by Will Romano
The Strawbs followed up Hero and Heroine with the strong but somewhat dark record Ghosts. “I was hospitalized for a suspected brain tumor [due to dizziness] during that time,” says Cousins. “I had a lumbar puncture [a spinal tap], which is the most god-awful thing to have. I had to sing the album lying on my back.”
Like Jimmie Rodgers on his final recording sessions, Cousins toughed it out—but he has also lived to tell about it. “I would sing, ‘Go to sleep my babies, don’t you wake up ...’ [from “Ghosts”] and have to lie down. Then they spooled the tape and I’d get up and sing the second line and lie down. A very harrowing experience, I can assure you.”
“There was a darkness about those songs, and [about] Dave [Cousins]’s in particular,” says Hawken. “Hearing them was like viewing an Edward Hopper painting. There’s always a black area about it.”
Despite the dire portent, the record is full of life, featuring “Lemon Pie” (a great straightforward 1970s rock song with a touch of harpsichord), “Where Do You Go (When You Need a Hole to Crawl In)?,” the Cronk-penned “Starshine/Angel Wine,” “The Life Auction” (a vertigo-inducing song about the greed involved in selling belongings of the dead), “Remembering/You and I (When You Were Young),” and the church-organ finale “Grace Darling,” recorded in the chapel in Charterhouse with a children’s choir (and based on a real-life nineteenth-century heroine of the same name, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who had helped to save lives of those in a sinking ship off the coast of northeast England).
“I remember when we recorded that: The chapel had a glorious natural echo,” says Hawken. “You could hear the sounds dying away. That wasn’t any effect: That was the sound whistling down the length of the chapel to these beautiful stained-glass windows. It was a magic experience.”
The music is enhanced by sonic textures—the result of experimentation in the studio, such as the matrix of heavily echoed variable speed harpsichords opening “Ghosts.” “It was like an explosion in a harpsichord factory,” says Hawken. “The engineers gradually reduced the amount of echo on the track. It was a nice technique to introduce the song.
“The classic one is, in fact, the beginning of ‘The Life Auction,”’ continues Hawken. “I wanted an elongated echo for the piano, and I wanted it to be uneven. The engineers got one of the tapes off of the console and attached its spindle to a broom handle [and] tied it up with adhesive as we were recording. I was playing the chord and [an engineer] would shove [the reel] out the window and bring it back [into the studio] and shorten the length of the tape. There’s your uneven echo.”
Ghosts was the band’s highest-charting record in the U.S. (scoring in the Top 50). But big changes were afoot. After a few lukewarm reviews of the album, and feeling that the musical winds had shifted as to work against the band’s momentum, Cousins thought the best direction for the band was to distance itself from its past and, in a stunning move, rid themselves of the Mellotron (and therefore Hawken). The result was the accessible, fairly successful album Nomadness.
“[When] we dropped the idea of the Mellotron, which is the most stupid [thing] we ever did, that was the end of an era, I’m afraid,” says Cousins.
Nomadness was the Strawbs’ last album for A&M (much to the label’s chagrin), as the band eventually found a home at Polydor. But what followed—Deep Cuts, Burning for You, and Deadlines, some of which contain choice material (e.g., “Hanging in the Gallery,” “The Golden Salamander,” “Burning for Me,” “Alexander the Great”)—simply didn’t stack up to the band’s reputation or its work of the past. Simply put, the Strawbs’ best and most progressive days were behind them.
“There’s an album called Heartbreak Hill that’s not well known, because it didn’t come out at the time it should have,” says Cousins, who adds that the record was officially remastered in 2006. “That record has very progressive playing; it has strong arrangements and vocals that go way above anything we’ve ever done before. But sadly our management decided . . . they were not supporting the group anymore, and the album got left aside. We never should have left A&M. That was a serious mistake. But that wasn’t my decision. A&M were desperate that we should stay with the label, but our managers decided otherwise. That was the end of the band, essentially, at that time.”
Cousins went on to have a career in radio, while the Strawbs lay dormant for most of the 1980s, returning later in the decade to the studio to record Don’t Say Goodbye, which featured Tony Hooper.
