Barclay James Harvest: Every Album, Every Song

Barclay James Harvest

Every Album, Every Song

On Track

Keith Domone

Monika Domone

Contents

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Introduction

1. Barclay James Harvest (1970)

2. Once Again (1971)

3. Barclay James Harvest And Other Short Stories

4. Baby James Harvest (1972)

5. Everyone Is Everybody Else (1974)

6. Time Honoured Ghosts (1975)

7. Octoberon (1976)

8. Gone To Earth (1977)

9. Xii (1978)

10. Eyes Of The Universe (1979)

11. Turn Of The Tide (1981)

12. Ring Of Changes (1983)

13. Victims Of Circumstance (1984)

14. Face To Face (1987)

15. Welcome To The Show (1990)

16. Caught In The Light (1993)

17. River Of Dreams (1997)

18. Live Albums

19. Other Official Live Recordings

20. Solo Work and Up To Date

21. Selected Solo and Post-1997 Album Discography

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Introduction

Barclay James Harvest are something of an enigma within the world of popular music. Variously categorised as everything from folk to progressive, rock and pop, the band ploughed their own furrow for three decades, outside of the mainstream and largely unknown beyond the cognoscenti in their home territory of the United Kingdom, whilst achieving megastar status in Germany, Switzerland and, briefly, France. During those thirty years, they notched up sales in excess of ten million albums, qualified for numerous silver, gold and platinum sales awards, had number one albums and singles and played to millions of enthusiastic concertgoers across Europe, whilst remaining widely regarded as a ‘cult’ band.

Rooted in the blues and soul scene of their home town of Oldham, Lancashire, in the north-west of England, the group was formed in the summer of 1967 from the remnants of two semi-professional outfits: The Blues Keepers, featuring Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholme and John Lees, and Heart and Soul and the Wickeds, which included Les Holroyd, Mel Pritchard and Rod Buckley in the line-up. The departure of original singer Rod Buckley, in August 1967, reduced the new band to a stable quartet comprising Lees, Wolstenholme, Holroyd and Pritchard. The band were discovered very early in their career by local boutique owner John Crowther, who became their manager and set them up in Preston House, an old coaching inn by the village of Diggle, high on windswept Saddleworth Moor. The group set to work writing and recording demos of their original songs and released their first single, ‘Early Morning’, in April 1968 on EMI’s Parlophone label.

This led to a contract with EMI’s new ‘progressive’ label, Harvest, for whom they would record four albums over the next four years, including the beautiful Once Again – well received at the time, particularly the timeless ‘Mocking Bird’, and now regarded as a classic. Critical acclaim and a small but growing following were not enough to pay the bills, though, particularly when the band ran up large debts by touring and recording with their own symphony orchestra, and in December 1973 Barclay James Harvest parted ways with the Harvest label and signed a new deal with Polydor Records.

The change of label heralded an upswing in the band’s fortunes as they released a series of superb albums, from 1974’s Everyone Is Everybody Else through to XII in 1978, and enjoyed steadily growing success at home and then, increasingly, in continental Europe. 1977’s Gone To Earth became a fixture in the German album charts and turned them into overnight superstars, more than a decade after they had started out.

What many fans regard as the golden age of the band was brought to an end by the departure of Woolly Wolstenholme in 1979, due to dissatisfaction with his role in the group and the more commercial path which their music was taking – and then there were three. The remaining members resolved to continue as a trio, augmented by guest musicians when necessary, and through the 1980s broke attendance records for concert tours in Germany and Switzerland, as well as topping the charts with albums like Turn Of The Tide, Victims Of Circumstance and Berlin (A Concert For The People). The latter is a record of Barclay James Harvest’s biggest triumph; a free concert performed on 30 August 1980 on the steps of the historic Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, which was attended by a huge crowd of an estimated quarter of a million people. Another highlight was the first major open-air concert given by a Western rock band in East Germany, on 14 July 1988 in East Berlin’s Treptower Park, and attended by around 170,000 fans.

Barclay James Harvest continued to record and tour in the 1990s, but increasing tensions within the band over their preferred musical direction and methods of working slowed their output to three studio albums in seven years, and their star began to fade. A ‘sabbatical’ announced after the relatively poor sales of 1997’s River Of Dreams CD and associated tour became permanent, and Barclay James Harvest split into two bands. John Lees chose to team up again with a returning Woolly Wolstenholme, following which Les Holroyd conceived his own vision of BJH, aided by Mel Pritchard.

Tragedy struck twice in the twenty-first century with the untimely death of Mel Pritchard in January 2004 and the suicide of Woolly Wolstenholme in

December 2010. However, both John Lees and Les Holroyd remain active to this day, playing songs from the extensive Barclay James Harvest back catalogue to enthusiastic crowds, as well as performing and recording new material.

