"Men don't get her," announced the headline on Barbara Ellen's article on Kate Bush in the Observer a couple of weeks ago.
The article is more questioning about Bush's appeal than that, but this man or boy certainly gets her. When I turned 18, The Kick Inside was rivalled only by Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood for the title of my favourite LP.
So here's another track from it.
But the Walker Brothers weren't the only big names to play Harborough in those days. I've blogged before about Jethro Tull, and now I can add some more names to the list.
Because a reader kindly pointed me towards an old post about the town on the Soul Source site:
The club was called the Frollockin' Kneecap and had been there since 1968, I saw Brenton Wood, Blossom Toes, Ferris Wheel, Keef Hartley, Dantallian's Chariot (Zoot Money), Brenton Wood and the best of all the Family 3 times, once with Fairport Convention jamming; about 700 in for that one!
It goes on to say that the club called itself The Lantern for "allnighters", which suggests there was such a thing as East Midland Soul.
I can't give you Family and Fairport jamming, but here's Dantalian's Chariot (Andy Summers, later of the Police, is on guitar) with their most famous track.
"Laura Kuenssberg’s tenure as the BBC’s political editor, beginning in July 2015 and ending in the coming weeks, was a catastrophe. On her watch, lies were not just permitted, they were amplified and given credibility by Britain’s state broadcaster. At least partly as a result of this, the UK Government now routinely lies with impunity." Patrick Howse on the consequences of the BBC's political editor.
Josh Self sees signs of a revival of one-nation Conservatism.
Brian Domitrovic reviews a new book on the 19th-century political economist Henry George: "George sold millions of copies of his books and pamphlets, spawned scores of activist reading groups among marginally literate groups of working people, inspired the building of model communities on the basis of the single tax, motivated innumerable “Georgists” successfully to seek elected office, influenced world-historical leaders such as the Mexican Revolution’s Venustiano Carranza and modern China’s founder Sun Yat-Sen, and all but reoriented the agenda of taxation and public works globally as the twentieth century dawned."
"Equally as important as the music in this case was that distinctive and much-discussed You Can All Join In sleeve. Snapped from above on a stepladder by the Hipgnosis photographer, the front cover shows a rag tag collection of 29 musicians. Fashionably unsmiling with collars turned up against the wind and hands thrust deep into the pockets of army greatcoats, leather jackets and (real) fur coats on a cold winter’s morning, no one looked too happy to be there at that hour of the day." Stuart Penney looks back at Island Records' first UK sampler disc.
Who were the coolest band in Leicester in the late Sixties?
The consensus, I think, would be Family, but they had a rival in the shape of Legay, who later renamed themselves Gypsy.
I came across Legay in old newspapers because, like Jethro Tull, they played the Frolickin Kneecap in Market Harborough.
But Bryan Hemmings goes back a long way with the band:
Legay, later to become Gypsy, had that almost undefinable quality that most times makes the crucial difference. In a parallel universe, somewhere, things probably turned out a lot better for them. And I’m probably a successful novelist. In this universe none of us were quite so lucky. Sometimes, there are moments I feel it’s all my fault.
To my mind, they could have been one of the biggest bands in Britain. Looks, style and music, like David Bowie, they had virtually everything. All they lacked was that final, tiny bit of musical polish, and a really good producer.
Guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and founder of the band, Robin Pizer, was in my class at Syston Parochial Juniors. Apart from a small interlude, when I was committed to a school in Leicester, we attended the same schools for most of the rest of our school lives.
Though we were never what you could call best of friends we communicated at times. We were probably also at the Infants’ school in Syston's High Street by Walker’s woodyard together.
Robin once got shamed in front of morning assembly with Billy Walker, who used to sit at the desk in front of mine. They were caught after throwing stones at a lamp outside St Peter and St Paul Church and breaking it. He was Jack the Lad personified.
He told me his uncle was teaching him to play guitar when he was about ten. Was I jealous. Robin once dissected a stickleback in front of my eyes with a pen knife under the bridge at Syston brook, when we were nippers. He definitely made an impression, I was horrified.
