‘Steeped in Antiquity and Fantasy’: Some Esoteric Seventies Music

 

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, when punk, ska, electro-pop and disco were all the rage, the folk-rock and progressive music groups of the preceding years were in disfavour and it was possible to pick up their shunned albums cheap from second-hand record shops pervaded by cigarette smoke and patchouli oil. Already drawn to fantasy and supernatural fiction, I saw some of these bands and artists as in the same tradition, as their very names revealed. The first that I encountered were called Comus, Titus Groan, Heron, Dr Strangely Strange, Third Ear Band and Gryphon. They sounded strange and alluring.

These bands seemed all of a piece to me with my interest in ancient mysteries, part of the same mood that had inspired Janet & Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain (1972) and a cavalcade of similar books. They belonged with stone circles, flying saucers, ley lines and terrestrial zodiacs. I liked their music too. It was either gentle, wistful and pastoral (at the folk scene end) or adventurous and unusual (at the more progressive reaches). Some of their songs became great favourites: ‘Song to Comus’, with its wild flute and caprine vocals; Titus Groan’s ‘Hall of Bright Carvings’, also flute-driven and with a soaring chorus; ‘The Unquiet Grave’ by Gryphon, a haunting version of a traditional song, augmented with sonorous crumhorn; the plaintive, melancholy minstrelsy of ‘Wanderer’ by Heron.

Such is my affection for these often obscure and off-centre bands that I have recalled this period of discovery fondly in two stories: ‘Goat Songs’, about the elusive album of that title (The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things, 2018) and ‘Lost Estates’, about what happens when The Perpetual Motion Machine Co. get back together again (Lost Estates, 2024). It is a theme that often draws me back. A band called Piccalilli, in red velvet flares and embroidered waistcoats, who regaled village halls in West Northants and thereabouts with a long oboe-led instrumental tribute to Edward Lear’s ‘The Dong With the Luminous Nose’, have yet to become a story. My own ‘band’, The Mystic Umbrellas, though it responded to the d-i-y tape scene of the early Eighties, was musically (if I may stretch that term) and thematically much closer to the ethereal, melancholy, drifting ambience of the soft- progressive style.

A decade or so further on there was a revival of interest in some of these (real) bands, and their records became sought-after and rare, in much the same way as the old books of Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany and Hope Hodgson came back into favour and vanished from the shelves. Some of the bands then got back together again, decades after they had disappeared.

In this revival I found out about bands I hadn’t discovered in the original Seventies afterglow: Jade, who had a wonderfully eerie song, ‘Five Of Us’, set in a haunted Norfolk cottage where they had stayed, all about shadows dancing on the whitewashed walls; Amazing Blondel, a medievalist band whose instruments included theorbo, cittern, archlute and other arcana; Trees, a Fairport-ish band who also had spooky songs such as the uncanny ‘The Garden of Jane Trelawny’; Oberon, whose only album was issued in just 99 copies and whose influences included King Crimson and Debussy; Fuchsia, named after the saturnine sister in Titus Groan, and unusual for being violin-led and chamber music-ish; the pagan and folkloric Forest;  and Dulcimer.

Dulcimer were a folk trio from the Cotswolds whose first album, And I Turned As I Had Turned As A Boy, was very sought-after. The title sounds like a quotation, but seems to be original to them: it is part of a poem recited (by the actor Richard Todd, who ‘discovered’ them) in the opening piece, ‘Sonnet to the Fall’. Their music is gentle, whimsical, sometimes peculiar, often melancholy. The songs are about the passing seasons, pilgrims and travellers, lost loves, falling leaves and falling snow, butterflies and fairies. ‘Their lyrics were steeped in antiquity and fantasy’ noted music columnist Bruce Eder, and this is true of many of the other bands mentioned here too. In an interview with Psychedelic Baby magazine their lead singer Peter Hodge explained that ‘Most of my songs have been stories set to music’. 

Fantastic literature pervades the ideas and images of many of the bands. Robin Clutterbuck, who designed the sleeve artwork for Oberon's rare LP, explained:  'I was really keen on mythical literature like Beowulf; also ‘The Hobbit’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, Alan Garner and Mervyn Peake.  As for artists, I liked the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Richard Dadd and Samuel Palmer.'

The Tolkien and Peake influences are not surprising for the time. When I later looked into all these bands and plotted out the dates of their first albums (see below), I saw that they clustered around a brief period from 1969-1973, and in particular the middle two of those years. By the time I was flicking through the racks of record shops, about a decade later, they were regarded by the trendsetters as quaint and obsolete (er, like the term ‘trendsetters’ too, now I think of it). That was why I was able to pick some of them up, with scuffed sleeves and often grooves too, for very reasonable sums. It was just like the delight of bookshop finds.

It is important to note that though they are known and collected for their Seventies music, this often comprised only a few years of their careers. Some players drifted out of the music scene altogether, others continued to write and perform, and some have resumed after a long gap. Comus, for example, returned after some 40 years, and their singer Bobbie Watson now releases her own work too. Gryphon are still releasing albums and performing. Dulcimer’s Peter Hodge is also actively at work, and has released three albums in recent years, including Pipers Grove (2023) and Too Many Frankensteins (2024). It is cheering to see their vision and virtuosity continuing.

Checklist

Dr Strangely Strange: Kip of the Serenes (1969)

Forest: Forest (1969)

Third Ear Band: Alchemy (1969)

Amazing Blondel: The Amazing Blondel (1970)

Dulcimer: And I Turned As I Had Turned As a Boy (1970)

Heron: Heron (1970)

Jade: Fly on Strangewings (1970)

Titus Groan: Titus Groan (1970)

Trees: The Garden of Jane Trelawney (1970)

Comus: First Utterance (1971)

Fuchsia: Fuchsia (1971)

Oberon: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971)

Gryphon: Gryphon (1973)

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Oberon's A Midsummer Night's Dream: sleeve art by Robin Clutterbuck