’s a real pain – though it’s not like Sticky Fingers, which will do damage to other covers!” The band members, who were not consulted to provide input about the cover design, were not thrilled. Tim Booth: “We wanted a simple fold-out with lots of pics and Strangely notes and clear typography. I hated the cover from first sight. This piece did not work as a vinyl storage system – the stupid flaps tore off when you slid it into a rack of LPs. This was justified by use of the flaps as props to display the album in shop windows.”
Tim Booth talked about the subject matter of the band’s songs: “The lyrics of those songs were extremely visual and related to the skyscraper clarity that acid appeared to furnish. Looking into the heart of a blackberry bush or observing the stubble growing on the chin of the local sergeant were heady catalysts.’ Tim Goulding added: “‘Looking back at it now,’ he continues, ‘it certainly appears like magic realism. Many of the characters in the songs are drawn from Irish literary, political and musical sources.”
A favorite track on the album is Here is Sign On My Mind, featuring a wonderful electric guitar solo by Gary Moore. Credits on this track:
Bass, Backing Vocals – Tim Booth
Lead Vocals, Rhythm Guitar, Organ, Whistle – Ivan Pawle
Mandolin – Andy Irvine
Lead Guitar – Gary Moore
Drums – Dave Mattacks
Years later band members had had mixed feelings about that second album and going electric. Tim Booth: “We began to think maybe we can be a folk-rock band. We sort of became a pale imitation of Fairport … and to some extent we lost our identity.” Ivan Pawle: “We went a bit adrift, in a way. We just thought we might be more mainstream and also become slightly more commercially successful.”
Sources:
Magna Carta feature in Prog Magazine Issue 138, March 2023
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