We were in the same year Longslade Comprehensive School. Most of the rest of Gypsy went there too. The band was called Legay after their first drummer, Legay Rogers. Unfortunately, Legay died young.
For a virtually unknown band outside Leicestershire, Legay had huge female following. Girls loved them. Even their roadies were sexy.
No-one, the track above, apparently reveals Legay in a more psychedelic mood than was usual for them. But it's easy to imagine it being a hit in 1969.
Robin Pizer is still around in Leicester and recorded a song about Richard III when the old boy was found in the city.
He wrote another about the Princes in the Tower, but that's a topic that merits a post of its own.
As the address given for the Frolickin Kneecap is The Square, Market Harborough, the club must have been meeting at the old County Cinema, where the Walker Brothers lost their shirts.
Sunday afternoon concerts appear to have been controversial. Another Leicester Mercury report from earlier in the year (18 April 1968) said that the police had asked all 'Sunday clubs' in the county to
look carefully at the regulations covering music, singing and dancing on Sundays. This is a warning that they might be infringing the law.
The report also says that Harborough's Frolickin Kneecap had decided to shut up shop because of this, but clearly it was back again later in the year.
In 1968 Jethro Tull sounded like this.
BBC News reports:
The leader of Blackpool Council's Conservative group has resigned from the role after falling out with one of the town's Tory MPs.
Councillor Tony Williams has led the Tory group for the past eight years.
He said he signed a letter of no confidence in Blackpool South MP Scott Benton and was then suspended from the Conservative party, so he subsequently stood down.
The letter, which was signed by a number of other Tory councillors, asked the controversy-hungry Benton to stand down at the next election.
But I don't want to tell you that.
Tony Williams grew up in Blackpool, played in a number of groups there and unsuccessfully auditioned to join the town's most famous group, Jethro Tull, in 1968.
He was to play with them on a US tour 10 years later after Tull's bass player John Glascock became to ill to continue. (He died the following year.)
In between these two encounters with Jethro Tull, Williams was a member of a number of groups. In 1972 he joined Stealers Wheel, which had been formed earlier that year in Paisley by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan.
And it was the line up with Williams that recorded the band's self-styled first album. Which means (as Discogs confirms) that he played bass on Stuck in the Middle with you.
Perhaps showing an early talent for resignation, he had left the band by the time it was released as a single.
Later. And here he is being introduced to the crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1978 by Ian Anderson.
Jethro Tull, God bless them, have a new album. RökFlöte. coming out in April.
To think that I saw them at the NEC in 1986 with some colleagues from Golden Wonder and we made jokes about them being old even then.
And it wasn't the best era to see them either. Ian Anderson had decided he wanted to be a guitar hero, so there were too many Mark Knopfler imitations and not enough flutes and cod pieces.
Here they are 10 years before that, playing a version of Thick as a Brick, their album from 1972.
Anderson once said of it:
"Monty Python lampooned the British way of life," says Anderson. "Yet did it in such a way that made us all laugh while celebrating it. To me, that’s what we as a band did on Thick As A Brick. We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it."
There's only one song it's possible to choose today. Ring Out, Solstice Bells is a track from Jethro Tull's 1977 album Songs from the Wood.
When I was 17 I thought this was the best LP there's ever been or could ever be (with the possible exception of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside.)
We've seen St Louis Union before. They were a Manchester rhythm and blues group and the best thing in the Spencer Davis Group's film The Ghost Goes Gear after the Spencers themselves.
We've also seen their keyboard player before. Dave Tomlinson later reinvented himself as Dave Formula and was a member of Magazine and Visage.
In 1965 St Louis Union won the Melody Maker National Beat Contest, beating The Pink Floyd, as they then were, among many other bands.
Their first single was the Lennon and McCartney song Girl and reached number 11 in the singles chart in 1966.
They had no more hits after that, but Behind the Door, their second single, is interesting too. It was written by Graham Gouldman, who was then writing for the Hollies and later a member of the successful Seventies band 10CC. And the flute on it makes them sound first like Traffic and then like Jethro Tull.
