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The brainchild of songwriters Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos, Nirvana was originally conceived as a group but devolved into a duo by the time they signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.
‘Blackwell said, “You’ll have to have an album” because he wasn’t interested in singles as such,’ Lyons remembers. ‘It just evolved. We went back to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and used to work long days and long nights completing songs. This character Simon came out of the song Wings Of Love which also inspired the sleeve artwork.’ A lonely kid, living in a six-dimensional city, is obsessed with the idea of sprouting wings and flying. After reaching the stars, he encounters an extra-terrestrial centaur and is taken to Nirvana where he meets and ultimately weds the impossibly beautiful mermaid creature Magdelena.
They dubbed their creation ‘a science fiction pantomime’. ‘To describe it as a concept album seems naff to me now,’ Lyons cautions. ‘We saw it as a musical pantomime for grown-ups with a slightly druggy undertone to it. I don’t know if we really knew what psychedelia meant but we had our own feeling about it. Many people were living psychedelic lives in those days.’
The musical backdrop was an oddly eclectic mix emphasising the schizophrenic divide between pop and rock in 1967. As ambitious songwriters, Lyons and Spyropoulos had one foot in Denmark Street’s Tin Pan Alley but were also aspiring towards more adventurous studio experiments.
The album included upbeat singalongs like We Can Help You, the catchy Wings Of Love and even a bizarre trad jazz item, 1999. It says much for the interest in the album that these songs were covered by acts as diverse as Alan Bown, Herman’s Hermits and Kenny Ball, respectively. The key track on the work was undoubtedly Pentecost Hotel, one of the finest pieces of orchestral pop ever released. ‘It really encapsulated the whole concept of the album,’ Lyons notes. ‘It was a journey somewhere out there. There was a lot of poetic licence in the whole concept. Maybe that’s what makes it attractive, its naïveté, which is missing in a lot of things today.’
Bobbie Gentry
The Delta Sweete
Her great lost concept album.
Record label: Capitol
Produced: Kelly Gordon
Recorded: Winter 1967
Release date: March 1968
Chart peaks: None (UK) 132 (US)
Personnel: Bobbie Gentry (g, v); Jimmie Haskell and Shorty Rogers (ar); other musicians not known
Track listing: Okolona River Bottom Band (S); Big Boss Man; Reunion; Parchman Farm; Mornin’ Glory; Sermon; Tobacco Road; Penduli Pendulum; Jessye’ Lisabeth; Refractions; Louisiana Man; Courtyard
Running time: 33.44
Current CD: Raven RVCD220 adds Local Gentry album
Further listening: Fancy (1970); Touch Em With Love (1969)
Further reading: www.geocities.com/odetobobbiegentry/
Download: iTunes
‘A perfect set of ivories, coffee-coloured eyes, a warm sensual face … no-one would ever dream of throwing her off a bridge.’ So surmised Gordon Coxhill in his 1969 NME interview with Bobbie Gentry. In the two years since Ode To Billie Joe she’d had little in the way of a hit and journalists were apt to dismiss her as just another pretty face. Born Roberta Streeter in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Gentry was, in fact, a self-taught musician who’d graduated from the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, writing by day and spending her evenings as a Las Vegas chorus girl where she was discovered by Capitol A&R man Kelly Gordon.
‘Kelly came into my office one night so choked he could hardly talk.’ remembers fellow A&R man David Axelrod. ‘He said, “We’ve got a demo and I know it’s real good.” It was Ode To Billie Joe. I said, “This is terrific, what’s the problem?” He said, “General manager of A&R turned it down.” The guy who owned the song was Larry Shane, one of the biggest independent publishers. I dialled him and said, “What do you want for this?” He said, “Ten thousand dollars.” I said, “Done.” I hung up. Happy. Went over the general manager’s head. Her stuff was too good not to hear.’
Her second album, however, was roundly ignored. A concept album about white southern life in which all intros and outros are underscored by sad strings, each track flowing into the next, The Delta Sweete was a work of great emotional power. It ranged from the fractured Mississippi funk of Okolona River Bottom Band to Courtyard, the sparsely-arranged tale of an imprisoned woman, and her most beautiful, tragic composition.
‘No one bought it but I didn’t lose sleep over it,’ Gentry told NME, ‘I’ve never tried to pre-judge public taste.’
After The Delta Sweete Gentry appears to have had difficulty deciding on a career path. Following a number of saccharine chart hits with Glen Campbell (Let it Be Me, All I Have To Do Is Dream), she returned with the hard country soul of Fancy, recorded with Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals. An astute businesswoman, by 1970 she also owned considerable property in California and had a large financial interest in the Phoenix Suns basketball team. She dropped out of the public eye altogether in 1976.
The Incredible String Band
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter
Celtic minstrels record their psychedelic masterpiece and copyright the concept of ‘getting it together in the country’.
Record label: Elektra
Produced: Joe Boyd
Recorded: Sound Techniques Studios, London; December 1967
Released: March 1968
Chart peaks: 5 (UK) 161 (US)
Personnel: Robin Williamson (v, g, gimbri, whistle, pc, pan pipe, p, oud, mandolin, Jews’ harp, chahanai, water harp, hm); Mike Heron (v, s, Hammond organ, g, dulcimer, harpsichord); Dolly Collins (flute, organ, harpsichord); Davis Snell (harp); Licorice McKechnie (v, finger cymbals)
Track listing: Koeeoaddi There; The Minotaur’s Song; Witches Hat; A Very Cellular Song; Mercy I Cry City; Waltz Of The New Moon; The Water Song; There Is A Green Crown; Swift As The Wind; Nightfall
Running time: 49.55
Current CD: Collectors Choice CCM02892 adds The 5,000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion
Further listening: Wee Tam And The Big Huge (1968); The 5,000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion (1967); Liquid Acrobat As Regards The Air (1970)
Further reading: Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium (Adrian Whittaker, 2003); www. incrediblestringband.com (official); www.makingtime.co.uk/beglad/ (fan site)
Download: HMV Digital
Fired by the success of their second album The 5,000 Spirits, Heron and Williamson repaired to a Chelsea studio to construct the album that would seal their reputation forever. With them they brought exotic instruments from a road trip to Morocco and a collection of incandescent tunes requiring, for the most part, a single roll of tape and a touch of embroidery.
‘This was the first time multi-tracking was possible,’ Williamson remembers, ‘though it was still done in a pretty slapdash, anarchic, have-a-go kind of way. The whole album was recorded in a few days. We didn’t even stay for the mixes. The basic tracks were mostly one take, live vocal and