So Who’s This Andy Roberts Then…?
Sometime in the ‘80s I bought an LP called
Home Grown, by one Andy
Roberts, as a jumble sale. I knew nothing about the man but it had
a really atmospheric, slightly creepy cover - of a man and a dog,
at least one of whom had a hang-dog expression - and music inside
some of which, most especially the lengthy
’Applecross’, only added to the intrigue and mystery.
It was, I later discovered, only one of three different versions of
the LP (this one the RCA pressing), and only one of several albums
the man had released under his own name during a very short period
in the early ‘70s - having previously been a member of the
equally (to my generation) obscure Liverpool Scene - after which he
seemed to disappear from view.
There was only one CD, an early ‘90s compilation, which was
tantalising in the eclectic brilliance of its contents and yet
still - in providing only one brief quote to the writer of the
notes on that compilation - the perpetrator of this music seemed to
remain fascinatingly elusive.
But I like musical underdogs, I like mysteries and I sometimes like
a challenge. In 2004 I suggested to John Reed at Sanctuary that I
had a hunch his label now owned an amount of Andy Roberts
recordings and would they like me to look at a new compilation. It
turned out that they did and they would. I also noticed that
Roberts himself now had a website (
www.andyrobertsmusic.com ) and decided to
get in touch. Luckily, while Andy was, and remains, very critical -
overly so, in my view - about the quality of his own work, he was
also prepared to accept the validity of a new 2CD anthology and
engage in a process of selecting tracks - including, in several
cases, comparing/contrasting several different mixes and versions
of tracks from both the Sanctuary archive and his own collection of
reel-to-reel demos and suchlike.
The whole process of selecting the tracks was actually a lot of
fun, and Andy was a joy to work with. Often the bringing together
of vintage artist, label-hired compiler and a label who owns much
or all of the work and has no legal obligation to let the artist
have any say over its repackaging can be fraught with tension, but
not in this case - well, possibly between Andy and Sanctuary (as it
was very much up to them to hammer out the deal for licensing the
half dozen previously unreleased tracks and photos from Andy), but
certainly not between Andy and I. It was also to the benefit of the
end product that Andy was personally involved in the mastering
process.
So, in conclusion, not only is the
Andy Roberts Anthology one of the most
satisfying I’ve worked on in terms of getting a lot of
wonderful music onto CD for the first time, it’s also been
delightful to get to know Andy himself - a hugely under-rated
artist and decent bloke, who’s been involved in a phenomenal
amount of musical byways, bands and projects in his time, and
indeed continues to be (check out the just-released
40th
Anniversary
Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band reunion concert DVD for an example). It was
a particular pleasure to be able to bring Andy over to Belfast in
December 2005 for an all-too rare solo performance, in a double
bill with Irish trad legend Andy Irvine.
During the process of working on the solo anthology, Andy and I
also began pursuing the legacy of his 1968-70 band Liverpool Scene
- I managed to procur copies of four amazing programmes they made
for Granada TV in 1968, while Andy (through a tortuous series of
letters, phone calls, haranguing, brinkmanship and denouement when
a ‘smoking gun‘ piece of letter-headed paper from 1970
was finally found) managed to effectively reclaim, from SonyBMG no
less, the rights to the band’s four albums. Privately
recorded live material from the period was also procured from folk
club organiser Geoff Harden and erstwhile TV celebrity Doc
Cox.
At the time of writing (April 2006) it looks very likely that a
2CD
Liverpool Scene Anthology will appear via
Sanctuary in 2007 - the 40th
anniversary of
the band’s founding. It also looks likely that a full release
for Andy’s 1973 solo masterpiece
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede - probably with
bonus BBC and/or demo recordings from the period - will appear
later in 2006 via Market Square Records, while an expanded version
of the 1976 LP
Sleepers by yet another
of Andy’s bands, Grimms, will appear on Hux. Andy’s
also currently working on material for a new Plainsong album with
Iain Matthews. The more Andy Roberts on CD the better, I say!