The band split in 1967. Wikipedia says that their lead singer Tony Cassidy went into teaching and became the youngest headteacher in the country.
James Kirkup offers a penetrating character sketch of Boris Johnson: "Yes, he went to Eton and the Bullingdon with them, but he was never truly People Like Us. His family had neither the money nor the breeding that Cameron was born to. Some people even say that the very name 'Boris' came about because the other boys started using it to bully the young Al Johnson: he adopted the name and the persona of Boris in to roll with the punches and fit in."
The government's Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme is an abject failure, argues Michael Scott.
Will Lloyd makes a Tory-Anarchist case for abolishing schools.
"Sadly, Jethro Tull brought the day to an end. But what a day it had been. For some, the combination of the Old Peculiar and the hot sunshine had taken its toll, but for most they were just intoxicated with the enjoyment of the day." Forget Glastonbury: John Heywood remembers Nostell Priory, 1982.
Simon Court looks at the art of Samuel Palmer.
We are profoundly attached to Catholic Rome. We hold firmly to all that has been believed and practised by the Church of all time, in her faith, morals, worship, catechetical instruction, priestly formation and her institutions, and codified in the books which appeared before the late Council. Meanwhile, we wait for the true Light of Tradition to dispel the darkness which obscures the sky of eternal Rome.
We pray that the Pope will consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for its conversion, and for the return of Modern Rome to Catholic Tradition. ...
If you have just found this site, or have concerns or questions about the loss of Faith in the Church and society, you are welcome to visit St. Anne's and to attend the Tridentine Mass so as to appreciate the mystery and sacredness of the Holy Sacrifice, and the sense of participating at something "other worldly.
Jack, do you never sleep -More on the Deptford Jack in the Green.
does the green still run deep in your heart?
Or will these changing times,
motorways, power lines,
keep us apart?
Well, I don't think so -
I saw some grass growing through the pavements today.
‘The future of folk is hanging in the balance, and is in danger of turning into just another branch of the performing arts… passively consumed by the audience rather than being a participatory social art form,’ warns Jon Boden, ex-frontman, composer and arranger with Bellowhead.
As a leading light in the British folk scene, over the years he’s added to our nation’s canon while also exhuming forgotten works for contemporary audiences.
It’s an endeavour that has seen him pick up many plaudits along the way, not least from the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, which has bestowed him with 12 statues for his efforts.
Since Bellowhead’s official split last year, Jon’s been working on the follow-up to his 2009 solo album Songs From the Floodplain, with the stunning results landing on 6 October.
Called Afterglow, it’s a concept album – and part of a trilogy inspired by post-apocalyptic literature and a post-oil future.Post-apocalyptic and post-oil were very much in the air in the late 1970s. You can find them, for instance, in Jethro Tull's 1979 LP Stormwatch, which is the darkest and least remembered of their folk-rock trilogy.
Literary inspirations were many and various! After London by Richard Jefferies is a touchstone...
If you played there, you did feel like you were a part of something whereas the bigger places, of course, everybody gets lost in the shuffle. Stadiums are stadiums, it loses the intimacy. So because of the size of the place it was just about right. It held a lot of people but not too many people that you couldn’t feel that connection with the artist.Its owner Bill Graham, says the article:
long maintained that the Woodstock Festival dramatically changed the rock concert industry. As performers’ fees skyrocketed, only arenas and stadiums could afford to book the rock stars of the 1970sToday it is a bank.
Family were an English rock band that formed in late 1966 and disbanded in October 1973. Their style has been characterised as progressive rock, as their sound often explored other genres, incorporating elements of styles such as folk, psychedelia, acid, jazz fusion and rock and roll.
The band achieved recognition in the United Kingdom through their albums, club and concert tours and appearances at festivals.This original line up includes the singer Roger Chapman, the guitarist Charlie Whitney (whom we have seen with Tim Buckley) and the bass player Rick Grech, who later joined Blind Faith, often described as the first super group, with Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood.
