Domone Barclay James Harvest

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-109-2
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Barclay James Harvest are surely overdue for greater recognition. They have Long been feted in Germany and in other parts of Continental Europe, but remain largely unknown at home in the U.K. except to a fiercely loyal cognoscenti. Formed in the Saddleworth area of north-west England in 1967, the band released a series of outstanding albums showcasing their pastoral, classically-influenced brand of rock, before hitting the heights of their success, culminating in a massive open-air concert in Berlin in front of an estimated quarter of a million people. With only one line-up change, the departure of keyboard maestro and founder member Woolly Wolstenholme in 1979, they continued to record until 1998, when the band finally split into two separate groups, led by original members John Lees and Les Holroyd respectively.
The core of this book covers Barclay James Harvest's output from 1968 to 1997, with analysis and background information for every studio album and every song released from that period, but there is also room for an overview of their live albums and of the member's activities after the break up of the original group. It is required reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in one of the rock world's most underrated bands.

Keith and Monika Domone have both been Barclay James Harvest aficionados from an early age, even meeting through their shared love of the band's music. They graduated from running the band's official fan club to writing and curating the Barclay James Harvest and John Lees' Barclay James Harvest web sites, in between work and parenting. They were also responsible for penning two editions of The Barclay James Harvest Story, the only biography of the band to have appeared in print to date, and now out of print. They have two grown-up children, living in Hampshire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Domone, Keith

Domone, Monika

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Barclay James Harvest (1970)

Personnel:

John Lees: vocals, lead guitar

Les Holroyd: vocals, bass guitar, keyboards

Woolly Wolstenholme: vocals, keyboards

Mel Pritchard: drums and percussion

The Barclay James Harvest Orchestra, conducted by Resident Musical Director Robert Godfrey

Recorded at E.M.I Studios, Abbey Road, November 1969 to January 1970

Producer: Norman Smith

Engineer: Phil McDonald

Record Label: Harvest (UK), Sire (US)

UK release date: 5 June 1970, U.S. release date November 1970

Barclay James Harvest’s recording career got off to a slow start, with only a brace of singles (‘Early Morning’/‘Mr. Sunshine’ and ‘Brother Thrush’/‘Poor Wages’) being released in 1968 and 1969 respectively, but behind the scenes, they were busy writing and recording demos of many original songs, as well as performing a lot of live shows. By November 1969, they were ready to begin work on their debut LP, and arrived at the iconic studios in Abbey Road in North-West London, then known simply as E.M.I. Studios, on the 8th of that month. They had already had a taste of their surroundings the previous May while recording ‘Brother Thrush’. However, this was to be an altogether much more ambitious project, involving an orchestra comprising music students from the Royal College Of Music and The Royal Academy, assembled and conducted by Robert Godfrey, the band’s new Musical Arranger. The plan proved over-ambitious, as the inexperienced students were out of their depth in a professional recording studio with an equally untried conductor, and although ‘Dark Now My Sky’ was acceptable, the other recordings were unusable. Fortunately, a classical musician of Godfrey’s acquaintance named Martyn Ford already had his own very capable orchestra, made up of the best students from the London music colleges and known as The London Symphonia. Renamed The Barclay James Harvest Orchestra for the occasion, they stepped into the breach, with Ford as leader of the orchestra.

The entire album was recorded in around eighty hours, using only two eight- track tape recorders. Drummer Mel Pritchard told Beat Instrumental magazine the following year, We had drums, bass, Mellotron, piano, organ, double-tracked guitar, orchestra, vocals and effects to go on. It took time to work out how to do it, because we didn’t want to lump the bass and drums together, and we also wanted the stereo effect of the guitars, so in the end we used two eight-tracks.

Given the relatively short time allowed for recording, and the hugely ambitious idea of using a full orchestra on a band’s debut album, the results were surprisingly good, but the band members weren’t entirely satisfied. As Woolly put it nearly twenty years later: Generally, the album wasn’t as successful as it could have been – it was rather overblown. It seemed to be rather a pre-emptive strike, a rehearsal for the real thing.

Flawed though it may have been, the band’s debut album set out their stall as an ambitious fusion of folk, rock and classical music, it was warmly received by critics and influential radio DJs such as John Peel and Alan Freeman, and paved the way for greater things to come.

Sleeve Design

Mixing of the album was completed on 26 February 1970 and ready to be launched in March, but the release was held up because the band weren’t keen on the Harvest label’s plan to use design studio Hipgnosis to create the album’s cover. Woolly Wolstenholme, in particular, felt that Hipgnosis tended to apply their own identity regardless of its appropriateness to the artist concerned.