Coliin
Harper, April 2006
Andy Roberts
Anthology Sleevenote
‘I’m realising that my biggest problem, now as
then,’ says Andy Roberts, ‘is that I get so bored in
the studio. I just want to bang it down and get on with something
else. In the ‘70s I was so busy rushing around from one gig
to another, one session to another, one collaboration to another,
that I couldn’t be bothered to polish anything in the way
that other artists did. There wasn’t enough time. My
favourite expression in the studio was “Will it affect
sales?” If the answer was “No!” then it was good
enough for me. It’s a failing.’
Andy’s ’failing’, though, has been responsible
for an extraordinarily rich and, up till now, largely untapped (on
CD) seam of music from the glory days of rock - intriguingly
crafted, beautifully played, often luxuriantly produced (at odds
with that ‘bang-it-down’ remembrance), and, taken as a
body of work, the product of a man who deserves to be written back
into the history which so curiously seems to have airbrushed him
out or, at best, demoted his name to that of a Zelig-like footnote
in the sories of other people.
Andy Roberts is an enigma: a man whose story involves playing on
hit singles while studying for (and achieving) a law degree in the
’60s; playing on an album produced by Jimi Hendrix; hanging
out at Paul McCartney’s place during the Beatles’
studio years; playing the Albert Hall and touring America with Led
Zeppelin in 1969; playing both 1969 and 1970 Isle of Wight
Festivals; and, a decade later, finding himself a member of Pink
Floyd for a couple of weeks. He might also claim celebrity as the
Pete Best of The Rutles. And yet who but a handful of connoisseurs
and train-spotters on the mighty railway of rock have even heard of
the fellow? Andy Roberts didn’t disappear from the limelight
- he simply moved sideways, out of its glare. Simultaneously (in a
combination that is rare) both an artist and a journeyman musician,
he decided to stop making records with his name on the cover after
the dismal luck which all-but buried the 1973 album he regards as
his best,
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede. He has
remained a comfortably successful working musician ever
since.
The insanely productive period which this compilation seeks to make
sense of spans 1969 - 1973, and takes in mind-boggling, overlapping
folds of commitment: that of being a solo recording artist (with
four albums - one reappearing in three different guises); an
in-demand session guitarist; a member of at least three bona-fide
bands (Liverpool Scene, Everyone and Plainsong); and a serial stage
and studio collaborator with the incestuous pool of musicians,
poets and performance artists whose family tree includes the
Scaffold, the Bonzo Dog Band and GRIMMS. Yet during the early years
of the 1970s Andy Roberts’ default setting - for his
professed ambiguity with the prospect in press interviews at the
time - appeared to be that of a solo artiste. But let’s go
back to the beginning…
Born in Hatchend, London, in 1947, Andy’s dad was a devotee
of Music Hall comedy and his mum an afficionado of classical music.
Both involved Andy in their enthusiasms from a young age and
consequently, from formative exposure to slapstick and symphony
concerts, Andy took up the violin at nine (taking lessons for nine
years) and simultaneously dived into the skiffle boom that was
sweeping Britain in the late ‘50s - owning his first guitar
circa 1959.
‘I got a music scholarship to a public school in
Essex,’ he explained, in an extensive interview with
Ptolomaic
Terrascope in 1992.
‘When I went there there was already a band called Flash Sid
Fanshawe & The Icebergs. This was in 1959. They’d got
guitars which they’d made in the school workshops and played
very simple stuff which I thought sounded fantastic. By the time I
left the school there was half a dozen quite good bands there. You
could plug in and just make as much racket as you
wanted.’
Andy’s school band, foreshadowing his long involvement with
the wacky and the surreal, was known to its friends as Monarch T.
Bisk & The Cherry Pinwheel Shortcakes - or, at least, would
have been ‘but nobody could remember it all’. The band
went through several stages - from a Shadows sound to Chicago
R&B - ‘but I never thought of doing it for a
living’.