The band wouldn’t become an entity again—writing, recording, touring, and establishing their own label, Witchwood—until the twenty-first century. As of this writing, the band continues, and in 2009, the Strawbs released a studio album with new material, titled Dancing to the Devil’s Beat, featuring, along with Cousins, Cronk, Lambert, Coombes, and Rick Wakeman’s son Oliver on keyboards, replacing Hawken (who left the reformed Strawbs due to health issues and lack of interest in touring).
Wakeman does double duty as the kevboardist for Yes and the Strawbs (something even his musical wizard father didn’t pull off). “After [Yes] had finished a Canadian tour [in 2008], Dave [Cousins] asked if I was available for the next album, and it was something I really wanted to do, as I have always been a fan of the Strawbs and their songs,” says Wakeman. “It’s great to perform live with Yes and Strawbs, but there is also something great being involved in adding to the recording legacy that a band has.”
In actual fact, the Strawbs’ legacy is an underappreciated one that hopefully will continue to grow through the years. “I think a lot of people who have remained fans really do equally enjoy the music and the lyrics,” says Cousins. “Many people have gotten married to our songs, especially the end part of Autumn.’ Many people got married to ‘Grace Darling.’ We have had that profound influence on people. I remember I had met a friend [Bill Levenson] who put together the double record Halcyon Days, the best-of compilation, and my description of [the Strawbs] was that among all the bands that came to America to perform, we were the top of the second division [of the progressive rock bands]. We just both kind of laughed and he said, ‘Nah. You were the bottom of the first division.”’
Recording engineer Dick Plant, who worked on 1974’s Turn of the Cards remembers Renaissance singer Annie Haslam had “a perfect voice for the contemporary orchestral folk material Renaissance wrote.” Haslam has called the early and mid 1970s “magic.”
THE ORIGINAL RENAISSANCE
Before John Hawken was a member of the Strawbs, he helped establish Renaissance with former Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty and vocalist/harmonica player/guitarist Keith Relf, after leaving his pop/rock ’n’ roll band the Nashville Teens in 1968.
“I got a call from either Jim or Keith, can’t remember now, who had rang me and asked if I’d come down for an audition for a band they were putting together,” says Hawken. “I had bumped into them on the road. The Teens and the Yardbirds had played together a few times. They’d said they were thinking of putting something together with more of a classical influence. Was I interested?”
An initial jam with Hawken, Relf, McCarty, and bassist Louis Cennamo (who’d play with Colosseum and later with Relf in Armageddon) and pedal steel player B. J. Cole (who later dropped out) confirmed the direction the band was to go in: a four-piece with less blues and more folk and classical influences.
“I remember we were playing the song ’Island,’ which was like one of Keith’s and my songs, and right in the middle of the song, suddenly John Hawken runs into this Beethoven,” says McCarty. “We said, ‘God, this is great. Let’s keep that.”’
“We did some weird wacky stuff [in Renaissance],” says Hawken. “You look back and say, ‘Oh, God, why did you play that chunk of Beethoven’s Sonata no. 13 Pathétique in the middle of a song? Why?’ Well, it’s because we could.”
This was not the Yardbirds or the Nashville Teens. The band that would be dubbed Renaissance seemed to be onto something different from what any of the individual members had done in t
he past. “Toward the end of the Yardbirds we wanted to do something a bit more poetic, if you like, not so heavy,” says McCarty, who’d learned to play guitar for his post-Yardbirds duo with Relf called Together. “A bit more folky. We were listening to Simon & Garfunkel and Dylan. We had had enough of heavy rock.”
Relf was looking to handle all of the vocals himself, but as it so happened, the often-delicate turns in the music called for a sweeter, gentler voice. “Jane [Relf] used to turn up there to hang out with her brother Keith and make tea,” says Hawken. “Then one day [Keith] handed her the mic and said, ‘Will you sing this?’ It was the song ‘Island.’”
