Traffic - Heaven Is In Your Mind

By the time Traffic’s ”Mr. Fantasy" was released in the UK in late 1967, Dave Mason had already left the band (for the first time). It was some time later that a US release for the album was to come about. The band therefore decided to reflect their current situation as a trio, erasing Mason from the album credits.
For it’s US release, the album was initially re-titled "Heaven is in your mind", and two of Mason's three songs were removed. This conveniently made way for the inclusion of three songs which had already been hit singles for Traffic in the UK. One of these, "Hole in my shoe", was in fact a Mason composition. The whimsical nature of the song lead to the rest of the band recording it under protest, but Mason enjoyed a told you so moment when it became a huge hit.
The differences between the UK and US versions were not however purely the result of political intrigue. There was a tendency in the UK for singles not to appear on albums around this time, while US record buyers were less prone to acquiring singles and therefore expected to hear such songs on a band's albums.
The rearrangement and substitution of the songs for this version is significant in terms of the balance and atmosphere of the album. Whereas the UK release had a generally serious, proto-prog feel (although for obvious reasons that term would not have been used at the time), the US album has a much lighter, psychedelic pop atmosphere. This is not simply down to the inclusion of "Hole in my shoe". The other singles, "Paper sun" and "Smiling phases", also had a pop feel to them. When this is combined with the occasional lighter moments on the original album such as "Berkshire poppies", this becomes a much more accessible album overall.
For me, while this is a highly enjoyable listen, the pioneering spirit which prevails on the UK "Mr. Fantasy" is slightly diluted here. That said, tracks such as "Heaven is in your mind" and "Giving it to you" are still very much an integral part of this release. At the end of the day, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Both versions are currently available together on a single CD on the Island remasters version of "Mr Fantasy".  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=7051

