1970 saw the release of many early British progressive rock albums by some of the genre’s classic bands, all covered in this series. Not all of these releases became a commercial success, and some of the bands fell by the wayside and received little or no recognition. However these bands were quite active that year, and their albums are more than worth listening to. In the next two articles in this series we will cover some of my favorite, albeit lesser-known, albums from 1970.
Audience – Friend’s Friend’s Friend
Audience formed at the end of 1968 by guitar player Howard Werth, and had an interesting front line instrumentation that consisted of classical guitar and reeds. In the thriving folk scene in Britain at the time that would have been the norm, but Audience amplified their instruments and catered to rock music listeners who were interested in groups that pushed the envelope. Werth remembers: “I was playing a nylon-strung acoustic guitar at home a lot, because I didn’t want to annoy the neighbors with loud music. I got into it and enjoyed the feel of it. I used to think that it would be great if I could get an electric nylon-strung guitar that I could play through an amp, but no such thing existed.” Eventually he found the right setup in a music store and started putting the guitar through effect devices such as wah-wah.
Keith Gemmell, flute, clarinet and saxophone player with the band and a like-minded musician, was constantly on the look for new sounds. Werth: “Keith has a very sophisticated doctored echo unit, with a very slow repeat, so that there’s quite a long time before the sound comes out, and he can then play in unison with it. He can sound like a whole horn section.”
Audience released a self-titled, self-produced debut album in 1969 on Polydor. The label gave the band artistic freedom in the studio, but was not keen on the end result. The album did not make a dent commercially and things looked quite grim in the second half of 1969. The band’s luck turned after a show they performed at The Lyceum in London, opening for Led Zeppelin. Werth remembers that date: “The night we supported Led Zeppelin was a good night. We went down very well and got some great music press the next week. We had a strong live following.” In the audience was none other than Charisma’s label head Tony Stratton-Smith, who was impressed and offered the band a contract with his newly established label.
Audience soon started to take the stage on touring packages that included label mates Van Der Graaf Generator and Genesis. Werth remembers a funny episode during a European tour that also included Brian Davison’s Every Which Way and Lindisfarne: “There were three roadies involved. Two of them had one lung each and one of them had one eye. I always remember Strat (Tony Stratton-Smith) going, ‘Bloody hell – between the lot of them they’ve got four lungs, five eyes and no brains!’”
For their first album on Charisma, the band was teamed with famed producer Shel Talmy, known for his production of hit songs with The Kinks and The Who. But things did not click between band and producer, as Werth recalls: “We went in the studio with him and he virtually said, ‘I don’t like any of this material. Let’s do some other stuff.’ And we thought, ‘That’s handy, of course we’ve rehearsed some other stuff’ and we said, ‘Bye,’ and produced it ourselves. We’d done it once so we thought we were experts. We were a strong unit and we knew what we wanted to try.” It takes guts for a young band to reject working with such a towering producer, but it is to the band’s credit that they went on to once again self-produce the album.
The resulting album, Friend’s Friend’s Friend, was released in May 1970. It produced one single, Belladonna Moonshine, that also scored the group a performance at Top of the Pops. The track Priestess is a favorite, its lyrics influenced by Werth’s reading material: “Reading-wise I remember one book in particular that took my attention called The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwels and Jaques Bergier. It had quite an influence on me searching for spirituality. A lot of the stuff in that book really spoke to me and took me beyond planet Earth if you like.”
Howard Werth — acoustic guitar, lead vocals, banjo
Trevor Williams — bass, backing vocals
Keith Gemmell — tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
Tony Connor — drums, percussion, pianos
Black Widow – Sacrifice
We remain with the flute as a leading instrument, albeit in a completely different context. Black Widow was originally formed in 1966 when a number of teenage musicians started a band and named it Pesky Gee! Gradually evolving from a soul-based repertoire to more progressive sounds, they signed with Pye records and released an album in 1969, titled Exclamation Mark. Reeds player Clive Jones remembers the reason for the album name: “We were very fond of the exclamation mark at the end of our name because nobody else had one, so our manager rang up Pye records and told them to make sure they put it on the album at the end of our name. Of course Pye didn’t do this, they called the album Exclamation Mark instead.”
The album included covers of late 1960s songs such as Season of The Witch, Piece Of My Heart, and Jethro Tull’s Dharma For One. The band was fond of Vanilla Fudge and covered their song Where Is My Mind? Which was also released as a single. Clive Jones recalls that period: “Pesky Gee! was originally a soul band but later when soul was fading, we came to like the more prog rock sound. We used to do Vanilla Fudge ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’”.
The album and single made no dent in the charts, and the band was dropped from Pye Records. Lacking sufficient originality in their songwriting, the band was looking for inspiration. They found it in late 1960s interest in Hammer Horror movies with remakes of Dracula and Frankenstein films, and occultists like Aleister Crowley and Alex Sanders. Singer Kip Trevor remembers: “We used to spend days in the library in Leicester, just reading books on Witchcraft. There’s so much of it. I found myself getting heavily into the Witch Trials of the sixteen-hundreds. It was so fascinating, I couldn’t stop.” They changed their name to Black Widow and wrote original songs with titles such as Conjuration, Seduction, Attack of the Demon and Sacrifice.
