The Judge RAVES!

Date: 17/01/09

Back To The Ark (2)

I'm afraid that since John Peel died, I've not kept up with new music very much. I think middle age has finally come to claim me, and I now tend far more to seek out material which I remember from the dim and distant or stuff which passed me by at the time.

I seem to have a particular 'thing' about the late 1960s. I have the slight advantage of having been around at the time, but not being of an age to appreciate what was going on. I think, however, it was the most exciting and open period in the whole history of popular music. Rock'n'roll had come in a few years before and really flung the doors wide. R'n'b (and I mean real r'n'b, not the over-produced posing bollocks they try desperately to dignify with that title today) followed, along with fusions of rock with folk, rock with orchestral music, rock with just about anything, in fact. The cross-fertilisation of styles and genres was rampant. I find this very attractive.

Oh, and before someone goes, "What about punk? What about dance? What about...?", etc., well those phenomena I insist either merely reassembled existing parts in different combinations or went 'back to basics' to what was a modification of the origins of the whole. The period between 1965 and 1969 - which I bookend chronologically if not stylistically by The Mothers Of Invention's Freak Out! at one end and Led Zeppelin II at the other - was the origin, was where the parts originally came together. So, yah boo to you!

As a result of this pseudery, I've spent a fair bit of time and money down the years collecting the classic albums of that period. Freak Out! I've already mentioned (and what a shock that must have been to a still-conservative America in '65!), but we also have The Beatles' Revolver (which was where the big change in their music happened, not Sgt. Pepper) and The Doors' first LP to name but a few.

These are merely the best known, however. There were others at least as worthy of appreciation which went largely or wholly unregarded at the time which have now taken on the aura of lost treasure. Love's Forever Changes, for example, with its hinting at the darker, more cynical side of the California of its time, combined with an (at the time) unacknowledged Herb Alpert influence; The Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow, which was really the first 'rock opera' and would have long been seen as such but for the stupefying idiocy of EMI in delaying its release (especially in the US, where they eventually released it two years late and on Tamla Motown!); even the first Genesis LP has its place, as the songs show considerable maturity for a bunch of teenagers and would have been better served without Jonathan King's grandstanding over-production.

Today, brothers and sisters in the Mysteries, I wish to bring to your attention another album which I feel to be worthy of consideration:

Ark 2 by Flaming Youth appeared in 1969, at the tail end of the period I've been talking about. It's a curious album: the packaging was quite extravagant for a début LP by an act which had acquired what support it had by heavy gigging (a gatefold sleeve with a front cover illustration which used cellophane to create a 'stained-glass window' effect); there were no songwriting credits featured; the whole album was developed around the concept of Man leaving an Earth on the verge of being destroyed in order to find a new home (this was The Space Age, y'know!); and the album's premiére was held at London Planetarium.

There was a sound reason why the songwriters chose to remain anonymous. They were none other than Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who already had a long track record of writing hits for the likes of The Honeycombs, The Herd and - most notably - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Despite the fact that those hits were well-crafted and adventurous in both style and substance - three-minute epics, many of them - they felt that they didn't want their latest concept to be burdened with preconceived notions on the part of reviewers and listeners.

If you know your Sixties music, however, you could guess who was behind Ark 2. The musical styles are suitably various, the lyrics are in turns heartfelt, witty or delightfully bonkers, and the production and orchestrations are lavish without being destructive of the overall desired effect.

So, what about the music, then? Well, the opening tracks, Guide Me, Orion and Earthglow tell of the departure from Earth and the sadness it invokes. A brief instrumental interlude (Weightless) leads us to the Ark's passage through the Solar System, accompanied by a suite of short pieces which takes the concept - though not the music - of Holst's The Planets and gives it a series of contemporary twists in which, for example, Venus is represented by sexual libertinage, Jupiter by a drug-fuelled party, Saturn by the story of a man who is a hundred and thirty four years old as a result of transplants and prosthetics but who has lost his mind, and Neptune by a list of fads and cults.

Side Two begins with Changes, a track whose jaunty 6/4 time signature means that you can't get it out of your head. This is followed by the driving power of Pulsar, which is where you might really twig who wrote the album, and the balancing tender and gentle hope of Spacechild, which reminds me a great deal of that first Genesis album. The infectious In The Light Of Love is a joyous romp with what would now be called 'World Music' connotations, and leads us into the finale From Now On (Immortal Invisible), in which the old hymn is counterposed and descanted upon with a new philosophy: "Praying as we used to pray won't be enough from now on/ Faith that guided us before won't be enough from now on/ Find another way, find another way, from within, and not without/ In the loneliness of space gather strength from yourselves."

OK, those are the songs; what about the performances? Well, they are on the whole very strong; all four band members were not only capable musicians by this time, but they were also all able vocalists with the scope to provide the variety of styles required by the material. The arrangements are sensitively handled (unlike the Genesis LP referred to above, the orchestra never drowns out the band) and enhance the experience rather than get in the way of it.

The album is not without its flaws, and it would be unreasonable to expect perfection in connection with something which was very much out on a limb. Some of the vocals are a bit weak, and the humour in The Planets is somewhat hit-and-miss, although much of that track also provides us with some sharp observation on the 'swinging scene' of its time. Taken all in all, though, these are minor faults for what should be seen as a major achievement.

Should your appetite have been whetted by all this, I'm glad to say that there is website dedicated to the album. Click on the picture of the sleeve and you'll be taken there. You can even listen to the album there and judge for yourself!

Sadly, although the album garnered many favourable reviews, it found little room on the airwaves in a period when the BBC was the near-monopoly provider of pop radio in the UK. Ark 2 didn't sell (copies of the original vinyl go for upward of £40 a throw, and it's had only one CD release to my knowledge, so it's hard to come by in any form now) and the band split up not long afterwards, when its drummer went off and joined another struggling proto-prog outfit which has already been name-checked at least three times in this piece.

Take a look at that picture again. See the luscious, pouting, long-haired boy in the bottom photograph? Well, he hasn't got much hair at all nowadays. He has got a lot of money though, and a CV in music and cinema which is as long as your arm. Yes, Ark 2 marked the recording début of one Philip David Charles Collins LVO. Listen to the album and you can hear the drumming and vocal style even back then, long before they became sufficiently ubiquitous as to become annoying.

This is a great album, and a critical re-appraisal of it is long overdue.

(Dedicated to William, aka eBay trader rnrguy251, who sold me the CD last week.)

File under: Music