The Nields - Jack The Giant Killer

My four-year-old is obsessed with my ex-husband. “That is David Nields,” says Johnny pointing at a circle with dots for eyes, a big U for a smile, and two stick legs coming down from the circle’s bottom. He draws two more sticks coming out from the sides and attaches one to a smaller but similarly drawn figure to the right. This circle gets a tuft of Ernie-and-Burt hair. “That’s you, Mama. You are holding David Nields’ hand because he likes you.”
Johnny says, “DavidNields” as one word, like “Madonna” or “Bono.” He doesn’t seem to recognize the last name as the hyphenated part of his own. For that matter, he does not know that before I met his father––Tom––I was once married to this stick figure. He only knows that David Nields was one of the three Daves in my band in the 90s: The Nields, a folk-rock family band. For ten years, we toured the continent in a fifteen-passenger van, pulling a small trailer full of our gear, our bodies packed alongside our guitars, duffel bags, notebooks and used paperbacks. Loading in and out of rock clubs around the country was like moving into and out of a small apartment twice a day, 340 days a year.
We have the CDs to prove it. Recently, Johnny’s dragged these dust magnets down from the shelf, where they’d been filed under “N” between Nirvana and Oasis. He plays them incessantly, jamming along with his collection of cardboard guitars or his teal ukulele. All the accoutrements of my old indie-folk-rock band have become props and characters in the world of his imaginative play.
It’s a shock to hear these CDs again. My sister Katryna and I still perform as a duo in less-rock-more-folk guise. But certain songs went silent after David left both me and the band. These include the songs David wrote as well as the ones he and I co-wrote. Partly out of writerly narcissism, partly from not wanting to give him the airtime, it’s my songs we continue to play. So some of our best songs have been shut in those square plastic boxes out of earshot for decades.
Johnny pulled down our 1994 CD Bob on the Ceiling, and when he shunned “James” (a co-write) in favor of “Be Nice To Me” (all mine) I had a sweet moment of schadenfreude, quickly dashed when he turned the repeat knob to play David’s opening guitar solo, running from the music room to the kitchen to stand under the Bose speakers and hear it reverberate off the chrome fixtures, a look of pure wonder in his eyes. Tom and I exchange a look. “Do you know,” he says, “I’ve had to think more about David Nields this month than I ever did when we were dating?”
Tom and I talk a lot about second chances, the miracle of finding each other, getting to start over. I still don’t understand what I did to be rewarded by his love and the subsequent and miraculous births of our two healthy, beautiful, hilarious children. Both of us were married before, each for about a decade. Neither of us had kids. We’d considered ourselves lucky. When a marriage ends, one’s ex takes with them an entire library’s worth of shared life experiences and memories. Children might hold some of these, but without witnesses, only the couple remains the repository for those ten years, and if they never communicate, a lot is conveniently forgotten.
In some ways, forgetting can be a good thing: sometimes I’m glad Tom didn’t know my twenty-something self, bulimic and obsessed with success. He in turn is glad he had some years to learn how to stand on his own, outgrow his need for his lover to share his every interest, move through the world together in lock step. “You like biking? Wow! I like biking! Let’s get married!” is his quip about his proposal to his first wife. But at other times, when I run into a couple who saw each other across the rougher terrains of late-adolescence and early adulthood––those early mid-life crises and crucibles from which we emerge, if we’re lucky, a bit sadder, wiser and more grateful––I wish Tom and I had something tangible from those tender years, something inchoate we could find in a small box and play on the stereo.
Today, Johnny’s discovered “Jack the Giant Killer,” another co-write. My 30-year-old voice meets me in the kitchen on a tidal wave of jangly millennial guitars: Don’t laugh at me, do you see me? 
Yesterday I was afraid but that’s over. The song is triumphant––the ascendency of youth over age––and Johnny sits at the kitchen island transfixed, gazing into the middle distance as he listens. I join him, remembering the day in the studio where Moxy Früvous––a Canadian band of similar vintage––added their dissonant “la la’s” and four-part slides under the choruses. In the summer of 1999, David and I drove home from the studio every night listening to the cassette playbacks, the track getting fatter and fatter with each element we added. If I hadn’t been so competitive, wanting the songs I’d written alone to be the first cut, the single–– if I’d obeyed the first rule of the rock and roll band (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts)––we might have had a hit with this song.
