We start this review with one of the most successful groups in England at the time and an album that topped the UK album charts when it was released in August 1970.
The Moody Blues – A Question of Balance
The albums that The Moody Blues released in the years 1967-1969 were elaborate affairs of production and arrangement. Reach in their textures and layers of instrumental and vocal performances, they were all wonderful studio creations but not easy to perform live. The song arrangements had to be simplified in order to perform them on tour by the five members of the band. When they convened early in 1970 at Essex studios to plan their next album, they decided to change their approach. Singer, guitarist and songwriter Justin Hayward remembers: “We were all convinced that we had to record an album of songs that could easily translate into effective live performances. In a way, we almost reverted to performing live in the studio, without venturing too much into the world of overdubs.”
Producer Tony Clarke, who worked with the Moody Blues since 1966, earning the title “the Sixth Moody”, talked to Melody Maker in February 1970 about how a new album by the Moodys starts: “We spend a couple of days just talking about how we would like the album to be. Everything comes into the discussion, it’s the thoughts of the six of us about things that are happening today or we think may be happening in six months when the record is out.” Many of the band’s songs start with a very basic skeleton and then take shape in the studio: “A lot of the time they will only have a few tracks written. All I really need is something to start with on the first day, the rest of the numbers are written here. They will disappear into the different rooms and work on the songs.”
Towards the end of the recording sessions, in May 1970, drummer Graeme Edge spoke to Melody Maker about one of the band’s signatures, the sound of the mellotron: “You can get a tremendous number of sounds from a mellotron but at the same time it’s not a fast instrument, it’s very much a block chord instrument. That was ok for the emotional spectrum that we wanted for the Moody Blues. We didn’t want to hit the genitals, we are aiming for the head and heart.”
The band was on a fast trajectory to becoming rock and roll stars, with constant touring and recording schedule since their success in 1967 with the album Days of Future Passed and the hit Nights in White Satin. The title of the forthcoming album reflected the musicians’ thoughts on their new status. Graeme Edge: “That album was the start of where we were almost treated as semi-deities, and we very much wanted to reflect what the title says: that maintaining your self is a question of balance. It’s very hard to maintain your equilibrium under those pressures.” Justin Hayward: “On the first side, we are asking ourselves the question, and on the second side, we are starting to answer it. Looking for the answers will keep us going for a long time.”
The album A Question of Balance starts energetically with one of the band’s biggest hits, the aptly named Question. It was written by Justin Hayward, who discussed in detail the circumstances surrounding the time he wrote it: “I was very aware of the anti-war movement in America which had grown thanks to the Vietnam War. It was a protest song about the state of the world.” Other personal feelings found their way into the lyrics: “There were a lot of things happening in the world and in my life, and I was getting a bit upset. I’d also lost someone that was very dear to me, which was part of it as well, and there was a kind of anger about that loss. And it turned out not so much a personal song, but more, I suppose.”
Like other songs the band has written over the years, Question was a combination of unrelated pieces of music put together to create a more complex song. Hayward: “Question was two songs I’d written separately – one frantic, one very slow. And then I was sitting at home one day and I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. One of them is half the tempo of the other one. So maybe, let’s go from one into the other and see what happens and then come back out of it.’” Once the structure of the song was decided, recording it was a breeze: “The recording session was very quick. We’d just gone through this period of not doing too many overdubs and trying to pull back to a live feel. We recorded it on Saturday. Tony Clarke mixed it on Sunday, and Decca had it for their Monday meeting.”
Question is one of the The Moody Blues’ fastest songs, propelled by Hayward’s frantic strumming on a 12-string acoustic guitar and the clever use of the mellotron. Hayward continues: “For me it was a natural rhythm, the speed of that rhythm. Ever since I was a little kid playing skiffle. It didn’t seem to be very fast at the time until I heard it back. The record actually has Mike Pinder playing tambourine on the original track which I think glues it together. I just said to Mike Pinder, ‘You know, I want it to go ba-ba at the beginning.’ And he had this mellotron sound of brass and strings combined.”
Question was released as a single in April 1970, with another fantastic song on its B-side, Candle of Life from their previous album To Our Children’s Children’s Children. It reached No. 2 in the U.K. and No. 21 in the U.S. It was their most successful single in the UK since topping the charts with Go Now in 1964. A few months later the band released the album A Question of Balance with the song Question as the opener. The album reached the top of the UK album chart.