Gryphon: Red Queen to Gryphon Three (1974)
Barclay James Harvest: Time Honoured Ghosts (1975)
Barclay James Harvest: Gone to Earth (1977)
The Strawbs: Dragonfly (1970)
The Strawbs: Grave New World (1972)
The Strawbs: Ghosts (1975)
The Strawbs: Just a Collection of Antiques and Curios (1970)
Renaissance: Scheherazade and Other Stories (1975)
Illusion: The Island Recordings (2003)
Before long the band had recorded its self-titled debut, produced by Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, a five-song platter that rivals much of the classical rock of the day. While not completely devoid of psychedelic blues (or of blues in general) Renaissance was a new beast.
Hawken lets loose on more than one occasion with aggressive piano work that elevates tunes such as “Kings & Queens,” “Innocence,” “Bullet,” “Island,” and “Wanderer” from folk rock to classical folk rock of the highest order. Embellishment and elaborate runs on the acoustic piano and harpsichord perfectly fit the mystique of the band and even hark back to a sound the Yardbirds were experimenting with on their hit song “For Your Love.”
“[Hawken] really has a gift,” says McCarty. “You could play him an idea with a few chords and he really does something beautiful with it.”
Once the first record was released, Renaissance hit the road in America for a tour that ended up being a self-confidence-sucking one (especially for singer Jane Relf). “Jim and Keith had come off a very stressful year with the Yardbirds and it was all starting to fragment, break down,” says Hawken. “The bottom line was they didn’t want to go on the road.”
“There was no big record company keeping [the Yardbirds] going,” says McCarty, “and the only way to make money was to get on the road. At that point I was just tired and fed up. I found it difficult to get back into touring again and to do all of that all over again.”
The decision was made that McCarty and Relf would remain part of the band, but only in the capacity of producers/songwriters/session men, while Hawken and Jane Relf remained to augment a touring lineup by adding vocalist Terry Crowe (formerly of the Nashville Teens), drummer Ferry Slade, bassist Neil Korner, and another Nashville Teen alumnus and future Renaissance mainstay, guitarist Michael Dunford.
The band’s second studio record, Illusion, which Hawken calls a “mishmash,” tapped this new crew as well as others, including keyboardist John Tout, drummer Terence Sullivan, bassist Jon Camp, and lyricist Betty Thatcher—all important musical figures in the next phase of Renaissance’s development. (McCarty and Relf also appear.)
“Then Louis left and Jane, once she realized that Keith was not going to tour, didn’t want to go back on the road either,” says Hawken. “So it was down to me.”
“We were a very insecure band, I think, at that point,” says McCarty. “That was one of our problems. I think John was okay, but if you put that many people who are insecure into a situation, it’s not the best basis for a touring band.”
As a result, Hawken had taken a job with Spooky Tooth, who had generated a buzz with a cover of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” from The Last Puff album. Before he exited, Hawken hired vocalist, Binky Cullom, for an upcoming tour. Hawken turned it over to keyboardist Tout, whom he had gotten up to speed on the arrangements, and that was the end of it. He was free of Renaissance.
In the mid-1970s (after his stint with the Strawbs), Hawken and original Renaissance members McCarty, Jane Relf, and Cennamo as well as guitarist John Knightsbridge and drummer/percussionist Eddie McNeill formed the band Illusion, a name taken from Renaissance’s second studio album. (They no longer had rights to the name.)
Illusion recorded two studio records, Out of the Mist and Illusion, in the wake of a freak electrocution accident in 1976 that claimed the life of original Renaissance member Keith Relf.
After Hawken’s exit, Renaissance became a cult favorite behind singer Annie Haslam, the once-cross-eyed, Northern English—accented girl who was sent to elocution lessons at the age of nine—and thrown out of her school choir for singing too loudly.
Not exactly an auspicious start to a life that would become totally immersed in music—and one that made Haslam one of the few undeniably great female singers in progressive rock.
“You couldn’t understand anything I said,” says Haslam, “and when I was thirteen the family lived in Cornwall and I picked up an accent there. It really wasn’t until I moved to London and began working for a dress designer, with people who spoke the Queen’s English, that I began to lose my strong accent.”
