November 2014
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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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Fuchsia Now this is another great, truly forward thinking, one album English neo-folk wonder. How about a 6-piece band where the real thrust of power comes from its 3-piece string trio? Fuchsia a Devon band fulfilled the promise that nascent artists like the Electric Light Orchestra, and similar ilk rarely accomplished as well…the idea of marrying…
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Jan Dukes de Grey Before we jump into 1972, lets catch two final one album wonder English neo-folk bands. Bands like these show the great aspect progression and complexity are starting to define the sound of their music. No longer content with paying due diligence to tradition they’re seeking to go beyond it, experimenting with…
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