Dr. Strangely Strange

Well, I’m for Donnybrook Fair
When I get the time I’ll see you there
Pick a golden apple from the heart of the sun
I can assure you that it is very easily done

Band Personnel:
Tim Booth: guitar, mandolin, idiophone (thumb piano), percussion, vocals
Ivan Pawle: guitar, bass, fiddle, whistle, percussion, vocals
Tim Goulding: organ, harmonium, piano, recorder, glockenspiel, violin, Stylophone, vocals
+ Caroline “Linus” Greville, vocals
+ Joe Thoma, fiddle, mandolin

Barely a whisper in their heyday, the “Strangelies” are a good example of British/Irish hippie-folk whimsy that followed a well-trodden path blazed by acoustic, Scottish mystics Incredible String Band (ISB). Not surprisingly, both groups were produced and managed by Harvard-educated expatriate and folk/blues/rock impresario, Joe Boyd (Witchseason Productions, Hannibal Records). 

Emerging from Trinity College, Dublin in 1967 were student bohemians Booth and Pawle. They jammed casually with a couple others before Goulding joined, all of them multi-instrumentalists associated with quasi-commune “The Orphanage” that also birthed Gary Moore and Phil Lynott (both Skid Row and Thin Lizzy). First signing interest came from Bernard Stollman of ESP-Disk (Fugs, Pearls Before Swine), but Boyd beat him to the contracts. First album, Kip of the Serenes (1969), has ISB stamp all over it, the band’s core threesome being joined by singer Carolyn “Linus” Greville. Opening track “Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal” is significant for cute title as well as inclusion on Island Records budget sampler, Nice Enough to Eat, alongside Traffic, Jethro Tull, and other rock heavyweights.

Popular on UK university circuit, Strangelies supported Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher, and at one point had a young Elton John supporting them. Their music might best be described as “woodland hippie”: that which might be played at an annual harvest festival, accompanied by mime troupe, maybe after a day of gathering organic carrots and peas. (Substances doled out near the Kundalini yoga tent.)

Second album, Heavy Petting (1970), has gimmick sleeve design by Roger Dean. It dispenses with Linus’s vocals but adds drummer Dave Mattacks (Fairport Convention) and Moore’s electric guitar for a punchier sound (though not too punchy), with hints of American country. Standout track is eight-minute groove, “Sign On My Mind.” Goulding then left to get married and paint. Gay and Terry Woods (Steeleye Span) briefly joined for a tour, but band soon crumbled. However, interest amongst folk-psych cultists in the Strangelies’ gentle, pastoral sounds has encouraged periodic reunions and releases. Mostly strange was at a wake for Annie Christmas of The Orphanage…an “acoustic gig in a cabbage patch” (Halcyon Days notes). And as recently as this year, a new LP called Anti-Inflammatory.

***

Perceptive readers may be noticing a longitudes trend. Yes, this blog has become enamored with certain British Isle underground acts spawned by what it calls the “Big Three” of British folk-rock: Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Incredible String Band. After all, I did launch my revamped (music-centric) blog with the mighty Dando Shaft nearly a year ago. I’ve had an affinity for British rock ever since “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then joyfully discovered the Big Three a couple decades later, but only recently have begun mining the musical gold that certain short-lived underground acts represent.

Much of this music is, as they say, an acquired taste: sometimes limp or derivative, occasionally “precious.” But for me it also has a refreshing purity and casual indifference to commerce. It has a hippie organicism lived in real time, not feigned later for nostalgia. As Rose Simpson of ISB told me when I interviewed her in 2019, “it was natural for all of us, not a performance of someone else, but a projection of the people we would have liked to be all the time.”

Dr. Strangely Strange only made two albums in its original incarnation, and neither stands with ISB’s magical The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. But they are perfectly representative of music – like that of Bread, Love & Dreams, Trees, and others – that, although locked in a certain time and place, is also a very special and exotic time and place.

Original Albums:
Kip of the Serenes (1969)
Heavy Petting (1970)

Reunion Albums:
Alternative Medicine (1997)
Anti-Inflammatory (2025)

Collections:
Halcyon Days (2007)
Radio Sessions (2022)

Pearls Before Swine: “Balaklava” – Repost

[Re-posting this 2018 album review for Remembrance Day/Armistice Day (known in U.S. as Veterans Day)]

Last February, I wrote an obituary/tribute to a gentleman named Tom Rapp (see A Knowledge of Ashes). Rapp was a singer-songwriter and recording artist from 1965 to 1976 who retired from music to become a civil rights lawyer. He was a musician of uncommon intelligence, with an unyielding commitment to social justice, leavened by the unexpected humorous wink. His music was too cryptic and melancholic to ever earn a listing on the Billboard Hot 100.  So if you’re unfamiliar with him, it’s understandable.

To put it another way, James Taylor or Dan Fogelberg, Tom Rapp was not. But artistic ambiguity and professional obscurity have never prevented longitudes from recognizing someone. In fact, they often indicate a vision too luminous for most of us to process.

