I was lent this album by a school friend about two years after its release, and was immediately hooked. Totally unlike anything I'd heard before, on the Virgin label (at that time cool and avant-garde), silly name and song titles, what teenager wouldn't love this?
Well, nearly all of them, actually.
I bought a second hand copy in a long departed basement record shop in Whitechapel in Liverpool, and it served me well until many moons later when I picked up the album on CD, and sold the vinyl for about four times the price.
The band, a Canterbury 'supergroup' made of former members of Egg, Caravan, Matching Mole and Gong, had split up before I discovered them but three-quarters of them reformed in 2005, and I saw them live at last.
So what about the music? If you like mostly instrumental, over-complicated pieces in shifting time signatures, you're in for a treat. Opening with a short jangly keyboard riff, bassist Richard Sinclair's short song Big Jobs introduces the album, then a lovely piece by keyboardist Dave Stewart (not Eurythmics, but It's My Party ten years later), Going Up To People And Tinkling which allows guitarist Phil Miller to show off his runs which segues into Miller's tune Calyx, on which former Matching Mole bandmate Robert Wyatt guests, duetting with Sinclair.
Next comes the main meat of the first half, the extended Pip Pyle (drummer) composition Son Of 'There's No Place Like Homerton', where an extended intro takes us into the main theme, with saxes, flutes and pixiephone (no, me neither) provided by some Henry Cow chums. It's a fantastic rambling piece, giving all four band members time and space to play, as well as introducing backing singers The Northettes. I've never been convinced by these vocal interludes, wonderful though the harmonies are, they don't quite fit for me, and what you can catch of the lyrics seems to add little. After this, we come down with Aigrette, a charming little ditty where Sinclair's wordless lyrics meander over Miller's gentle guitar, but Sinclair soon returns the favour when his tune Rifferama lets Miller go wild on guitar over some complex bass and frantic drumming, before Stewart's keyboards duel with him.
The second half kicks off with Fol De Rol, a nonsense song, incorporating a fluid bass solo with a silly telephone ending, then the pleasant Shaving Is Boring, a lively keyboard theme, which takes a turn into a darker passage where an ugly guitar solo sits atop a repetitive hypnotic base. Following this, it's down a notch for a gentle song, with almost stream of consciousness self-referring lyrics on Bossa Nochance, which runs into a reprise and development of the opening song, imaginatively named Big Jobs No 2.
The Northettes return to open the strangely named Lobster In Cleavage Probe and Gigantic Land Crabs In Earth Takeover Bid, a couple of pieces by Stewart, both keyboard and guitar led, the latter graced by another dirty guitar solo in the first half before it calms down for the keyboard to lead it away. And there we have it, Hatfield's debut album comes to an end. But this being the CD version, there's a couple of bonus tracks in the shape of the single (which failed to trouble the Top Of The Pops scouts), Let's Eat (Real Soon), a silly, yet engaging little song, and its B-side Fitter Stoke Has A Bath, a song which reappeared on their second album The Rotters' Club (but you'll have to wait for that one).
I've loved this album for nearly half a century, and despite being able to see its flaws much more clearly now that I could in the 1970s, it's still a great album, and a gorgeous slice of what the 1970s never quite were.
4* - a fantastic example of the Canterbury Sound, from possibly the archetypal Canterbury band
Comments