When David told me he couldn’t stay in the marriage I felt like I’d been slammed with a rogue fastball I hadn’t seen coming. Our marriage was a mosaic of shared interests: music, literature, theater, but most of all, the band. There’s an image of us (Johnny recently showed me) on the inside of one of our CDs, backs turned to the camera, leaving the stage, arms around each other’s waists. We look more like teammates than lovers. It’s hard to say which caused what: the band’s failure dissolving us, or our breakup killing the band.
Thirty years of fighting tears are over.
Yeah, they’re over
Cause I’m Jack the Giant Killer.
But the band plays on, in our living room, and in the life of our family, and even still onstage, though less frequently. Johnny’s uncle is Dave Chalfant our bass player-turned-guitar player and producer––married to Katryna, the band’s lead singer. When we come over to their house for dinner, Dave pulls out his guitars and basses to satisfy Johnny’s curiosity about exactly which model played on which song. Johnny regularly calls Dave to double-check. He also calls our drummer Dave Hower just to chat. He’s been asking to call the third Dave, and I’ve sidestepped. Today, heart in my throat, I relent.
“What are you going to say to him?” I ask, tapping the name into my iPhone.
“That I wuv him,” says Johnny, as if to say, What else?
We let it ring and ring. He knows my number. “Hello?” says a familiar voice, cracking on the second syllable. Johnny deftly touches the speakerphone icon.
“How many guitars do you have?” he calls into the phone, a tiny Facebook icon of an aging David in the upper right corner.
“You might want to say who you are,” I suggest in a low voice.
“This is Johnny.”
“Oh,” says David, as if he were somehow expecting the call, and I am impressed at his quick shift to composure, his ease in speaking with a pre-kindergartener. “Four. A Martin, a big orange Yamaha that looks like a Gretch, a Dan Electro and an Epiphone bass. Why do you ask?”
“You have a fan,” I say. And Johnny proceeds to list the songs he loves. “Love and China” (my song about our breakup), “Alfred Hitchcock,” “Jack the Giant Killer.”
“Yeah,” says David. “That’s a good one.” His disembodied voice deepens, sounds more like his old self. “I remember singing through the telephone into my amp to get that crazy sound at the beginning. Cool effect.”
“We should’ve started the record with it,” I blurt, taking the phone. And then, I immediately think: But should have why? So radio would have played this disc, we would have continued playing in legendary but tiny rock clubs for a few more years, maybe gotten a Grammy nod and then broken up? Or—best-case scenario—we had the kind of career we dreamed of when we were honeymooning at Niagara. Let’s say we sang for President Obama, toured Europe, lived half the year in a tour bus, had sneakers and ice cream flavors named for us, made enough money to never have to worry about health insurance and retirement. What then? I wouldn’t have this four-year-old drumming with pencils on the counter.
“Nah,” says David. “I don’t remember anyone arguing for that. I think we all agreed on the sequence of the record.”
“Let me talk to DavidNields!” shouts Johnny, reaching for the phone. I hand it back to him and he holds the iPhone like a mic. “What guitar do you play on all the songs?”
After David finishes cataloguing his equipment for Johnny, I take the phone back to tell him about the stick figures and the replaying of his opening guitar solos. I wish him well.
Later Johnny asks if he can bring DavidNields to school for “N” week, which is coming up soon. I say he can bring a picture of DavidNields. So he draws a picture of Jack the Giant Killer—a little head with a frown and extremely long sticks for legs––and I realize he thinks, as one would, that Jack is a gigantic killer.
“Actually,” I say, bringing him in to my chest. “Jack is a little boy just like you. And he is very brave, so brave that he doesn’t let big scary monsters stop him from doing what he needs to do.”
Johnny puts his head on my shoulder. Then he bounds off. I sit at the kitchen table, fingering the frayed cover of Gotta Get Over Greta, artwork by Stefan Sagmeister, now a celebrated genius we were lucky enough to have worked with on his way up. This cover, this repository, is precious to me for so many reasons, and I don’t have a spare. The booklet is about to come apart at the staples from Johnny’s curious perusals. Should I hide it from him, or let him slowly and lovingly destroy it?
The beginning of “Jack” comes back on the speakers. I get up and creep around the corner. Johnny is standing on a chair in order to reach the knobs, holding his teal ukulele and a Beatles pick. He’s singing along, softly, completely lost in his rock and roll fantasy. He catches me watching him.
“Mama,” he says, his eyes pleading, halfway between pride and shame. “Go.”
So I do. It’s not really my song anymore, if it ever was.  From: https://losangelesreview.org/jack-the-giant-killer-by-nerissa-nields/