The band got their way, choosing instead a kaleidoscopic, repeating stained glass butterfly image designed by Ian Latimer on the outside of a lavish gatefold sleeve. Inside the sleeve were sepia-tinted photographs of the four band members taken by Richard Dunkley at The Hanging Gate pub in Diggle and at Preston House. Curiously, the names of the individual musicians of Barclay James Harvest are not shown anywhere on the sleeve or record label of the original LP, but two other individuals are credited with ‘Special thanks to Jim and Jim’. Jim Tetlow was the band’s road manager and sound engineer, whilst James Litherland, who played some percussion on ‘Taking Some Time On’, was another Lancashire lad and the guitarist and vocalist in the band Colosseum.

‘Taking Some Time On’ (Barclay James Harvest)

Written by John Lees and with Les Holroyd taking on lead vocals, the album opener was one of the last of the album’s songs to be recorded, on 26 January 1970, fulfilling a need for an attention-grabbing opener. From the raw opening riff, inspired by the double-tracked lead guitar sound of Cream’s ‘Politician’, it rocks along nicely with the band playing alone, without orchestral accompaniment. The lyrics, apparently espousing a simple idealism and referring to ‘hidden meanings of the mind’, were, said John many years later, not intended to be taken seriously. ‘It was a hippy song’, he said, ‘Very tongue in cheek.’ He rated it as the second favourite of his own songs on the album, and in the summer of 2011, it was dusted off again for John Lees’ Barclay James Harvest’s appearance at the High Voltage Festival in London, going down so well that it subsequently made regular appearances in the band’s live shows.

The delay in the release of the album had scuppered plans for a version of ‘Good Love Child’ to be issued as a single in advance of the LP, and instead a new single mix of ‘Taking Some Time On’ was created, rather belatedly, at Abbey Road on 10 August and released to the public on the 28th of that month, by which time the album had already been out for the best part of three months. Unsurprisingly the single, released as HAR 5003 and backed with the album version of ‘The Iron Maiden’, made little impact.

‘Mother Dear’ (Barclay James Harvest)

Another John Lees song, ‘Mother Dear’ offers quite a contrast to the album opener: a gothic tale from the same arcane realms as the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe or medieval poems like ‘True Thomas’, the song concerns ghostly apparitions and a visitation from the grim reaper in the night and dates back to 1967. An early demo recording featured out of tune honky-tonk bar-room piano, but, perhaps fortunately, producer Norman Smith came up with a new orchestral arrangement, in which the soaring strings and warbling brass offer a subtle counterpoint to the vaguely unsettling theme of the lyrics. Woolly Wolstenholme sings this one – John Lees later wryly suggested that he had been told that he wasn’t allowed to play lead guitar and take on the lead vocal at the same time, but Woolly’s memory was slightly different: In the early days, he didn’t used to sing. That’s why most of the material in the early days has me, very high profile, singing-wise, and then gradually, as people either got more confident, or saw what a bad job I was doing, they decided to do it themselves!

‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ (Barclay James Harvest)

The entire recording of Woolly’s ‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ was completed on the first day of recording, 8 November, including all of the orchestral parts! The gentle Mellotron intro gives way to Woolly’s reflective verse, and then everyone comes crashing in on the chorus to create the first hint of the epic fusion of rock and classical sounds which would become a Barclay James Harvest trademark over the next few years. John Lees was a big fan, rating it as his favourite song on the album: ‘It gave me a big high, and still sounds great!’ Woolly himself described it as ‘a kind of antidote to ‘Mr. Sunshine’, which was about hiding from the bright light of day, not about drugs! ‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ and ‘Ra’ have a similar theme.’ A 1969 solo demo recording made by Woolly at Preston House, and included in a deluxe box set edition of the album released by Esoteric Recordings in 2018, shows that the song as originally conceived was a good bit faster, and given a country-ish feel by the acoustic guitar accompaniment. The song was played live before the album was recorded, naturally without the minimal orchestral accompaniment, and subsequently became a regular in the live set at concerts, whether the band happened to be appearing with or without the orchestra.

‘When the World Was Woken’ (Barclay James Harvest)

The only Les Holroyd composition on the album sees the composer musing on attitudes to life, the thoughtful, introspective lyric a gentle wakeup call and exhortation to mankind to be positive and ‘live together, with one triumphant cry’. Unfortunately, the rather rushed nature of the recording impacted this song more than most on the album, with the meandering and unsubtle orchestral arrangement, including a direct lift of a fanfare from Handel’s Water Music, too high in the mix and constantly threatening to overwhelm Les’s voice. The performance, too, was less than perfect. As Les later recalled, I remember writing all the melody lines for that on a Hammond. The singing was all over the place, but in those days you didn’t have the...