It was becoming embroiled in providing live music for a revue -
written by a Shortcakes’ associate - at the 1965 Edinburgh
Festival which led to the real beginnings of Andy’s path as a
professional musician. The show ran for two weeks at the Traverse
Theatre, and one of the acts following the play was Vivian
Stanshall, who had recently formed the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band,
‘doing mime, playing the tuba and generally camping
around’. The theatre was also playing host to The Scaffold, a
Liverpool comedy troupe comprising Roger McGough, John Gorman and
Mike McGear (ne
McCartney,
Paul’s brother). Andy was really impressed with their show,
and by a bunch of poets - including Adrian Henri - playing the
venue during afternoons. Many strands of Andy’s career over
the next decade and beyond would be interwoven with all of the
above, all focused on this one venue in August 1965.
Andy returned to London and accepted an offer to study law at
Liverpool University, almost immediately bumping into Roger McGough
at a bookshop as soon as he got there. The ‘jazz and
poetry’ movement was at its peak, and Roger invited Andy to
dive in: ‘February 1966 was the first time I did a thing with
him and Adrian Henri, at the Bluecoat Theatre in Liverpool. It just
took off from there. Within a couple of months I was doing poetry
events at The Cavern and playing with a band at the University.
There was loads going on.’
Soon, on the back of a 1967 poetry anthology entitled
The Liverpool Scene, Adrian Henri,
Roger McGough and Andy, along with jazz saxophonist Mike Evans and
songwriter/guitarist Mike Hart, were taking bookings as ‘The
Liverpool Scene Poets’ Andy was also recording with
McGough’s music/comedy outfit The Scaffold, on a series of
singles which included their breakthrough hits ‘Thank U Very
Much’ and ‘Lily The Pink’. Roger consequently had
to drop out of the poetry gigs, leaving Andy to suggest to the
charismatic Adrian Henri that all they needed was a bassist and
drummer to become a bona fide band. Percy Jones and Bryan Dodson
(later replaced by Pete Clarke) filled those roles respectively and
The Liverpool Scene was born.
An album for CBS had already been recorded, prior to the
band’s formation, called
The Incredible New Liverpool Scene - basically Andy
accompanying Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, recorded over a couple
of hours in Denmark Street, London. BBC Radio’s champion of
’the underground’ John Peel took a shine to it and
regularly booked the now fully-fledged band (or, as a duo, Roberts
& Henri) for his show and for his own live engagements. He also
nominally produced their first full-band album,
Amazing Adventures Of… (RCA,
1968), in a recording deal secured by their new manager Sandy
Roberton - a key figure in the careers of many now legendary acts
at the progressive ends of folk and rock music of the time.
In 1968 Andy graduated in Law - having somehow found a way through
a degree course in between singles with The Scaffold, concerts with
the Scene and helping out on the Scaffold spin-off LP
McGough & McGear, the other
guitarist being Jimi Hendrix and the producer Paul McCartney.
‘I wasn’t professional at the time,’ says Andy,
‘but I was doing jobs that many professionals would have
envied. I’d get calls to do a bit of recording in London, and
I’d stay at Paul McCartney’s house - walk up and ring
the doorbell and there’d be 85 girls hanging around outside.
I didn’t even think twice about it. [But] 1968 was really
when the working life started.’
The following year saw the Liverpool Scene at their peak -
delivering their second album
Bread On The Night, touring the UK
on a three act bill with Led Zeppelin and Blodwyn Pig, playing to
150,000 at the Isle of Wight Festival (on the day of Bob
Dylan’s much-heralded ‘comeback’ performance) and
touring America for a gruelling, and revelatory three months.
‘Absolute disaster,’ is Andy’s verdict on the
tour. ‘We suddenly came up against the utter reality of it.
With a British audience, given this poetry and a band that were
never rehearsed, we got away with it through being so different and
[through] our verve and irreverence. None of which worked in
America.’
The American experience would nevertheless inspire the band’s
best work - the lengthy ‘Made In USA’ suite, one side
of their last LP proper,
St Adrian Co, Broadway And 3rd
(1970) - and
which would filter into Andy’s own work for the next few
years. It also forced him to re-examine his own direction:
’[Before America] I was stupid enough to still think I could
be Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to be a star. You do when you’re
young - you don’t realise that everybody has their role, and
that wasn’t mine.’ Andy still recalls some sage advice
he received around this time from folk-baroque guitar hero Davy
Graham : ’You only person you should be in competition with
today is yourself yesterday’.