The Grateful Dead - That's It for the Other One/New Potato Caboose/Born Cross-Eyed

The Grateful Dead's self-titled debut album from 1967 was a casserole of folk, rock, blues and psychedelia. But it didn't quite capture the live experience. So the Grateful Dead set out to bring their celebrated concert sound into the studio on Anthem of the Sun, which was released on July 18, 1968. They traveled south to Los Angeles in November 1967 to begin work on this second album. By this time, the effects of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had legitimized rock 'n' roll as a serious art form. The Grateful Dead wanted to see how far they could push this. In the documentary Anthem to Beauty, Jerry Garcia says that the band's contract gave them unlimited studio time, an unheard-of provision back then. "Our strategy was, we wanna play in the studio, we wanna learn how the studio works," he said. "What we did essentially was we bought ourselves an education."
Warner Bros. Records exec Joe Smith also recalled the sessions: "These guys came along ... went in the studio, experimenting with sound like kids in a candy store. Whatever was state-of-the-art, they were availing themselves of it." Producer and engineer Dave Hassinger, who had worked on the Dead's debut, was brought in for Anthem, but as Smith pointed out, there was a new "element of chemicals involved. These guys were stoned part of the time, living in a fantasy world and looking for sounds that may not even be possible."
The sessions continued on and on as Hassinger grew more and more frustrated with the band, which had no finished songs or direction. They eventually moved to New York, and Hassinger bailed. The Grateful Dead were thrilled – the project was now all theirs. "Anthem of the Sun was our vehicle," drummer Mickey Hart recalled. "It was our springboard into weirdness. Now we're not tethered by the engineers or the technology of the day, we can fly the lofty peaks. And of course, we knew nothing of the studio. It was startling, it was new, it was invigorating, it was the edge."
The idea was to weave studio and live recordings into a seamless entity. Different performances of the same song, recorded on different nights, somehow melded together, then merged with studio takes, like one big sugar-cubed puzzle. Both sides of the album run as continuous pieces, and the LP's final mix was almost like a performance itself, with the mix made as the tape was rolling. "Using musical jump cuts, mixes and cross-fades, Anthem incorporated many of the techniques of cinema," said bassist Phil Lesh. Highlights are plenty. "That's It For the Other One" is a dramatic piece with four distinct sections unfolding into a tripped-out psychedelic blur colored by Garcia's killer guitar work. The shimmering mellow of "New Potato Caboose" is sheer beauty, pointing toward a direction the band would soon follow.
"Born Cross-Eyed" wraps up side one in an aggressive burst of pure rock 'n' roll led by Bob Weir. Time changes, stop-starts, blistering guitar and sweet harmonies drive it home, and just when you think you've got it figured out, a Herb Alpert-style trumpet blares in amid the late Ron "Pigpen" McKernan's swirling organ. The song first appeared as the flip side to the band's "Dark Star" single, probably the most concise song to emerge from this era of sessions. Ironically, the song was dragged to marathon lengths onstage. "Alligator" and "Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)" wrap up the album by wandering into even more free-form terrain, as the band tries its best to replicate part of its live experience. "Anthem of the Sun was like a chance for us to try a lot of things, to see what things might work and might not," said Garcia. "Actually, when we mixed it, we mixed it for the hallucinations. Phil and I performed the mix as though it were an electronic music composition. It was pretty intense, and we performed each side all the way through."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/grateful-dead-anthem-of-the-sun/  

Susanna Hoffs - Enormous Wings

‘Susanna Hoffs’ is the second solo album by Susanna Hoffs. The style of the album is more folk-oriented than her earlier work. Columbia Records disagreed with this style and dropped her from their roster, resulting in Hoffs signing to London Records. Three songs rejected by Columbia appeared on this album including "Enormous Wings", "Darling One" and "Happy Place". The album is much more personal and deals with issues like abusive relationships and insecurities; "Weak With Love" is about John Lennon's assassination. The album was promoted by forming a band for an extensive tour.
The album was released to enthusiastic reviews but, like its predecessor, it failed to sell as well as expected. AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine stated this album is "a remarkably accomplished and catchy collection of mature jangle-pop, power-pop and ballads". Wook Kim of Entertainment Weekly noted Hoffs "performs a small act of bravery".  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Hoffs_(album)

Kansas - Hopelessly Human

Kansas biography
Founded in Topeka, Kansas, USA in 1970 - Continued activity with different line-ups - Still active as of 2017. Original members Kerry Livgren (guitar) and Phil Ehart (drums) combined their two separate bands into one large band. Kerry's band was called Saratoga, and Phil's was called White Clover. The band changed its name to Kansas. They were from the beginning just an ordinary rock band, but were quickly compared to other progressive bands in the 70's like Genesis, Yes and King Crimson. Combining the musical complexities of British prog-rock with the soul and instrumentation of the American heartland, Kansas became one of the biggest selling and most successful touring acts of the 1970s. With huge hits like "Carry On Wayward Son" and "Dust In The Wind", they helped define the sound of "classic rock".