Black Widow became the focus of many media publications due to their stage act. They integrated witchcraft rituals into their musical performances, consulted by an expert on the subject: “Alex Sanders called himself the ‘King’ of Britain’s Witches. He came to give us advice with the stage show, about how to get the rituals correct and that sort of thing. He also lent us his wife Maxine to ‘sacrifice’ at the end of the show for a while.” Kip Trevor adds: “Our act was worked out very carefully in a theatre in Leicester over a period of six months or so. The idea was to mix Theatre with Pop in a way that hadn’t been done before. Rather than just go on stage and do a set, we wanted to put on a complete production, with props and everything.”
A naked girl, portraying the female demon Astaroth, was sacrificed anew in each performance, causing waves of shock among the audience. Vocalist Kip Trevor would stage simulated sex with the aforementioned naked girl, consummated by sacrificing the poor lass. Clive Jones: “We got through a lot of girls in a short space of time. They kept leaving – it was 1970, they didn’t want to be naked on stage, they were in the papers, and their parents were extremely unhappy.”
Eventually those sensational performances earned the band too much publicity of the wrong type. UK papers were full of comments about the shocking act with very little discussion of the musical merit of the band. Music venues started demanding that the group remove the nude rituals from their live shows. Jones: “Vicars would turn up at the shows, waving crosses and telling crowds to beware of the evil dark magic of Black Widow.” Even witch groups condemned the show, claiming that they might annoy the spirits.
The black magic act faded fast when plans to tour the US fell apart due to the distaste for supernaturalism in America at the time. This was not long after the brutal murders committed by Charles Manson and his cult. The band was not allowed to perform in the country, hurting not only their publicity, but their pockets as well.
Black Widow released one album in 1970, aptly named Sacrifice. It included one hit song, Come to the Sabbat, featuring a string arrangement performed by music school kids: “We taught them the part and they played it perfectly the first time and that was it. I often wondered if they knew what they had played on.” The song became popular when it was included along tracks by well-known artists such as Chicago, Santana, Leonard Cohen and the Byrds on the CBS double-album sampler ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’.
Sacrifice peaked at no. 32 in the UK charts and the band performed at the Isle of Wight festival that year.
Kip Trevor – vocals
Clive Jones – flute, saxophone, clarinet
Jim Gannon – lead and Spanish guitars, vibes
Zoot Taylor – organ, piano
Bob Bond – bass
Clive Box – drums, percussion
T2 – It’ll All Work Out in Boomland
We end the article with one of my favorite recordings from the year 1970, sadly the sole album by the mostly forgotten band T2. The band consisted of a power trio format, on the hills of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Its members came from a list of even less known bands including Please, Files, Gun, Neon Pearl and Bulldog Breed. They initially called themselves Morning, but changed their name after discovering that it was already taken by an American band. T2 is unique for being formed by a drummer, who also wrote all their material and sang lead vocals.
The band’s beginning was quite promising. Drummer Peter Dunton remembers their residency at the Café des Artistes in London: “We began with a handful of people watching us, and by the end of the fourth week a queue had formed around the block. We also had interest from four record companies.” They were able to secure a record deal with one of the major labels, Decca. Live performances quickly ensued at various London venues such as the Marquee Club and the British university circuit.
The band was able to combine aggressive arrangements full of distorted guitars, power chords and heavy drum beats with delicate, acoustic guitar interludes, plus excellent orchestrations for brass instruments. Topped by Peter Dunton’s unique vocals, the result is a fantastic album of long, emotional tracks, with side two dedicated to a single epic track titled Morning. Dunton said that his drumming style, “is comparable to Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell, and comes from the Mod scene. Blues as a style was largely irrelevant for T2 as we were coming to things from a white, middle-class background.”
T2’s debut album was recorded at Morgan studios, with the band performing during the wee small hours, as Dunton commented, “mainly from midnight to about 6 am, we felt we’d get a better atmosphere then.” The album was released in July 1970 and climbed to #20 on the UK albums chart. It received decent promotion by the record label, but suffered from poor distribution. Audience members who liked what they saw on stage were not able to find the record in stores. Bernard Jinks: “The promotion got into full swing, TV, ads in the music papers, being played on the radio, etc, but there were problems in the pressing, and the album came out six weeks later, and the momentum had been lost by then. It would’ve gone higher had this not happened.”
The track ‘No More White Horses’ is a cover of a tune originally performed by the band Please, in which Dunton and bassist Bernard Jinks were members. The original three-minute psychedelic rock tune is extended by T2 to over eight minutes of a progressive rock masterpiece. The epic guitar intro by Keith Cross is simply breathtaking, followed by a gorgeous tempo change with horns added to the mix for good measure before Dunton’s haunting vocals enter three minutes in.
Keith Cross – guitars, keyboards, harmony vocals
Bernard Jinks – bass guitar, harmony vocals
Peter Dunton – drums, lead vocals
Sources:
Audience – Friend’s Friend’s Friend, 2015 Cherry Records CD release booklet
Audience article in Shindig magazine issue #50, 2015
Black Widow – Sacrifice 2004 CD release booklet
T2 – It’ll All Work Out in Boomland 2008 CD release booklet
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