BLODWYN PIG - Ahead Rings Out

XXX WARNING: One of the below posts conjurs up a disappointing allusion XXX

(PS)

Late last year we said farewell to Mick Abrahams, or at least some of us did. His passing seems to have crept under most radars, as he is somewhat of a footnote in the history of British rock; but he really shouldn’t be.

As lead guitarist on Jethro Tull’s first (and some say, best) LP he deserves credit for adding a bluesy, jazzy feel to a band that became increasingly less interesting in the years after his departure. However as founding member and creative force behind Blodwyn Pig his legacy is far greater, no matter how short-lived the band itself was.

1969’s Ahead Rings Out is one of those albums that genuinely has everything for me: rock, blues, jazz, folk… it’s a complete masterpiece which has been overlooked for too long as far as I’m concerned.

Songs like It’s Only Love, Leave It With Me and The Modern Alchemist are jazzy romps with some lovely interplay between guitar, flute and saxophone supported by the swinging drums of Ron Berg; the latter track being one of the real highlights of the LP, it’s a purely bonkers, untrammelled joy from start to finish. I even get a bit of the quiet/loud section from Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man in there, although it’s somewhat less intricate and protracted on this track; but as the LP was released while In the Court of the Crimson King was being recorded, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it might’ve had some small influence (until the great Fripp himself shoots me down, that is).

Bluesier moments are Dear Jill with some soulful slide guitar and Up and Coming; both of which take things down a notch following moments of frantic mayhem, adding calm and balance to proceedings. Folky bits are the wistful Change Song (complete with mockney introduction which would likely be completely lost on American listeners) and Backwash, serving as an overture to the album closer, Ain’t Ya Comin’ Home Babe? which perfectly combines blues, jazz and heavy rock with the delicate balance between light and shade that so few songs manage.

The star of the show for me is the pulsing rocker Sing Me a Song That I Know, with its driving beat that propels it along its few minutes’ duration. Again, it’s got that light, sprightly opening saxophone & ride cymbal riff pitted against the heavy rock juggernaut that is the body of the song. A full-throated vocal delivery from Mick caps the performance on a song that I will never tire of hearing as long as I live.

The album cover is one of the most iconic images in rock and the liner notes show Mick’s quirky sense of humour, which unfortunately was more intrusive and somewhat irritating on the 1970 follow up Getting To This, which had its moments but was a disappointing return. A couple of worthy solo projects in ‘71 & ‘72 followed (incidentally, check out the Mick Abrahams Band’s appearance on German rock show Beat Club, it cooks) before Abrahams’s retirement from music for several decades; but this debut release was something very special indeed.

Suffice it to say that I bloody love this LP and it will always have a place in my all-time top 5; I even wrote to Mr Abrahams some years ago to tell him just that, whether he got the message or not I will never know. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, I want my remains to be cremated: one half should be scattered over Sofia Vergara, the other half pressed into a copy of this album and played at full volume on each anniversary of my passing. Let it be so.

(MS)

Blodwyn Pig emerged from the slurry of the late 60s British blues boom. Just one of the B-list acts squealing like a litter of runts in search of the audience vacated by The Yardbirds and transatlantic Stones.

To say they emerged suggests some sort of trajectory to greatness, as if launched, like an ocean liner or rocket-ship into the musical firmament. A band embedded deep into our collective pop consciousness with an oeuvre of genre shifting albums critiqued and revered by the venerable music press of the day. Their guest musicianship harnessed by peers across a plethora of contemporary recordings. Photos snapped alongside the 70’s glitterati at all the right places. Recreational and sordid excess dissected in the tabloids of the day. The candid quotes, the dollybirds, the editorial condemnation, the appeal to moral authority. The newsprint splattered with sauce. And egg yolk. And ciggy ash. And oil. The thick dark spots transfiguring Anita Pallenberg and Keef to exotically hued cameos on page 7. “Marsh Magic topples Hammers!”, on the back-page. Belches, coughs. “Two double egg, chips and beans”, “Chish and Fips...who’s the Chish and Fips!”. A Luton caff, the Blod’s very own Chateau Marmont.

“Ahead Rings Out” opens with the barnstorming It’s Only love, the sort of thing you’d hear late at night, on the other side of the tracks, on the edge of town in an illicit, good-time Roadhouse…somewhere between Worcester and Dudley. Multi-instrumentalist Jack Lancaster sounds like Roland Kirk on this one, or rather Coliseum’s Dick Heckstall-Smith doing Roland Kirk, with everything stuffed in his gob. I only wished the drums had been placed in the centre of the mix. Switching to flute comes Dear Jill, a sweet country blues with slide that sits nicely in second place even if it does expose Mick Abrahams somewhat expressionless vocals. The fat driving Sing Me a Song That I Know is probably the best thing they ever recorded and found its way to more households than were interested via the popular “Nice Enough to Eat” Island sampler.