I- THE 1970s
The Early Days: Their self-titled debut album was released in 1974, but nationwide response was slow. Their second album, "Song For America", saw a softening of Kansas’ sound, with more classical influences evident. The third album, "Masque", featured more pop songs and was lyrically quite dark. They suffered ridicule from people around the world, because they wore overalls and had a violonist, which made people think that they were a country music group.
The Best of Times: "Leftoverture", with the popular single "Carry On Wayward Son", became a signature piece and pushed the album to platinum success. The followup, "Point Of Know Return" (1977) contained the ever-popular acoustic "Dust In The Wind". During their tour, they recorded their first live album, "Two For The Show" (1978) and the next studio album "Monolith" (1979).

II- THE 1980s
Seeds Of Change: A year later, the band followed up with "Audio Visions", the last production of the original band lineup. Walsh left the band due to creative differences. "Vinyl Confessions" had Christian lyrical content. The next album, "Drastic Measures" (1983), had some hard rock material on it, including the song "Mainstream". In 1984, the band released a greatest hits compilation, "The Best Of Kansas", which featured one new song, "Perfect Lover".
The Second Generation: The group split in 1983, only to reform in 1986 with the albums "Power" and "The Spirit Of Things" (1988). Sales of these two albums were not very strong. Thus, the second generation of Kansas came to an abrupt end.

III- THE 1990s: The Third Generation
The new lineup released their second live album, "Live At The Whiskey", and featured live renditions of their classics. In 1995, the "Freak Of Nature" album featured some powerful new studio tracks. "Always Never The Same" featured old classics and new material, done with the London Symphony Orchestra.

IV- The 2000s
Seeing the return of founder singer/songwriter Kerry Livgren, "Somewhere To Elsewhere" was released in the summer of 2000. "Early Recordings From Kansas 1971-1973" is a true gem. Another live album, titled "Device Voice Drum", is different from their earlier live albums.