The first Andy Roberts album,
Home Grown, was recorded
in late 1969, and built upon the quirky solo tracks he had to date
peppered among the jazz/poetry workouts on Liverpool Scene albums
and radio sessions. ‘The Raven’, featured on
1968’s
Bread On The Night and heard here
in a superior unreleased version from 1969, was one such;
‘Home Grown’ itself was another. Those two tracks
conveniently represent the poles of Andy’s writing: the
profound and the purely comedic. Making these parameters sit well
together on one piece of vinyl was the question which would quickly
colour Andy’s own view of the album - or, at least, in its
original form, as released by RCA (under a production deal with
Sandy Roberton) in March 1970.
‘Infinitely listenable and beautifully arranged, with
excellent guitar work from Andy. A lovely, peaceful album.’
That was Disc’s
judgement on this mesmerising and atmospheric rough-hewn debut, on
which Andy was backed on some tracks by the rhythm section from
Mighty Baby (another of Sandy Roberton’s charges), with brass
arrangements from future Jethro Tull man David Palmer.
An eclectic album, punctuated with brief bursts of violin and organ
noodling, the key tracks included the ragtime/country flavoured
comedic songs like ‘Home Grown’ and ‘Gig
Song’, the impressionistically autobiographical ‘Moths
And Lizards In Detroit’ (first of the ‘American’
songs) and ‘Queen Of The Moonlight World’ (inspired by
a visit to London Zoo), and the altogether gothic
‘Applecross’, inspired by a weekend in a village of
that name in north-west Scotland. The spooky vibe was continued on
the traditional ‘John The Revelator’ and a funky cover
of ‘Spider’ John Koerner’s ‘Creepy
John’.
Andy performed several items from
Home Grown on John
Peel’s Top
Gear radio show, plus
the driving non-album track ‘You’re A Machine’,
on which he was again backed by Mighty Baby. A previously
unreleased rehearsal of the track, recorded shortly before the BBC
session, is included here.
The Liverpool Scene finally split, onstage at a London gig, in May
1970. In Andy’s recollection (’Adrian attacking Mike
Evans with a mike stand’) it had been building up for a
while. Soon after, Andy crashed a motorcycle and was out of action
for a couple of months, but recovered well enough by July to
accompany Adrian - along with Dave Richards on bass, Alan Peters on
trumpet and John Pearson on drums - to Norway for a couple of gigs
booked as the Liverpool Scene. The trip would inspire Andy’s
‘Sitting On A Rock’.
Regrouping with Adrian had been Andy’s hope, but it
wasn’t to be. Despite the Scene’s perceived success, as
Andy explained to Record
Mirror’, ‘nobody
really made any more than about £20 a week. I was going to form a
band with Adrian after the Scene split, but he backed out.
You’ve got to remember, he’s 39 and £20 with the Scene
wasn’t much.’
As Adrian went on towards becoming, in tandem with his poetry, a
well-regarded visual artist and college lecturer, Andy pressed
ahead with his new band - now titled Everyone. Retaining Richards
and Pearson from the Norway trip, he added John Porter, on guitar,
and took Porter’s recommendation to bring in Bob Sargent on
keyboards which, he now says, ‘was probably the worst of
several moves’.
Nevertheless, the picture that emerged from the band’s debut
music press feature, in Disc,
September 19, 1970, was one of a bunch of happy campers, ready to
take on the world. Having played one gig - the 1970 Isle of Wight
Festival, no less - and on the cusp of their debut album, Andy
declared, ‘We’ve reached the stage now where
we’re over-rehearsed and under-performed.’ In
retrospect, he prefers to sum up the period with a rejoinder worthy
of Spinal Tap: ’Rented a house near Stonehenge; took lots of
drugs; didn’t rehearse enough.’