After her stint in the clothing business (she’d go on to design some of her famous, gypsyish stage clothing herself), Haslam began taking her talents for singing seriously and signed up for vocal lessons with opera singer Sybil Knight. Before long, she answered an ad placed by Renaissance, who were looking for a vocalist, and became perhaps the most important ingredient in the band’s appeal.
Unlike many of the artists to which they were compared, Renaissance allowed the piano and female voice to came to the forefront, as they do for Prologue, the first record with the lineup of Camp, Tout, Sullivan, Haslam, and guitarist Ron Hendry. Songs such as “Kiev” (reflecting the band’s puzzling obsession with Russia and its great composers), “Sounds of the Sea,” and the title track (which has no lyrics) feature Haslam’s incredible range.
After the release of Prologue, Dunford, Tout, Camp, Sullivan, and Haslam produced, arguably, the band’s first great record, 1973’s Ashes Are Burning, featuring electric guitarist Andy Powell.
Once again, piano takes command in many of these diverse songs (we hear symphonic patches, Afro-Cuban percussion, and impressionistic rhythmic pacing), particularly in future fan favorites such as “Can You Understand?” and “Carpet of the Sun,” as well as “On the Frontier” (cowritten by McCarty) and the title track, which was inspired by a near-death experience as told in Betty Thatcher’s lyrics.
Nineteen seventy-four’s Turn of the Cards, boasting tracks such as “Running Hard,” “Black Flame,” and “Things I Don’t Understand” (cowritten by McCarty in his last appearance on a Renaissance record), solidified the band’s sound. Most importantly, sweeping orchestral passages; tuned percussion; interlocking, counterpoint, and simultaneous acoustic piano and guitar lines; layered harmonies; and Haslam’s soaring, angelic lead voice mark the tension-filled nine-minute closing track, “Mother Russia” (featuring Russian scales and inspired by the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, based on the story of a 1950s prisoner of the Soviet gulag, the track was the record’s eerie crowning achievement).
“I think that the real thrust of the music came from John Tout’s piano,” says coproducer and recording engineer Dick Plant. “I don’t think Renaissance ever wanted to do anything that they couldn’t reproduce onstage.”
Having said this, Renaissance went all out for its 1975 studio album, Scheherazade and Other Stories, which featured the twenty-five-minute “Song of Scheherazade,” recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.
A point of confusion: Renaissance based its song on the story of One Thousand and One Nights; the track bears no musical connection to the well-known classical work “Scheherazade” By Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
“There are three versions: Ravel, Rimsky-Kor
sakov, and Renaissance,” says Haslam.
For the record, Thatcher wrote beautiful imagery for Haslam to sing, and the vocalist delivers fantastical lines with equal whimsy, vulnerability, conviction, and dread. “Betty wrote several songs about me: ‘Ocean Gypsy’ was based on me and my relationship with Miles Copeland, while ‘Trip to the Fair’ was about the first date I’d had with Roy Wood [ELO, the Move], who I lived with for four years and was engaged to,” says Haslam. “What happened was, one night Roy and I had been out drinking [laughs] and we left to go to the fair on Hampstead Heath; I think it was at Easter time. It was like twelve o’clock at night when we decided to leave. We got there and [the fair] was closed. Next day I called Betty to tell her about the date and my evening was turned into lyrics for a song.”
“Song of Scheherazade” (along with a rousing rendition of “Ashes Are Burning”) was a flash point of the band’s well-received double LP Live at Carnegie Hall (which went to number 55 on the U.S. charts), documenting Renaissance’s historic run at the famed New York City venue. Renaissance sold out three consecutive nights at Carnegie, becoming the first British band to do so.
Nineteen seventy-seven’s Novella album followed, bringing such memorable tunes as “Midas Man,” “Can You Hear Me?” (another brilliant orchestral number), and “Touching Once (Is So Hard to Keep),” just missing the U.S. Top 40.
Renaissance was at an all-time popularity high, finding themselves playing to sold-out audiences and receiving radio airplay on FM radio stations in the U.S., particularly in the northeastern part of the country, in Pennsylvania and New York.