From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=630

Patty Griffin - Poor Man's House

Instead of Living With Ghosts, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin could have easily named her 1996 full-length debut Nowhere To Hide. It’s a powerful album of ten songs, each featuring only Griffin supported by acoustic guitar—thus resembling the nakedness of copyright demos. It was definitely a risky move for Griffin’s first major label release. Did it pay off? Well, that depends upon whom you’re asking.
Living With Ghosts never charted in Billboard, to date it’s sold less than 250,000 copies, and it didn’t exactly set up her sophomore effort (1998’s Flaming Red) for commercial success—that album also never found a home on the Billboard 200 and actually sold less than its predecessor.
Over the years, though, Griffin has established herself as one of the most critically acclaimed singer-songwriters in music today with a rich catalog of studio albums, a lengthy list of tour itineraries, and seven Grammy nominations resulting in two wins for her 2010 gospel album Downtown Church and her 2019 self-titled folk album. Griffin’s been covered by The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire. Kelly Clarkson absolutely fangirls over her.
I couldn’t care less about the lack of chart position or sales number of Living With Ghosts, to be honest. Twenty-five years after its release, I still hold this watershed album in as high regard as Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) and Carole King’s Tapestry (1971). This is an album that, by the very nature of its sparse recording, demands two-way engagement as if the spotlight is firmly on Griffin and you’re the only one in the audience.
It also requires an ability to empathize—to slip into the well-worn shoes of every protagonist Griffin writes about who’s rolling with life’s high tides. It commands the listener to focus squarely on the small amounts of real estate where Griffin discloses big revelations about each character she painstakingly cares for within each song. Although it’s usually categorized as a seminal folk or alt-country effort due to its stripped-down sound, I’ve always felt Living With Ghosts moonlights as a bona fide rock album whose bare bones recording, muscular guitar playing, and deeply drawn incisive lyric moments challenge the perceived notions of what a rock album can be.
There’s a fiery demeanor and bristling urgency that Griffin weaves throughout Living With Ghosts. When “Moses” breaks the seal at the beginning of the album with Griffin’s pained call out heavenward for a savior (“Diamonds, roses, I need Moses / To cross this sea of loneliness / Part this red river of pain”), it’s shocking, at first listen, how freely and unabashedly Griffin erupts her anger and anguish in front of us.
In “Every Little Bit,” she feverishly sketches a portrait of a rebellious woman proud of her emotional armor (“I can chew like a cannibal / I can yell like a cat / I even had you believing that I really really like it like that”) which ends with Griffin wailing out the word “bit” several times, unraveling it into a multitude of newly formed syllables until she’s done punching it around.
Or consider the rollicking “You Never Get What You Want,” where Griffin employs a slight snarl and curled upper lip to add some leather to the cocky opening lyrics (“You first found me in my holding pen / Stopped to take a look and stuck your finger in / I bit one off and you came back again and again.”) As the song progresses Griffin gets rowdier—channeling hues of Johnny Cash and Billy Idol into her performance until the end when she releases the pressure valve with a final lyric sung in almost a whisper.
Perhaps Griffin’s moments of full throttled clamor and troublemaker tones are a result of the divorce she had just endured, the exhausting years of waiting tables and patchwork temp jobs all through her twenties, or how she learned to keep unpleasant emotions on the inside as the youngest of seven children (all born within seven years.) “Emotions like anger were not in my vocabulary,” Griffin once recalled about her childhood. “They were not welcome.”
When you hear how Griffin wields control over her blazing pinnacle vocal moments within the more somber songs on the album like “Poor Man’s House,” “Forgiveness,” or “Let Him Fly” (covered by The Chicks on their 1999 album Fly), it makes total sense that she used to cover Pat Benatar songs in her high school band (and that she grew up close to a forest in Maine and had to have a big voice to yell back towards home.)
Recently I spoke with musician and music instructor John Curtis, who was Griffin’s former guitar teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He told me when he heard Griffin’s singing voice in their first lesson together while she was still married, he was completely blown away, “I peeled myself off of the wall...one of the first words out of my mouth was, ‘You need to do this for a living.’”
What also gives Living With Ghosts such a propulsive rock energy in many of its offerings is how the acoustic guitar does double duty by adding big-heeled percussion to its job description. At the end of “Poor Man’s House,” Griffin’s forceful playing sounds like it could be a finale drum solo. Once you get to the amped-up back half of “Sweet Lorraine,” you can almost hear the cymbals in the way Griffin pulses her strings. Or in “Time Will Do The Talking,” it’s Griffin’s athletic strum that pushes her vocals into that previously mentioned rowdy (dare I say “badass”?) territory she inhabits just as effortlessly as she can corral a hushed moment with a teardrop in her voice.
The album’s raw and sometimes imperfect recording also infuses it with a rough-around-the-edges rock energy. Some of the songs were recorded in the Nashville kitchen of the album’s recording engineer, while others were recorded in a Boston apartment close to a hospital. If you listen carefully, you can hear ambulance sirens in “Forgiveness” and the album’s closing track “Not Alone.” Other songs like “Moses,” “You Never Get What You Want,” and “Poor Man’s House” flirt with mic pops or high vocal levels pushing against the limits of the recording hardware.
Releasing the album this way wasn’t the original plan when Griffin was signed to A&M. A curious pairing with producer Nile Rodgers to record tracks never saw the light of day, which was apparently not a problem for Griffin. “I love Nile Rodgers, otherwise I never would have bothered to work with him,” she told The Washington Post, adding, "Man, if there's one thing I hope does not ever circulate, it's that stuff.” Next, she recorded the songs with a band in New Orleans at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studios with producer Malcolm Burn. A&M wasn’t happy with the results and neither was Griffin who felt the songs lacked the power and integrity of her original demos.
"l asked them [A&M] if they would release my songs as they originally heard them, namely, my guitar and my voice” Griffin recalled to Raleigh, North Carolina’s Spectator in 1997. “Realizing that they were attached to those solo performances made me appreciate the strength of them and gave me guts to ask if they'd put them out that way. And they did. I have to give A&M credit."  After some re-recording of vocals on several of the songs, along with some minimal production clean-up and sweetening, A&M released Living With Ghosts with skeletal promotional fanfare on May 21, 1996. In the liner notes, Griffin thanked Malcolm Burn and the New Orleans crew that worked on the shelved version of the album, proving at the outset that Griffin was a class act.
On Living With Ghosts, Griffin stripped out all of the noise that shrouded her intense and intimate songcraft and pushed for the album to be heard the way she wanted. “It represents what I’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s kind of scary to put it out this way,” she said at the time. “If someone wants to pan it, they’re panning me. But it’s what I do, so I’m real happy we were able to do it.” Sticking to your guns and demanding your art is only sent out into the world once it meets your high standards. I can’t think of anything more Rock ‘n’ Roll than that.  From: https://albumism.com/features/patty-griffin-debut-album-living-with-ghosts-turns-25-anniversary-retrospective