The resulting album,
Everyone, released in
January 1971, while well-recorded was, in Andy’s view,
‘frankly, a bit of a mess - there was Bob’s stuff and
my stuff and it didn’t really meet in the middle.’ The
album included four songs fronted by Andy: another Koerner cover,
‘Midnight Shift’, and a beautiful trio of originals in
‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ (a reflection on recent US
student uprisings against the Vietnam war), ‘Sitting On A
Rock’ and ‘Radio Lady’, the latter being another
memoir of the Scene’s US tour. All three originals are
included here, with ‘Radio Lady’ appearing in the form
of a superior mix first released in October 1971 on an US Roberts
compilation, on the Ampex label, confusingly called
Home Grown (more of which
below).
Whether Everyone could have found the common musical ground to
continue is academic, for the band were effectively destroyed by a
tragic accident involving their two road crew and a friend on the
A33 in November 1970. The group’s van and gear were written
off and Paul Scard, Andy‘s loyal roadie, lost his life. Andy
saw out some contractual obligation gigs as a three-piece with
Richards and Pearson but ‘come December 1970 that was it. I
didn’t want to do anything.’ By the time the
group’s first (and last) album appeared, on B&C, there
was no wind in its sails.
Shortly after the crash, Andy and Dave Richards had rented a house
for a month on the outskirts of Northampton. This brief period
would yield the material that found its way onto Andy’s next
solo album proper,
Nina And The Dream Tree, a year later. As
Andy explains, ‘We played a lot of Bezique, and played Neil
Young and Grateful Dead records. I was visited by Polly James
[actress in the popular TV sitcom The Liver
Birds], with whom I
was seriously involved, and who is the subject of the whole of the
first side of
Nina . Polly and I
spent New Year’s eve at Tommy Steele’s
house.’
Andy was back in London by January ‘71, living with his folks
and wondering what to do, when he got a call out from Paul
Samwell-Smith, ex-Yardbirds bassist and now a record producer. He
was looking for a guitarist to work on a debut solo album by former
Fairport Convention and Matthews’ Southern Comfort vocalist
Iain Matthews - hot property after MSC’s September 1970 No.1
hit single with ‘Woodstock’. Andy and Iain hit it off
together, and the new association with himself and Samwell-Smith
‘put me into seven months’ intense studio work Iain and
Cat Stevens and so on. Then Sandy Roberton was saying I
hadn’t done a solo album for a year and should do
something…’
Work on the Iain Matthews album (If
You Saw Thro’ My Eyes) spanned
January to March 1971 (April to May ‘71 would see further
studio work with Iain, which became his next album,
Tigers Will Survive); during March
he also worked on the Mike McGear LP
Woman; and he was
also, as a Melody
Maker feature of March
27 put it, ‘experimenting on a solo album, using vocal
backing from three West Indians (“but no flash
guitar”)’. Those backing singers, who played a crucial
part in the magical sound of
Nina And The Dream Tree (recorded
sporadically during the next few months and released on Pegasus in
October 1971), were Mike London and Mac and Kathy Kissoon. Three
pieces of
Nina’s jigsaw
had been debuted on a BBC session for Bob Harris earlier that month
- ‘Keep My Children Warm, ‘I’ve Seen The
Movie’ and ‘Welcome Home’ - although the listing
of musicians involved, essentially a reunion of Everyone, as given
in Ken Garner’s In Session
Tonight (BBC Books,
1993) strikes Andy in retrospect as ’hugely
unlikely’.
Much of the Melody
Maker interview, by
Michael Watts, dwelt on Andy’s enthused speculations on
’a new multi-media venture entitled GRIMMS’, a
surname-acronymic sextet involving himself, the three members of
The Scaffold plus Viv Stanshall and Neil Innes from the Bonzo Dog
Band, with aspirations to being a comedic, theatrical, surreal
revue ensemble with musical content influenced by German satirical
cabaret and kitsch Las Vegas crooning.
