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Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

Track 9 is a mere 42 seconds long, and is a brief and quiet reprise of the first track, “Entropy”.  It was the fashion to do such things in those days; c/f King Crimson’s “In The Wake of Poseidon”, and Pink Floyd’s “Animals”.

The CD ends up with both sides of the band’s second and final single.  Track 10, “One Blind Mice” was the “A” side and is a reasonable 3.19 minutes rocker, though nothing to write home about.  It would, frankly, have been astonishing if it had made chart success.

Track 11 is the last one on the CD, and was the “B” side, “Punting”, a rather quirky 7.09 minutes long instrumental, but actually very agreeable to listen to, notwithstanding a curious use of noises and a somewhat jumpy beat.

I close off on Quatermass with the opening words of Chris Welch’s splendid notes in the CD liner:

“Quatermass, an exceptionally powerful three piece group, showed great promise when they got together in the Autumn [sic] of 1969.  Sadly they never received the attention they deserved from the public.  But during its brief career, the British band toured extensively, visited America and produced this highly rated album in 1970, which shows off their considerable potential.”

P.S. “Quatermass” was the surname of a fictional scientist most famous for his appearance in the sci-fi horror “Quatermass and the Pit”.  Indeed, that story had been televised in the UK in the very early 1960s; I remember longing for its return in November 1963, when coincidentally another show started, called, oddly, “Doctor Who”.

Buying the albums smpled on “Picnic”.

We have got to “Make Up Your Mind”, Track 7 on the CD, and the third longest track on the album, coming in at a mighty 8.44 minutes.  This is a great rock song, with the briefest of lyrics, and a very long central instrumental middle 8, which starts off with a quiet organ solo with some dramatic staccato interludes.  This builds into a bit of a crescendo, and the developes into a slow bluesy plod, which in turn becomes a rock jaunt,, which quitens down, leading up to a repeat of the chorus of the song.

Track 8 on the CD, “Laughin’ Tackle”,  was the penultimate track on the LP, but for all intents and purposes the last track, as the actual last track is hardly there at all.  This is an instrumental, and the longest track on the record at an extraordinary 10.35 minutes.  It is much as one would expect for such a thing, and features as the middle 8 the obligatory drum solo, which is perfectly competent and relatively short, eliding into a bass solo which morphs into a piano solo.  Very much use of the orchestral strings is, of course, put into this one.  As instrumentals go, this one is fair enough, and cetainly gives the bass guitar its most prominent outing of the record.

Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

Track 4 is “Good Lord Knows”, which is in my view not only the best track on the record, but also one of the most brilliant songs I have ever heard.  It is only 2.54 minutes long, and is a sort of slow, stately processional thing, the main theme comprising a succesion of minims, ending in a more varied cadence; however, the effect is awesome.

Track 5 would, I think have been the last track on Side 1 of the LP, being “Up On The Ground”, which is a standard rocker with a slightly jazzy organ solo in the middle 8, lasting 7.08 minutes.

If I am right, Side 2 of the LP would have kicked off with what is track 6 on the CD, “Gemini”, which is split personality song lasting 5.54 minutes.  It starts as a lively rocker, but after about a minute slows right down for the last few words of the first stanza, with about 30 seconds of gentle organ, and this pattern is repeated with variations throughout.  This is a very clever and well crafted song, and a pleasure to listen to.

The next track, Track 7, is another long one, “Make Up Your Mind”, coming in at 8.44 minutes.  More of this one next time.

Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

The record opens with a soft, gentle, classical, and even liturgical, style instrumental called “Entropy” which lasts just 1.10 minutes.

Track 2 is the sampled track, “Black Sheep Of The Family”, though the album version is a bit longer, having a dramatic ascending organ swirl at the start, before the main rocker kicks in.  According to the liner notes, this track was also released as a single at the same time as the LP, which is presumably why it was selected for “Picnic”, though in my view it is not the best track on the album.

Track 3 is an epic of a song, coming in at a mighty 9.42 minutes, though it is only the second longest track on the album.  This is called “Post War Saturday Echo”, and is a long instrumental piece interspersed with selections from the three stanzas, of which this is the first:

“The city is a ravin’ neon nightmare

Freudian symbols lay my soul bare

And everywhere I turn, electric hoardings burn

And words that mean nothing

Are endlessly rushing

Telling me nothing I really wanna learn.”

The word that is most emphasised throughout is “nothing”, which gives you a good clue as to the basically nihilistic feel of the piece generally.

Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

In several technical ways, Quatermass was very similar to the final version of The Nice, a splendid band of which I plan to say much more in due course.

Both bands comprised 3 guys, respectively on bass guitar, keyboards, and drums.  This in itself was most unusual in those days, in having no lead guitar.  Further, in both groups the bass player was the only or main vocalist, and both of them made extensive use of orchestral accompaniment.

Here, however, the similarities end; the respective groups produced wholly different sounds from each other.

Anyway, as promised, here is the list of musicians from the luxury double LP version of this estimable album:

“Violins

Tony Gilbert (Leader)

John Kirkland

David Katz

Bily Millar

Charlie Vorsanger

Les Maddox

Gerald Enns

Harold Parfitt

Paul Scherman

Homi Kanga

Jack Rothstein

Henry Datyner

Bill Armon

Michael Jones

Laurie Clay

Derek Jacobs

Violas

Steve Shingle

Chris Wellington

Henry Myerscouh

Ian White

Bernard Davis

John Graham

Cellos

Paul Buckmaster (Leader) [Remember him?]

Boris Rickelman

Francis Gabarr

Peter Wilson

Freddy Alexander

Chris Green

Double Bass

Frank Clarke

Joe Mudele

Arthur Watts

Wow.

Perhaps a little more on the packaging next time.

Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

Although I never got the original SHVL 775 Harvest Label vinyl LP, I was, oddly, some years after I bought the CD, able to buy a gorgeous double LP vinyl version of the album.

This came out on Akarama, AK 175-2, a division of Comet Records, made under licence by Celebrity Licensing Europe.  It contains an LP sleeve size inner insert, one side of which is a perfect copy of the original front cover, minus only the Harvest logo.  The other side contains a full transcript of Chris Welch’s notes from the CD.  The tracks are exactly the same as on the CD, including the bonus tracks.

The front cover of the Double LP is again a perfect copy of the original, minus the Harvest logo.  The back is the original continuation of the distinctive “high rise skyscrapers and pterodactyls” motif, but here with a track listing across the middle section.

The inside of the cover has all the lyrics, just as you get in the CD insert, but you also get much more, including large purple sepia pictures of the faces of the three chaps in the band, across the bottom.

More particularly, you also get a detailed list of the additional musicians on the record, of which more next time.

Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”.

Here in Sheffield, UK, we are blessed still to have one or two record shops, emporia which worldwide are now on the brink of extinction.  Of the few we have here, perhaps the most celebrated is Record Collector, situated in the suburban West Side shopping precinct called Broomhill.

I was browsing the contents of the shop one day in 2005, and noticed an upper rank short shelf labelled “Progressive”, which had maybe 40 or 50 CDs arranged neatly in a row.  Naturally I had to investigate, and found there to my intense surprise and pleasure a CD version of “Quatermass”, which I purchased immediately and with great joy.

This CD comes from the wondeful people at Repertoire Records, and is a 1996  release REP 4620-WY.  It comes with a brilliant 16 page colour insert, which includes compendious notes by Chris Welch, datemarked London 1996.  The booklet is choc-ful of colour pictures of heavy indusrtial machinery, on every page except the trademark front and back covers.  The only pictures of the three chaps in the group are postage stamp size black and white ones at the foot of Page 12.  At the foot of Page 13 they are named as:

John Gustafson – Vocals & Bass Guitar

Pete Robinson – Keyboards

Mick Underwood – Drums.

The CD comes with two bonus tracks.

It can be seen from the earliest posts in this series that I never really set out with the intention of collecting all the albums sampled on “Picnic”.  I had formed such an objective with “Nice Enough To Eat”, as I believed it could be done, and the story of that is set out in a seies of posts started well over a year ago.

It simply never occurred to me, at least until the current century, that it might be possible to obtain all the albums sampled on “Picnic”.  I guess it was in 2002, when I got the first Barclay James Harvest album as an extended CD, that the penny dropped, as by that time I realised that I had 16 of the 18 albums already.  I did not realise, however, just how hard it was going to be to get those last two.  In 1999 I had been able to acquire a CD by a band calling itself “Quatermass II”, which I think featured the drummer from the original group, but that was the closest I came by then to tracking down either of those last two somewhat elusive records.

More on my endeavours in this regard next time.

[Buying the albums sampled on "Picnic"].

Pink Floyd in 1969/1970 were still very much part of the”underground” scene; it would be some 3 years before they became mega stars with “Dark Side of the Moon”, an LP which for many years I dismissed as a sell-out.

Anyway, I fairly soon picked up the threads of what had happened.  Syd Barrett had not only been in the original line-up, but had very much been the Front Man, someone who effectively was the band, like Peter Noone in Herman’s Hermits.  That line-up had done the first LP, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in 1967, and had released some singles, and “Best of..” comprised 2 tracks from the LP and both sides of 4 singles.  However, largely due to an over-enthusiastic use of LSD, he had become progressively more unreliable.  A friend of the group, one Dave Gilmour, therefore lent a hand on guitar and vocals when Syd was indisposed.  Syd had in fact left the group, replaced by Dave Gilmour, by the time of the third LP “More” in 1969.  Whilst there had also been a total of 4 chaps in the group that made the second LP, “Saucerful of Secrets” in 1968, they were then three and two halves; Syd hadn’t quite left, and Dave hadn’t quite joined.

It says much for the group that they soldiered on, and indeed for the record label that they kept them on.

It is a very good thing for music that they did so.  As it turned out, the way they achieved this was by banishing from the public perception of the band any concept of the individual, though this was not going to become clear for a year or two.

Interestingly, the first track on the live LP of “Ummagumma” is “Astronomy Domine”, the song which also opened the first album.  This was the last time the new Floyd did an old Floyd song.

I propose to talk more of Pink Floyd in due course; next time, however, I plan to return to the Main Theme…

[Buying the albums sampled on "Picnic".]

As I mentioned last time, one of the first full price LPs I ever got was a cheap second hand copy of this remarkable LP.  I was astonished, on listening to it, however, that it didn’t sound much at all like the Pink Floyd I knew and loved; rather, it sounded much more like “Terrapin”, the Syd Barrett track on “Picnic”.

It is a short LP, with just 10 brief tracks on it:

Side 1

Chapter 24

Mathilda Mother

Arnold Layne

Candy and a Current Bun

The Scarecrow

Side 2

Apples and Oranges

It Would Be So Nice

Paint Box

Julia Dream

See Emily Play

As will be observed, despite its brevity, this is a great little LP.

What I found really interesting, though, were the four albums adverised on the back cover, one of which was “Ummagumma”.  The others, arranged along a lower row, were:

“Soundtrack From The Film “More”

“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”; and

“A Saucerful of Secrets”.

“Best Of…” was on Columbia, as were all the others, except of course “Ummagumma”, which was on Harvest.

I was very confused indeed about all this, and determined to find out more, and this in the days long before search engines or indeed home computers.

I made enquiries, in the first instance, of my school chum with the hip elder brother.