The album cover was a gatefold that opened top to bottom instead of the standard left to right. Lots of detail in that image, starting at the bottom with people sitting at the beach (notice the placement of the Threshold label on the flag) unaware of the brooding on-goings in the horizon and sky above them. The cover art caused legal issues for the rendering of a photograph artist Phil Travers found in a National Geographic issue of British explorer Blashford Snell. The resulting image, of Snell wearing a helmet and pointing a gun at an elephant, came to the attention of its subject (Snell, not the elephant) who wasted no time sending an angry letter to Decca, demanding immediate removal of that atrocity at once. Travers replaced his portrait with an imaginary person, sans-helmet.
Mike Pinder contributed the second epic song on that album, the melancholic ‘Melancholy Man’. Pinder demystifies a myth about the song and its protagonist: “The single most incorrect interpretation of Melancholy Man has been that maybe it was a song about me being melancholy. I used that as a way of saying that there are different levels of melancholy, and that this was a melancholy for the whole world because of the impending breakdown of the structure in all things that we have seen happen.”
Sound engineer Derek Varnals has vivid memories of this song and its songwriter: “This was recorded at a time when Mike was not being very productive from a songwriting perspective, but, eventually after five months, he comes up with this song. And it’s a good one, of course. Mike always comes up with something good under pressure.” He continues talking about the recording of the song: “It was a curious thing. As soon as they started playing the first run-through – with Mike playing acoustic guitar with Justin on it – the key they were paying it in and just the general feel of it made me say to Tony Clarke: ‘This sounds like the soundtrack to a French film.’ And I said to Mike: ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to very much try and make it sound like a French film.’ That is why I made the song a little echoey . I usually employ echo to make things sweet and smooth, but I thought this one should sound a little more brittle, a bit stark, a bit sort of black and white. That was the flavor that it gave me, and that’s what we did for the basic guitars.”
Justin Hayward – 12-string acoustic guitar, lead vocals
John Lodge – bass guitar, backing vocals
Mike Pinder – Mellotron, backing vocals
Ray Thomas – tambourine, backing vocals
Graeme Edge – drums, percussion
We continue this article with a number of albums released on the Transatlantic Records label in 1970. The label, founded by Nat Joseph in the early 1960s, focused mainly on British folk music. Among its roster were acts such as The Dubliners, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Ralph McTell and most notably Pentangle. With the advent of the late 1960s the label started signing artists from the emerging genres of psychedelia and progressive rock. Although none of the acts reviewed here found major success, the albums they released in 1970 are all worth listening to.
Peter Bardens – The Answer
The first is keyboardist Peter Bardens, who started his career as a blues musician in the band The Cheynes, which also included a very young Mick Feetwood. After a stint with Van Morrison’s band Them, Bardens started his own band Peter B’s Looners. The band again featured Mick Fleetwood on drums and one guitar player who would become one of the best blues rock guitar players in Britain. Mick Fleetwood remembers the first time they met the guitar player: “He came to audition for a band called The Peter B’s Looners. He fitted with us. We were a very simple instrumental band, a lot of Booker T, Mose Allison. He had a great ‘sound’ as they say, but me and [bassist] Dave Ambrose didn’t think he knew enough about the guitar. He only played a couple of licks, variations on a theme, Freddie King. And to Peter Bardens’ credit, he pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re wrong, this guy is special’”. If you did not guess, that guitar player was Peter Green, who would soon thereafter form Fleetwood Mack.
In 1970 Peter Bardens released the album The Answer, and who guests on it but Peter Green, now world famous with Fleetwood Mac, contributing wonderful electric guitar on a number of tracks. He is uncredited on the album sleeve, but the guitar sound and style are unmistakable. Bruce Thomas, who plays bass on the album, talked about Peter Green: “There’s no one who comes within a million miles of the depth of feeling that he can get out of a guitar. There was just something totally special about him. He was not a musician – he was a shaman. Peter said he had to stop playing the guitar because it was breaking his heart. The sound was not coming from the guitar, it was coming from the depths of his soul through his guitar. That’s all I could say!”
The album featured the epic side-long track Homage to the God of Light, featuring an excellent organ solo that reminds me of a Santana jam from the same period. Two years later Peter Bardens would join Andrew Latimer, Andy Ward and Doug Ferguson to form Camel. This track was part of Camel’s early live sets.