The periodic appearance of references to GRIMMS or aggregations of
its constituent parts in the music press of the early ‘70s is
a bit like the Cheshire Cat to anyone hoping for simple linear
development in the biography of Andy Roberts. The GRIMMS story, of
course, goes back to that 1965 Edinburgh Festival melting pot, but
as an active unit (whose membership would be fluid enough to make
its very acronymic name a kind of surreal statement in itself), its
time had not yet come. In spite of all the talk of its imminence in
the March ‘71 Melody
Maker piece, Andy can
recall no GRIMMS activity until literally two shows later in the
year, at Greenwich and Corby, the former featuring The Who’s
Keith Moon on drums. ‘Both of these were booked as Scaffold
gigs,’ says Andy, ‘and I don’t think the punters
were all that pleased!’ GRIMMS became a regular performing
entity in 1972, when Andy was otherwise engaged as a member of
Plainsong. But in being, by the time Plainsong folded in December
‘72, an established entity with a decent UK tour coming up it
provided Andy’s momentarily off-the-rails career with a soft
landing. The group, with fluid membership, enjoyed continued live
popularity during the mid ‘70s and recorded three albums
(GRIMMS,
1973;
Rockin’ Duck, 1973;
Sleepers, 1976).
Andy‘s ‘Bluebird Morning’, from
Sleepers (reissued by
Hux, 2005), is included here as a whimsical memoir to his early
‘70s solo career. Speaking of which…
As Andy explained to Michael Watts, after the Everyone experience
‘the idea of forming a [purely musical] band is out, and so
is the idea of joining one… If I had nothing to do I’d
put a rucksack on my back and do the folk clubs. It’s a
living. But it’s not what I want to do, ideally. In fact, I
don’t know what to do definitely… [But] I’m
enjoying the new-found freedom of not being tied to a rock band,
both mentally and artistically.’
During the early summer of ‘71 Andy was certainly enjoying
himself playing shows with a proto-GRIMMS outfit billed as the
Bonzo Dog Freaks. If this was a blast of the future, Sandy Roberton
had engineered a blast from the past: a new lease of life
for
Home Grown.
Somewhere between 1970-71 Sandy’s licensing allegiance
switched from RCA to B&C/Pegasus. Consequently, in June 1971,
Andy found himself promoting it all over again:
‘We’ve remixed and re-recorded some of it,’ Andy
explained to Sounds,
‘and changed some of the tracks which didn’t quite work
the first time. So this is almost a different album. It’s
certainly better than the original one and bears more relation to
me as I am now - but it’s still 18 months old. To confuse the
issue still further, there’s an album going to be released in
the States which will also be called
Home Grown because
apparently they like the title, but that one will only have three
tracks from the original album, and four or five totally new ones
which haven’t been released here yet. This means that America
will be half an album ahead of here, [but] I’m reluctant to
let those tracks go unreleased over here…’
(Most of the
Home Grown tracks on this
compilation come from the B&C mixes - their CD debut - save for
‘Moths And Lizards In Detroit’ which, though
significantly revamped for B&C, loses something of the careworn
atmosphere of the original. The B&C album included one entirely
new track, ‘Lonely In The Crowd’, also included
here.)
Home Grown’s
re-release provided an excuse for Andy to perform, supporting
Procul Harum, at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, backed by
Dave Richards and Mighty Baby’s Ian Whiteman and Roger
Powell. It would be the stage debut of the
Nina material, and
led directly to Andy getting the support slot on a Steeleye Span UK
tour later that year.
During July ‘71 Andy was able to tell Melody
Maker’s Karl Dallas
that: ‘For the first time I’ve got a coherent
direction. Now I have personal statements I wish to make, though I
don’t want to knock them in with a sledgehammer.’
Dallas was given a preview of the new recordings and was rightly
impressed: ‘There is a great deal of warmth in his
work,’ he wrote, ‘a fellowship for his kin which brims
over… His singing voice has matured incredibly and his use
of the electric guitar is haunting, reminiscent sometimes of
Richard Thompson on top form…’
Andy was often telling the press that it was only during the McGear
and Matthews sessions earlier in the year that he found his voice
on the instrument, and the quality of his electric playing - a
master of texture and atmosphere - was one of
Nina’s
revelations. Then again, spending August-September ‘71 on an
Iain Matthews tour of the States as a trio with Richard Thompson
himself can’t have done any harm.