The primary focus of this book is the body of work created by the original Barclay James Harvest up to 1997, with every album and song covered in depth. There is also room for a peek into the related solo works and those of John Lees’ and Les Holroyd’s bands, which continue to fly the BJH flag to this day. As John Lees put it in his 1993 song ‘Once More’, ‘They’ll never kill the mockingbird’ ...

Chapter 1

Barclay James Harvest (1970)

Personnel:

John Lees: vocals, lead guitar

Les Holroyd: vocals, bass guitar, keyboards Woolly Wolstenholme: vocals, keyboards Mel Pritchard: drums and percussion

The Barclay James Harvest Orchestra, conducted by Resident Musical Director Robert Godfrey

Recorded at E.M.I Studios, Abbey Road, November 1969 to January 1970 Producer: Norman Smith

Engineer: Phil McDonald

Record Label: Harvest (UK), Sire (US)

UK release date: 5 June 1970, U.S. release date November 1970

Barclay James Harvest’s recording career got off to a slow start, with only a brace of singles (‘Early Morning’/‘Mr. Sunshine’ and ‘Brother Thrush’/‘Poor Wages’) being released in 1968 and 1969 respectively, but behind the scenes, they were busy writing and recording demos of many original songs, as well as performing a lot of live shows. By November 1969, they were ready to begin work on their debut LP, and arrived at the iconic studios in Abbey Road in North-West London, then known simply as E.M.I. Studios, on the 8th of that month. They had already had a taste of their surroundings the previous May while recording ‘Brother Thrush’. However, this was to be an altogether much more ambitious project, involving an orchestra comprising music students from the Royal College Of Music and The Royal Academy, assembled and conducted by Robert Godfrey, the band’s new Musical Arranger. The plan proved over-ambitious, as the inexperienced students were out of their depth in a professional recording studio with an equally untried conductor, and although ‘Dark Now My Sky’ was acceptable, the other recordings were unusable. Fortunately, a classical musician of Godfrey’s acquaintance named Martyn Ford already had his own very capable orchestra, made up of the best students from the London music colleges and known as The London Symphonia. Renamed The Barclay James Harvest Orchestra for the occasion, they stepped into the breach, with Ford as leader of the orchestra.

The entire album was recorded in around eighty hours, using only two eight- track tape recorders. Drummer Mel Pritchard told Beat Instrumental magazine the following year, We had drums, bass, Mellotron, piano, organ, double-tracked guitar, orchestra, vocals and effects to go on. It took time to work out how to do it, because we didn’t want to lump the bass and drums together, and we also wanted the stereo effect of the guitars, so in the end we used two eight-tracks.

Given the relatively short time allowed for recording, and the hugely ambitious idea of using a full orchestra on a band’s debut album, the results were surprisingly good, but the band members weren’t entirely satisfied. As Woolly put it nearly twenty years later: Generally, the album wasn’t as successful as it could have been – it was rather overblown. It seemed to be rather a pre-emptive strike, a rehearsal for the real thing.

Flawed though it may have been, the band’s debut album set out their stall as an ambitious fusion of folk, rock and classical music, it was warmly received by critics and influential radio DJs such as John Peel and Alan Freeman, and paved the way for greater things to come.

Sleeve Design

Mixing of the album was completed on 26 February 1970 and ready to be launched in March, but the release was held up because the band weren’t keen on the Harvest label’s plan to use design studio Hipgnosis to create the album’s cover. Woolly Wolstenholme, in particular, felt that Hipgnosis tended to apply their own identity regardless of its appropriateness to the artist concerned.

The band got their way, choosing instead a kaleidoscopic, repeating stained glass butterfly image designed by Ian Latimer on the outside of a lavish gatefold sleeve. Inside the sleeve were sepia-tinted photographs of the four band members taken by Richard Dunkley at The Hanging Gate pub in Diggle and at Preston House. Curiously, the names of the individual musicians of Barclay James Harvest are not shown anywhere on the sleeve or record label of the original LP, but two other individuals are credited with ‘Special thanks to Jim and Jim’. Jim Tetlow was the band’s road manager and sound engineer, whilst James Litherland, who played some percussion on ‘Taking Some Time On’, was another Lancashire lad and the guitarist and vocalist in the band Colosseum.

