More Beastly Folklore (The Beast and the Lamb) and Book News

This is my 400th post since starting the blog!

I'd like to use it to announce the publication of a new substantially revised and updated version of Decadent London which should be out by the end of this month, published by Accumulator Press.

The book has been thoroughly revised, new material has been added and musician and writer Max Decharne kindly agreed to write a foreword.

Decadent London will be available on The Big Cartel and from the following bookshops in London:

Treadwells

Watkins

Atlantis

Two free talks have been arranged so far to promote this new edition, both can be booked through Eventbrite:

6 December Westminster Reference Library to coincide with the excellent Yellow Book Exhibition (which has been extended to 9 December). Talk begins at 6.30pm. Details here.

12 December Kensington Central Library - with Nina Antonia and Darcy Sullivan - see here

Today is the 45th(!) anniversary of the date of the original release in 1974 of my favourite lp The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. There's a good article about it here.

As a bonus we learn therein that Headley Grange, where it was recorded, was a 'former poorhouse [that] had been owned by Aleister Crowley, which had drawn devotee Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin to record there.' [Most of Led Zep IV and parts of Physical Graffiti] In Hugh Fielder's Book of Genesis Peter Gabriel says in an interview: 'We were working at Headley Grange which I felt was partly haunted by Jimmy Page's black magic experiments ...' Steve Hackett has often remarked: 'If anything was a haunted house that place was. You'd hear extraordinary noises at night - it was almost impossible to sleep.'

As far as I'm aware there is no connection between Crowley and Headley Grange - there could be confusion with Page's ownership of the Great Beast's former home Boleskine on Loch Ness during the 1970s.

The Music's All That Matters (Third Impression)

Many of Stump's preferences (from the 'classic' 70s period) chime with my own: Egg are one of the most underrated groups from the time; King Crimson between Lark’s Tongue’s in Aspic and Red were making some of the most aggressive and exciting music of the period – I would love to have seen one of their largely improvised live shows at that time; Gentle Giant (at least up to Freehand) were one of the most musically arresting and diverse groups featuring counterpoint, polymetry, polyphony and hocketing (‘in which a phrase is arbitrarily broken up into cells of one, two or three notes’). He also gives space to more radical avant garde groups such as Henry Cow and includes the numerous European epigones like Focus and PFM.

I also share his positive opinion of early pastoral Genesis, that soon benefited so much from Steve Hackett’s more acerbic and effects-laden guitar, but his rubbishing of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (in my view this incarnation’s high point) I find inexplicable.

Like Stump, I still think that Relayer is the best Yes record, the one that even the most committed Yes-hater might possibly warm to; Patrick Moraz was a far more jazzy, hard-edged and risk-taking keyboard player than Rick Wakeman and some of the group playing on The Gates of Delirium sounds genuinely unhinged, (pity about Jon Anderson’s ‘arseholes’ mishearing on Sound Chaser). It was to be downhill from then on. A couple of years ago in Delft I bought a mint copy of Moraz’s 1976 solo project The Story of I in a wonderful gatefold sleeve, one of the most bonkers concept lps of the time with some interesting ‘world music’ influences.

For the future I would say, although Stump doesn't, that a form of Progressive pop is emerging from the likes of These New Puritans, Everything, Everything and Field Music; in the US Deerhoof have been doing it for a while and Guided by Voices used to say they played the 4 p's: Pop, Punk, Psychedelia and Prog.