Cordelia's Dad - Texas Rangers

Strange how things come back. Got an email this morning from a friend asking if I knew anything about Tim Eriksen who's playing at The Betsey Trotwood with Steeleye Span's Peter Knight on the 20th July. Eriksen used to play in a band called Cordelia's Dad and he had a lot to do with the soundtrack to Cold Mountain. Now I just happen to have got a new hard drive and I've been moving loads of archive stuff off floppies and zip disks. And amongst this stuff was an interview that I did with Tim and Peter Irvine and Cath Oss in a cider pub in Bristol; it was cold and wintry so I reckon it was January. Anyway this piece never appeared in print and I'd forgotten that it was as complete as it was. This looks like it was ready for lay-out. So why not put it up here? Oh and by the way Cath Oss was there though she doesn't seem to have said anything and she's now Cath Tyler. So imagine yourself back in 1997 and take it from here:
In the wilds of last January I ventured to the nether regions of north-east London and a place called Highams Park. There, in an upper room. I saw three young Americans and an English friend mesmerise a bunch of middle aged unreconstructed folkies. They played a set of traditional American songs and tunes harking back to the nineteenth century, revitalising those tales of passion and intense emotion, gripping us with the starkness of their voices and the simple beauty of their acoustic instrumentation.
A couple of weeks later, at Bristol's Louisiana Club, the three Americans again mounted a stage, this time equipped for electric music. While the songs displayed unmistakably a traditional origin this was a set that was ragin' full on. Power trio stuff but with the poetry that only the finest protagonists aspire to; the balm inside the mayhem. Like Brass Monkey meeting Sonic Youth. In the hurly-burly of the extended 'Rapture Bird' my mind and my synapses were drawn back to the frenzy of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Hamburg the previous summer as they deconstructed "Like A Hurricane". It was that good.
There are things we accept you can't do and so we don't even try them. It seems like nobody told Tim Eriksen, Peter Irvine and Cath Oss, or if they did they didn't listen. These guys have, in various combinations, been playing together as Cordelia's Dad since the late 1980s. Depending on where you see them, which records you get, they are a noise band, a folk band, a folk-rock band, a folk-noise band, a hard-core band or shape note singers. There's a dozen other categories, all as relevant and as meaningless. They're a band that has steeped themselves in the folk music of America and its English origins, they search out songs and variations on songs. The afternoon of the gig you may well find them digging in the local library.
For some years now they've been disconcerting the English folk music community, or the part of it with less catholic tastes, by presenting both sides of their coinage as Cordelia's Dad. They've now decided to be two bands. Cordelia's Dad for the acoustic shows and Io (pronounced eye-o) for the electric ones. It avoids confusion but lessens the surprise. From: http://bucketfullofbrains.blogspot.com/2010/07/cordelias-dad-interview-from-january.html