"Tadpoles keep screaming in my ear, hey there Rotters' Club..."
So began another formative album from my teenage years. While other cooler kids were getting into Bowie, Roxy, New York Dolls and getting ready for punk's day zero, some of us were listening to over-complicated nonsense and thinking ourselves oh so superior.
Yet, despite it being terminally unhip and never popular, it's an album recognised as a high point of a genre - the Canterbury Sound - and one whose title has spawned a trilogy of novels by Jonathan Coe. It's fifty years old this month and was the featured album in Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone this week, so it's high time I revisited it. I bought it many years ago on the internet, as a 'must-buy' when I was replacing the vinyl with CD (costing considerably less than the vinyl LP sold for).
It opens with Share It, a throwaway little song written by bassist / vocalist Richard Sinclair and drummer Pip Pyle (almost certainly the bizarre lyrics are Pyle's work) nevertheless, quite infectious, followed by Lounging There Trying, a lovely guitar melody from Phil Miller.
(Big) John Wayne Socks Psychology On The Jaw, is a short single phrase which takes as long to type it as the track, while Chaos At The Greasy Spoon, also feels like an intro to the following track The Yes No Interlude, which after an impassioned guitar solo from Miller, feels like pure jazz fusion, especially when guest saxophonist Jimmy Hastings lets rip, and Dave Stewart's electric piano noodling gets going. It's great, a fantastic listen. It segues nicely into the frankly bonkers Fitter Stoke Has A Bath (apparently a phrase uttered by Pyle's daughter, and very possible misheard). It's a lovely, silly song, of which I never tire, and after some ominous bumpings and squawks, melts into Sinclair's Didn't Matter Anyway, possibly the most orthodox gentle pop song the band did, ending the first half in a haunting flute melody.
The second half opens with the jazz guitar/keyboard piece Underdub, a fantastic tune, before the main event - the 20 minute grand opus Mumps. It's a sprawling piece from keyboardist Dave Stewart, with repeated themes, vocal arrangements from the Northettes, some beautifully gentle and precise guitar work from Miller, a song full of alphabet puns, which sounds a little twee at half a century's distance. but nevertheless, an interesting listen.
And it is a great album, showcasing a band who made no concession to what was fashionable or current in musical trends, and one I've enjoyed for fifty years. Sure, parts of it might feel a little dated, and even silly at a distance, but the main course of the music is still as tasty.
There are 5 bonus tracks on the CD reissue - two are pointless repeats of instrumental snatches from the album, but there is the treat of the band's unrecorded 'classic' Halfway Between Heaven And Earth, a Sinclair song much more on the easy listening side of the band, taken from a live album of various artists live at the Rainbow Theatre in London.
There's also Oh, Len's Nature, also known as Ethanol Nurse and various other anagrams, a Miller guitar riff which had been kicking around since Matching Mole days as Nan's True Hole, and a live version of a similarly aged piece, Lything And Gracing, which seemed to be a staple of their live set for years.
4* - a great album by a short lived band who shaped my musical tastes for decades
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