england
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Renaissance Renaissance, what a name, and what a band. This is another band that travelled the third way, I wrote about yesterday in Amazing Blondel’s post. The third way was a path where you didn’t necessarily have to leave your musical chops or imagination at the door. This group, especially with 1973’s release Ashes Are…
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Amazing Blondel Allow me to take a step back. It was correct that English neo-folk music was struggling to find a way forward in 1972. Many groups were succumbing to the larger than life music from the likes of the Who, Zeppelin, and Yes, forcing them to stray away from their folk underpinnings or create…
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Paul Giovanni singing “Gently Johnny” in a The Wicker Man scene. Somehow, we’ve come full circle. At a time when most of English neo-folk bands were in some weird half-baked musical purgatory, an American came along to light a fire in their bellies again. This time it was New Yorker Paul Giovanni, sometime playwright, actor,…
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Last we left Clive Palmer’s old, new band C.O.B. they were creating a fascinating sound, one that hearkened to pre-traditional days, days of Crusaders and Moors. When 1972 rolled around rather than accept the sales flop that Spirit of Love was for CBS Records, they were signed to a much smaller label Polydor’s Folk Mill Records…
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Mike and Lal Waterson If you’re going to come back, when you’re flame has almost been extinguished by time, you can find no better accompaniment to your resurrection than the meaningful work of Lal and Mike Waterson. This brother and sister duo by the time 1972 had rolled around, were thought of as great icons…
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Sandy Denny – 1972 Talk about a long time coming! Last we heard from Sandy she was doing her brilliant work trying to stay out of the limelight a bit with Fotheringay, then what we didn’t cover was her debut album The North Star Grassman and the Ravens her first tentative steps to the sophisticated genius…
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Nick Drake – 1972 I’d be remiss to go through 1972 without covering Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. In the grand scheme of neo-folk music, it won’t be as important as a Liege and Lief, or as sparsely folk pastoral as Bert Jansch’s, in my opinion, much more powerful Birthday Blues which traversed on similar feelings and…
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Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson – 1972 I’m allowed to go out on a limb right? On the same year the Jethro Tull released the best Prog rock album ever Thick as a Brick, they quite possibly released one of the year’s best folk albums as well. I know, I know, weren’t Sandy Denny’s Sandy and Nick…
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Where do you go when you don’t quite know how to continue onward? You start to deconstruct your own past and footsteps. In 1972, an artist like Mark Fry must have been asking himself these questions. His influences Donovan, and Marc Bolan had started to go glam, and he himself wasn’t quite ready to leave…
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Lindisfarne 1972, was such a transitional year for English neo-folk. There were such a paucity of solid releases and well thought out ideas coming out of that genre that you’d be hard pressed to figure out why this was happening. You could say that bands like Lindisfarne, once thought of as the next Beatles, presented…
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