As before, Andy’s US tour experiences would be a rich seam
for his song writing. Time spent with one Karen Goskowski at the
Poison Apple in Boston would yield three songs, first heard on his
country flavoured
Urban Cowboy LP in 1973:
‘Poison Apple Lady’, ‘Urban Cowboy’ and
‘New Karenski’. The first of these is heard here in a
demo version recorded in November 1971. Some of the credit for
Andy’s new skills at honing personal experiences into his
creative process was down to Iain Matthews: ‘Iain has brought
me more out of myself,’ he explained to Record
Mirror in August,
‘he’s been a great influence. I’ve had to
cultivate my lack of self-consciousness to the point where
I’m ludicrously casual about the whole thing. A nice way to
work…’
Right after the tour Andy recorded his contribution to Richard
Thompson’s solo debut,
Henry The Human Fly, and in
October
Nina And The Dream Tree, long in
gestation, was finally released. Andy toured the UK in support of
the record, as a trio with Bobby Ronga and Dave Richards, as guest
of Steeleye Span. ‘A great pleasure,’ Andy recalls.
‘All the gigs were great.’
Typically, Andy was already working up a whole new batch of songs -
including ‘Poison Apple Lady’, ‘Richmond’
and ‘Elaine’ which he aired on a Bob Harris BBC session
in November. That same month he also performed live with Viv
Stanshall and others as the Human Beans (yet another mercurial
Bonzo-related project) and was working on the Bonzos’ reunion
album,
Let’s Make Up And Be Friendly, at the Manor
Studio - ‘where Mike Oldfield was recording
Tubular Bells in our down
time!’
A late November interview with Mark Plummer for Melody
Maker touched on many
of the pies Andy had fingers in. Plummer’s conclusion was
interesting: ‘From talking with Andy I got the impression
that although he genuinely wants to entertain and loves working
with as many people as he can cram into his diary, a lot of it is
down to a fear about going onstage as a front man.’
Right on cue, Andy agreed to submerge himself in a band with Iain
Matthews, Bob Ronga and Dave Richards - to be known as Plainsong.
The group, a country-influenced vocal harmony outfit, spanned the
entirety of 1972, recording the classic
In Search Of Amelia Earhart and the (at the
time unreleased)
Plainsong II, and toured
Europe extensively. Save for backing Adrian Henri on a couple of
BBC radio dates, Andy’s focus for the whole year would be the
band. And then, around Christmas ‘72, with Matthews lured to
a solo deal with Elektra, it dissolved in rancorous
disappointment.
By way of some consolation, Andy secured a solo deal himself with
Elektra - yielding two albums in 1973,
Urban Cowboy and
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede, the final solo
albums he would make. Immediately after the Plainsong split,
though, Andy was able to jump on board an already-booked GRIMMS UK
tour (that band having built up a live following the previous year,
without Andy’s involvement). In Andy’s words ‘the
best antidote to the Plainsong blues. A fantastic
relief.’
Urban Cowboy, featuring the
likes of Richard Thompson, Neil Innes, Iain Matthews and Martin
Carthy, and consisting of some newly recorded material and some
tracks, like the fabulous ’Richmond’ (covered by
Shelagh McDonald on
The Shelagh McDonald Album in 1970 - half
of which was produced by Andy, uncredited), which were in the can
prior to the Plainsong experience, was released with lightning
speed in March 1973. This CD represents all but one of that
album’s tracks in either LP or demo form, bar one: ‘All
Around My Grandmother’s Floor’, a fabulous Plainsong
left-over which can be heard on the forthcoming Plainsong
‘complete works‘ 2CD set on Water Records.
After the GRIMMS dates Andy put in time working solo in folk clubs,
and got married (to Jacqui Byford) in May - honeymooning in Jamaica
for a month. Andy had been intrigued with reggae since working with
Mike London and the Kissoons on
Nina, and wrote a
number of songs with reggae influence coming out of the Jamaica
experience - ‘Living In The Hills Of Zion’, heard here
in demo form, recorded right after the honeymoon in June ’73,
being the best.
