(Talking Elephant TECD467)
By Brian R. Banks
From time to time, less often than we might first assume, a collective of musicians creating their own sound and vision are not easy to pigeon-hole. Shuffling between genres, this LP is distinctive as an interesting backdrop fuels memorable melodies and laid-back lyrics to evoke a summery world of infectious fun amidst bird song beside a gently drifting river. Some albums just rise above their period: they’re rightly part of that time yet also timeless in the true sense, not because of pose, image, sales or hype, but authenticity.
Forty years ago, I heard one of its tracks on a compilation and never forgot the experience. Two of the quartet, Roy Apps (vocals, guitars, piano, organ) and Tony Pook (vocals, percussion) met at school in leafy Berkshire, first duetting at a nearby Liberal Club. By 1967, Steve Jones (all keyboards) had joined and they were playing the local Dolphin Club in Maidenhead and Windsor College when they met Jones’ Reading-born friend Gerald T. Moore (vocals, guitars, mandolin, keys), deciding to join not long after. Moore said they all wanted to incorporate other styles, to break the mold of being only a folk or rock band.
Roy Apps was Entertainment Sec. at Reading Tech so could book his own band as support to the big names. Meeting the celebrated producer-manager Peter Eden from Southend, who co-managed Donovan and produced his first single Catch The Wind. As their manager, Eden got them signed to the same label (Pye) who wanted new styles for a progressive offshoot (Dawn Records 1969-75), of whom Mungo Jerry and Prelude were their most successful chart acts.
They went in the studio and did a single of a Bob Dylan tune about a hobo, but it fell victim to industrial strikes. Heron disliked the studio experience immensely, holed-up in a windowless cellar, and as Pook’s family had a farm in their area in Appleford they decamped there with friends to record an album in the summer of 1970. The indulgent label organized a U.K. tour of Heron, Comus, Titus Groan and Demon Fuzz with entry for the princely sum of a (pre-decimal) penny no less, when money had value before hijacking by successive governments.
For their second LP in 1971, Heron likewise evoked the hippy ethos of value for money by issuing a double for the price of one, hence the title. Guests included Mike Finesilver, who co-wrote Arthur Brown’s hit Fire, and the always-interesting stablemate Mike Cooper on slide guitar /vocals (he and his wife Annie took the cover photos), Pye’s mobile studio was engineered by Terry Everett and Vic Maile. Alas, a vinyl shortage and delivery strikes, coinciding with such labels prioritizing their big names, combined to make it hard to find and now a collectible (especially with its postcard-insert reproducing the back cover stamped Black Dog) worth hundreds of pounds like others on that label. Gus Dudgeon (Elton John etc.) at Essex Music published them but doesn’t remember their “tuneful, summery sound” today. He was almost certainly the same in 1971 too.
This time they went to West Emlett Cottage south of Black Dog village near Crediton, Devon in May 1971 for two weeks, bolstered by their £250 advance. Just before, they had recorded five songs of which four were put on a maxi single by Dawn becoming Tony Blackburn’s record of the week on BBC radio; they did at least three sessions including John Peel’s Top Gear while the single enjoyed some radio play. Supporting Status Quo at the Marquee Club, they were a trifle surprised when the headliners entered the cramped changing room to shed their suits for stage clothes of jeans and t-shirts!
They say they never constructed songs prior but came together organically when sharing their own creations for “an English sound” (Steve Jones), a natural process in the countryside’s bird and river setting. The result is a bit like Dando Shaft or Magna Carta, maybe a vague aftertaste of Dr. Strangely Strange without the quirky pungency (certainly they seem parallel during interviews!) blending the drum-added joy of Global Village Trucking Company as life-enhancing song.
Twenty-one titles include a dozen that don’t reach three minutes, but their different styles never grate and add to the overall ethos which melds so tunefully. It leads off with the countryish, jaunty rock of Madman with delicious harmonies and fret skipping alongside nifty keys, the too-short lead single Take Me Back Home as organ-backed soft rock, and the dreamy Love Is, Something Inside and Miss Kiss, which is longer than the cover says. Big A returns to Brinsleyish country rock with slide guitar from Mike Cooper, plus the longest track at over eight minutes called Winter Harlequin by Gerald. T. Moore, a pastoral almost madrigal style reminiscent of Dulcimer with birdsong. A kind of full circle is here because there was a Harlequin 2 on the debut.
As well as the surprise of Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got A Hold Of Me, here piano-led, and Holland/Dozier’s This Old Heart Of Mine (almost pop excluding the outro, a hit for the Isley brothers and one of Moore’s live staples), is Woody Guthrie’s The Great Dust Storm with accordion adding a hoe-down feel. They’d covered snatches of Guthrie on their debut too. The surprising thumpy fun of Moore’s My Turn To Cry segues the 45 B-side Minstrel And A King, both minor classics, followed by an Eddie Cochran-like boogie Getting ‘Em Down, the accordion regret of I Wouldn’t Mind, and He’s A Poor Boy in country rock style again which permeated that time. The wise lyrics of Wanderer appeared on a fine Dawn Records sampler the same year.
It’s rare when covers surpass the original but happens here when the words of an early, pseudonymous Bob Dylan are set to the music of Gerald T. Moore for one of the most powerful anti-war songs ever penned. John Brown is a throat-clenching seven minutes that was regrettably not edited as a single. But the band, with label indifference —they wanted a ‘hook’ or direction to market so lost interest—started to drift apart, some leaving for London. Peter Eden semi-retired to a record shop in Southend, though continuing to manage Heron, and G. T. Moore although somewhat erratic (he turned up to a well-paid gig with only a penny whistle instead of guitar!) formed a popular pub band (1973-77) which at one time featured ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick of Free fame and released two LPs on Charisma. He had links to leading musicians in Jamaica such as Jimmy Cliff and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, as well as guesting on Mike Cooper’s superb Places I Know on Dawn the same year as Twice As Nice…which is here reissued by Talking Elephant which has a fascinating catalogue. (No booklet, alas, but probably in-keeping with this band’s modest ethos.)
In the 1990s, Jones and his wife were on holiday in Devon and duly stunned to discover that the village remembered them. Thinking they had been forgotten, Heron reunited to release two LPs that decade (River Of Fortune also in Black Dog village) with another one in Japan following reissues there in 2004. It is rare to find a band without regrets or angst, what the poet Rilke called “the joy of transforming the unbearable weight of life into the pure heavy shining of art”.
Romantic, pastoral, nostalgic subjects down winding lyrical lanes. If the map is a bit wonky at times, no matter because the trip is worth it along such a scenic route. In A Field Of Their Own (Relaxx Films 2000), one of them said: “If all I leave behind me is [Heron], that’ll do me.” A breath of summer fresh air, just like discovery of their fine albums.
Brian R. Banks