‘Taking Some Time On’ (Barclay James Harvest)

Written by John Lees and with Les Holroyd taking on lead vocals, the album opener was one of the last of the album’s songs to be recorded, on 26 January 1970, fulfilling a need for an attention-grabbing opener. From the raw opening riff, inspired by the double-tracked lead guitar sound of Cream’s ‘Politician’, it rocks along nicely with the band playing alone, without orchestral accompaniment. The lyrics, apparently espousing a simple idealism and referring to ‘hidden meanings of the mind’, were, said John many years later, not intended to be taken seriously. ‘It was a hippy song’, he said, ‘Very tongue in cheek.’ He rated it as the second favourite of his own songs on the album, and in the summer of 2011, it was dusted off again for John Lees’ Barclay James Harvest’s appearance at the High Voltage Festival in London, going down so well that it subsequently made regular appearances in the band’s live shows.

The delay in the release of the album had scuppered plans for a version of ‘Good Love Child’ to be issued as a single in advance of the LP, and instead a new single mix of ‘Taking Some Time On’ was created, rather belatedly, at Abbey Road on 10 August and released to the public on the 28th of that month, by which time the album had already been out for the best part of three months. Unsurprisingly the single, released as HAR 5003 and backed with the album version of ‘The Iron Maiden’, made little impact.

‘Mother Dear’ (Barclay James Harvest)

Another John Lees song, ‘Mother Dear’ offers quite a contrast to the album opener: a gothic tale from the same arcane realms as the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe or medieval poems like ‘True Thomas’, the song concerns ghostly apparitions and a visitation from the grim reaper in the night and dates back to 1967. An early demo recording featured out of tune honky-tonk bar-room piano, but, perhaps fortunately, producer Norman Smith came up with a new orchestral arrangement, in which the soaring strings and warbling brass offer a subtle counterpoint to the vaguely unsettling theme of the lyrics. Woolly Wolstenholme sings this one – John Lees later wryly suggested that he had been told that he wasn’t allowed to play lead guitar and take on the lead vocal at the same time, but Woolly’s memory was slightly different: In the early days, he didn’t used to sing. That’s why most of the material in the early days has me, very high profile, singing-wise, and then gradually, as people either got more confident, or saw what a bad job I was doing, they decided to do it themselves!

‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ (Barclay James Harvest)

The entire recording of Woolly’s ‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ was completed on the first day of recording, 8 November, including all of the orchestral parts! The gentle Mellotron intro gives way to Woolly’s reflective verse, and then everyone comes crashing in on the chorus to create the first hint of the epic fusion of rock and classical sounds which would become a Barclay James Harvest trademark over the next few years. John Lees was a big fan, rating it as his favourite song on the album: ‘It gave me a big high, and still sounds great!’ Woolly himself described it as ‘a kind of antidote to ‘Mr. Sunshine’, which was about hiding from the bright light of day, not about drugs! ‘The Sun Will Never Shine’ and ‘Ra’ have a similar theme.’ A 1969 solo demo recording made by Woolly at Preston House, and included in a deluxe box set edition of the album released by Esoteric Recordings in 2018, shows that the song as originally conceived was a good bit faster, and given a country-ish feel by the acoustic guitar accompaniment. The song was played live before the album was recorded, naturally without the minimal orchestral accompaniment, and subsequently became a regular in the live set at concerts, whether the band happened to be appearing with or without the orchestra.

‘When the World Was Woken’ (Barclay James Harvest)

The only Les Holroyd composition on the album sees the composer musing on attitudes to life, the thoughtful, introspective lyric a gentle wakeup call and exhortation to mankind to be positive and ‘live together, with one triumphant cry’. Unfortunately, the rather rushed nature of the recording impacted this song more than most on the album, with the meandering and unsubtle orchestral arrangement, including a direct lift of a fanfare from Handel’s Water Music, too high in the mix and constantly threatening to overwhelm Les’s voice. The performance, too, was less than perfect. As Les later recalled, I remember writing all the melody lines for that on a Hammond. The singing was all over the place, but in those days you didn’t have the luxury of going back and doing it all again!

The Hammond organ parts he mentions bring to mind the grandeur of Procol Harum, required listening at Preston House in those days, but the overall effect is, sadly, less disciplined. The general chaos even extended to the song’s title: at the time of first recording it was noted on the Abbey Road log sheets as simply ‘Les Untitled’, before becoming ‘When The World Was Broken’ and finally ‘When The World Was Woken’. None of these was correct, as the actual title Les decided upon was ‘When The World Has Woken’, as sung in the lyrics, but the mistake wasn’t picked up, and the piece became known as ‘When The World Was Woken’ for all time!

‘Good Love Child’ (Barclay James Harvest)

More successful, and more representative of Barclay James Harvest live shows of the time, was the band-only rocker, ‘Good Love Child’, composed by John Lees and sung by Les Holroyd. Lyrically simple, it’s a singalong, typical sixties period piece where the band are clearly having fun, bouncing along, propelled by Mel Pritchard’s exuberant drumming and Les’s driving bass, with John’s guitar solos linking the verses and choruses. At over five minutes long