In an interview to Zigzag magazine, label executive Nat Joseph said of Peter Bardens: “He is really a top musician who realizes very full the context in which he is working, and he’ll take pains to make sure a record is programmed to get across to his audience – I think he is going to be a massive star.” Maybe not a massive star, but with his later work with Camel, certainly one of the best progressive rock keyboard players of the 1970s.
Bass – Bruce Thomas
Congas – Rocky
Drums – Reg Isadore
Guitar – Andy Gee
Organ, Piano, Vocals – Peter Bardens
Vocals – Linda Lewis, Steve Ellis
Marsupilami – Self titled debut
The band Marsupilami took its name from a 1952 cartoon character created by Belgian artist André Franquin. Band members were influenced by a wide variety of music styles and artists such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Fairport Convention, McCoy Tyner, Olivier Messiaen, Soft Machine, Yes and Frank Zappa. John Peel saw an early performance and offered to sign them to his label Dandelion. They opted for Transatlantic and their beginnings were quite promising, with performances at various London clubs such as The Roundhouse, appearance at the first Glastonbury festival, and most notably, the first band on the first day of the Isle of Wight festival in August 1969. However, the band were short on live gigs in their native country. A year after they released their self-titled debut album in 1970, Nat Joseph told Zigzag magazine: “Marsupilami’s first album sold only moderately here but sales in Holland and Germany were very pleasing, because the group play far more gigs over there than they do here. I’m sure we’d have sold many more here if they’d been playing in England, but it’s a management thing – at the moment the group haven’t got a manager, and if a group’s not playing, it can’t sell any records.”
A highlight from their debut album, released in April 1970, is the track Born to Be Free. Great instrumental passages by all members of the group, including flutist Jessica Stanley Clarke, who later became an organic gardening expert. From a review of the album shortly after its release: “Unusual, interesting debut by a band who contrast driving rock rhythms with ethereal flute, chants and spoken verse to create an eerie and oddly unsettling atmosphere. They are an accomplished outfit who sound as if they’ve listened to contemporary ‘serious’ composers, and their own music is pretty demanding. A bit too doomy at times, in fact, although the Gothic gloominess is balanced by some tremendous rhythmic passages when guitar, drums and organ really take off.”
Dave Laverock – Guitar, vocals, words and music
Fred Hasson – Vocals, harmonica, words and music
Leary Hasson – Keyboards and music
Richard Lathom Hicks – Bass
Mike Fouracre – Drums
Jessica Stanley Clarke – Flute and vocals
Jody Grind – Far Canal
Jody Grind was formed by keyboardist Tim Hinkley in 1968. The trio he led, which rehearsed as the backing band for singer Elkie Brooks, was deemed too experimental and instrumental for the singer. The trio went on their own, and titled themselves Jody Grind, after an album and song by jazz pianist Horace Silver. They were signed to Transatlantic and released their debut album One Step On in 1969. Lack of success and differing musical directions caused a major lineup change, with Tim Hinkley the sole remaining member recruiting former Ferris Wheel guitarist and vocalist Bernie Holland and drummer Pete Gavin.
Taking to Zigzag magazine after reforming the band, Hinkley said: “I want the band to become tighter, and the arrangements to be more stated. I want the themes which we improvise over to be a lot more complicated and intricate, and I want another voice to augment mine. In the old band I was playing organ, the bass part on organ, and singing, and I often felt the need for a second voice.” Guitarist Bernie Holland, who would later go on to play with diverse artists such as Stomu Yamashta, Joan Armatrading, Danny Thompson and Van Morrison, remember the band playing gigs alongside artists such as Genesis, Osibisa and Patto.
Their second album, Far Canal, released in July 1970, is indeed more elaborate with wonderful instrumental pieces. It was recorded at Sound Technique Studio in London in three quick days. Unfortunately, this album did not fare commercially any better than the first, and the band was soon dropped from the Transatlantic label and disbanded altogether.
Here is a great energetic track from that second album, Jump Bed Jed:
Tim Hinkley – Organ, piano, electric piano, vibraphone, vocals
Bernie Holland – Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, vocals
Pete Gavin – Drums, percussion
Sources:
A Question of Balance 2006 CD release booklet liner notes by Mark Powell
Higher & Higher Issue 33 Winter 1996
Marsupilami’s debut 2008 CD release on Cherry Red Records booklet
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