The following month Charisma released the compilation
Andy Roberts, featuring
material from the pre-Plainsong albums, but Andy was already
focused on creating what he regards as his finest album,
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede - clearing his
diary for a whole month in the summer to record it, with musicians
including BJ Cole (pedal steel), Patto’s Ollie Halsall (lead
guitar), ELO’s Mick Kaminski (violin), Zoot Money (keyboards)
and Sandy Denny associates Pat Donaldson (bass) and Gerry Conway
(drums). The result was a powerful, luxuriantly produced soft-rock
album which moved him once and for all away from any assumptions of
being part of the British folk scene - a scene to which Andy was
never closer than semi-detachment.
‘The reason I called it
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede was that I was
hoping people would think of it as a band. I don’t want
people to think that the only thing that’s on it is
me,‘ Andy explained in a Melody
Maker interview of
December 1973. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever
made an album in one go… It’s the first one that
I’ve done all the vocals on - all the harmonies. That was
something that I got out of Plainsong.’
Andy had just finished a second sizeable UK tour with GRIMMS when
he gave the interview. ‘It’s been about equal amounts
of solo and GRIMMS with a bit of nothing in between,’ he
said. ‘It’s been a good year artistically in that
I’ve done something completely different to what I was doing
last year, and I think that I achieved something last year. So if
I’ve achieved something else this year that’s
alright… I’m very pleased with [The
Great Stampede]. The next one
will be better.’
Unfortunately, there would be no ‘next one’. Andy had
been able to promote both of his 1973 albums with BBC radio
sessions and press interviews, but unfortunately - just as he felt
he’d delivered his best work with
The Great Stampede, his luck was
running out. The three-day week, vinyl shortages and the sale of
Elektra to David Geffen (with implications for their UK pressing
and distribution) effectively wrecked the album’s release.
While Andy had been hoping to put together a band to support the
album, there would be no tour. He believes only around 1500 copies
managed to trickle out and, tellingly, has not once in over 30
years been offered a copy to sign.
‘The thing never got a proper a release,’ he reflects,
’there wasn’t enough copies, they weren’t
available on the declared day and the review copies didn’t go
out. It was heartbreaking.’ A future CD release of
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede in full is
planned, so for this compilation we’ve chosen merely a taster
in the beautiful ‘Home In The Sun’.
Disillusioned with his solo career, Andy Roberts - one of the great
neglected singer-songwriters of the era - bowed out with a final
BBC session for his old pal John Peel in March 1974. The following
month he dived into a Liverpool Scene reunion tour, with Adrian
Henri, Mike Hart, Dave Richards on bass and Mike Kellie on drums.
Sadly unrecorded, it was, to Andy‘s recollection,
‘musically the best line-up of all time. And I was a simpler,
straighter, less pretentious kind of guy, I like to think! This
late-flowering version of a poetry band rocked hard and worked a
treat.’
From then on Andy became simply a musician for hire, working in
theatre and seeing out the decade with GRIMMS and as a member of
both Roy Harper’s band and the Albion Band. In 1980 he began
a four-year tenure with comedy country icon Hank Wangford’s
band, taking time out in 1981 to join an expanded version of Pink
Floyd to perform
The Wall in Germany and
at London’s Earl’s Court. Theatre, TV and film
soundtrack work rolled on thereafter, interspersed with occasional
gigs backing Adrian Henri’s poetry. In 1990 a chance meeting
with Iain Matthews at a pub in Brighton (where Andy now resides)
resulted in a Plainsong revival, which has thus far delivered
several new albums and periodic tours.
With much of the Liverpool Scene, GRIMMS and solo recordings now
reverting back to himself and the members bands concerned, future
possibilities include a Liverpool Scene box set, an expanded
version of GRIMMS’
Sleepers and a full
release for the long-lost
Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede - all from the
original masters. For updates on these projects, and for loads more
on Andy’s incredible, labyrinthine career, keep checking
out
www.andyrobertsmusic.com
Because he’s worth it.
Colin
Harper, April 2005
with
grateful thanks to Ptolomaic Terrascope for much of the interview
material and to Andy Roberts, without whom this double CD would be
entirely blank.