Island was investing in a multi-talented roster of jazzy-blues at the time and the Blod’s found a natural home amongst some stellar names; Chris Wood’s contributions to Traffic, Dick Morrissey’s multi-album If project, the Keith Tippett era King Crimson, Wynder K Frog’s party LP’s. And the guest slots like Chris McGregor and Lyn Dobson’s input to “Bryter Layter”, Harold McNair on John Martyn’s “The Tumbler” and that groovy Spooky Tooth b-side “Lugar’s Blues”. And of course there was Ian Anderson in Mick Abrahams old alma mater, Jethro Tull. You get a sense of all this in Lancaster’s closing track to Side One, The Modern Alchemist that snakes about in full progressive jazz-rock territory. But maybe that was it, save the guitar riffing on the closing track Aint Ya Coming Home. In between it’s more of the same but less and though it doesn’t really matter there’s a very good song they missed from the sessions for this LP called See My Way that the record company held onto for the band’s final LP in 1970. There’s even an American version of this album with other non-UK tracks, so someone blew it I think with the marketing.

Anyway about halfway through side two I found myself re-reading the sleeve notes that suggest the appalling gatefold sleeve is cut in half and worn on your head like a party hat. Those hip hipsters Hipgnosis didn’t think of that did they? Then I’m on the A638 to Pontefract. In the back the 25-50 year old-looking drummer has picked up a bird and with the van skidding to avoid Pete Brown and Piblokto speeding South, the rear-view mirror gives the driver a front-row view of a big pimply arse going through the motions. That’s what I hear in this music.

(LK)

I have not listened to Blodwyn Pig, more specifically Ahead Rings Out, for many, many years; I think the last time that I actually listened to the whole album was when I was a teenager, so when the subject of this album came up I was met with the awkward realisation that I don’t like Blodwyn Pig. Obviously there is nothing wrong with not liking a band, regardless of what people might say, but the awkward part of this confession is that I have no idea why! I have thought about it quite a lot over the years when the name has popped up; it’s not the music, though I wouldn’t say that they are my favourite band musically, and it’s not their image, which I’m not sure they actually have in any meaningful sense. Certainly there is the name which to me sounds like an insult, though I’m fairly sure that it isn’t, but when you put a traditional name from a culture that you are not a part of next to a commonly used insult there is always the possibility of a misunderstanding; but that is not the reason why I am left with this feeling of dislike toward the band. So I have to wonder, what is it about this band that has left me with this reaction, what, in my limited experience with this band, has caused me to dislike Blodwyn Pig?

The origin of Blodwyn Pig is a classic story, one that is so common that it is now a music history cliche, where a member of a band leaves due to “creative differences” to form another band closer to their idea of what makes good music. In this particular case the first band was Jethro Tull, the person leaving was Mick Abrahams and the band he formed was, rather obviously due to the context, Blodwyn Pig.

Formed in 1968 as a four piece they would release their first album, the aforementioned Ahead Rings Out, the following year, which would receive both critical plaudits and commercial success. Their music is generally placed in the blues explosion of the late 60s in the UK which included bands such as Fleetwood Mac, Cream and Free, though they generally sound more like the blues influenced bands from the early 60s; whereas the likes of Fleetwood Mac and the others were moving to a style that was extending the nature of the blues via amplification, effects and distortion, both in the nature of the sound that was produced and the way that the music itself was structured. Ahead Rings Out, Blodwyn Pig’s first album, generally stays close to what may be considered a standard blues style, they do show influences of other musical styles, but rarely is this ever developed into something different.

The first three tracks are fairly standard blues with the exception of Sing Me A Song That I Know which, although still based very obviously in a blues style, dares to do something different and, nearly sixty years on from its release, still feels original and interesting. I would go as far to say that this is probably the stand-out song on this album.

The fourth track completely changes the dynamic of the album with a complete shift in musical style. The Modern Alchemist you might expect, due to the title alone, to be something of a mix of musical chemistry, bringing the influences from the different band members together to create something bigger than the separate parts, but it simply isn't. There are a few suggestions of the blues in there, but they disappear quickly to be swallowed up into what is a fairly standard jazz track, albeit with some distortion on the guitar which may be considered atypical for the genre. This is not to say that it is bad, I find it quite enjoyable as jazz goes, but it leaves you unsatisfied with the sense that there could have been something better. The same can be said for Leave It With Me, another jazz number that reaches for something a little different, but this time it’s folk music that features. The difference here is that rather than hints of folk music that don’t really go anywhere, you have interludes within the track where there is a sudden outbreak of folk music which just as quickly stop and play no further part in the track.

The other tracks are decent examples of country, delta and Chicago blues and, in a strange way, this is the fundamental problem with this album; if you told someone that each of the tracks was by a different artist or group, I genuinely believe that most people would want to know who each one was and want to hear more from each one, but that doesn’t make a great album. What you get instead is a collection of tracks where it appears that a band is showcasing their talent with the hope of impressing their audience.

So, to return to the premise from the beginning, do I have a better idea of why I seem to have a dislike for Blodwyn Pig? The simple answer is no, I still don’t know why this band engenders such feelings. There is nothing wrong with this album; I would even go as far as to say that it is a good album that I have developed a greater liking for the more I’ve listened to it, but, as I have already said, it is hard to escape the feeling that this is a band that is trying to showcase the range of their talents rather than create an album.