Fifty years ago, Rapp released his second, most ambiguous, and arguably best album, credited to his band Pearls Before Swine, on the underground label ESP-Disk.  It’s called Balaklava.

 Tom Rapp

Scholars of European history might recognize Balaklava (also spelled with a ‘c’, “Balaclava”) as the name of the place where a famous British cavalry charge occurred in 1854 during the Crimean War. The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson immortalized it in his poem about valor, The Charge of the Light Brigade. The truth is that this charge was an unnecessary military action, a suicidal maneuver that dissolved 40 percent of an entire brigade. Valor in suicide. Irony, like this, was a Tom Rapp specialty.

The year 1968 had a similarly senseless military action going on, this one in Southeast Asia. More irony: Rapp dedicated his record to WWII soldier Eddie Slovik, the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion since the American Civil War.

“Some people thought (my) songs were hopeless…I was being realistic about the pain that’s out there. If you say life is wonderful, people know it isn’t true, but if you talk about the pain, someone will listen.” (Crawdaddy, December 2008)

Tears are often jewel-like…

The first thing that makes Balaklava different from other records is its unusual sleeve art. Album reproductions of paintings later became popular, but Balaklava is one of the first examples, and the painting chosen partially relates to the music inside. It’s a reproduction of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s 16^th-century, apocalyptic oil panel “The Triumph of Death,” with typewriter characters of the band name and album title stamped across the top…as if this record is a dispatch being wired from the abyss below.

 Private Eddie D. Slovik, shot for desertion in 1944

The back cover features surreal illustrations by French avant-garde writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Also, a quote from American philosopher and poet George Santayana: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” And yet more irony: a photograph of a freckle-faced girl wearing a shy smile, with a daisy protruding from her plaid dress, and a button reading “Pearls Before Swine.”

(The photo was snapped at a peace rally by photographer Mel Zimmer. The girl’s button actually said “Flower Power.” Zimmer identifies his photo as “Molly Stewart.”)

So, the listener has an idea where this record is headed even before the needle strikes the wax. The packaging is deliberate and unapologetic. As Dante wrote in “The Inferno:” All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Another striking thing about Balaklava: the music is introduced by a ghost. The first “song” is titled “Trumpeter Landfrey,” and is the actual voice and bugle call of a survivor of the Light Brigade charge, a man named Martin Leonard Landfried. With brimming pride, Landfried announces, “I am now going to sound the bugle that was sounded at Waterloo, and sound the charge that was sounded at Balaklava on that very same bugle, the 25^th of October, 1854.” Landfried’s scratchy voice comes from a cylinder recording from 1890 that was reissued on a vinyl record that Rapp owned.

 Martin Leonard Landfried (Photo: Friends of Shoreham Fort)

Landfried’s bugle notes smoothly segue into the strummed guitar notes of “Translucent Carriages.” Wikipedia calls this one of Rapp’s “most enduring songs,” a shivering tune whose title again harkens to yesteryear, and whose languid music includes ghostly background whisperings. One of them is the Herodotus quote “In peace, sons bury their fathers / In war, fathers bury their sons.” Another is the Rapp quote “Jesus raised the dead / But who will raise the living?”

The recurring chorus goes “Every time I see you, passing by, I have to wonder…why?” The identity of the “you” can be interpreted differently. Are they ancient carriages, perhaps Roman? Hearses? Maybe a woman? Is Rapp referring to Jesus? Or the pointlessness of war?

“Images of April” burrows deeper into the murky surreal. It features vocal echoes, flute, bird songs, and even frog croaks to paint a world of desolation, where springtime exists in fleeting images that only memory can summon. If you’re open to something strange, hypnotic, and completely different:

As unconventional as is “Images of April,” the next song, “There Was a Man,” is totally conventional—the guitar/vocal music, that is. The words, maybe less so. They relate a story about a stranger who one day arrives in a village. The stranger has a scar on his head, “where there used to be a crown.” He amazes the people by doing wonderful, magical things. Then the stranger leaves, sadly, suddenly. He has heard “the news from the war.”

“I Saw the World” is maybe the most passionate song on Balaklava. Rapp pleads, with palpable emotion in his voice, that he’s seen the world “spinning like a toy,” and “hate seems so small compared to it all.” A melodious cello and piano passage helps boost this song to another plane.

Rapp was an admirer of songwriter Leonard Cohen, and the “Swine” honor him with a rendition of Cohen’s “Suzanne.” They supposedly recorded this song in one take, while sitting on the studio floor, in the dark, with candles burning. (Yes, very Sixties.) The hushed ambience they created must have succeeded, since this is one of the most respectfully rendered versions of this acclaimed song.

 Florence Nightingale

Other titles include “Guardian Angels” and “Lepers and Roses,” both of which further the odd, time-frozen quality of Balaklava. At the end of the record, there’s another vintage 1890 recording, this one of Florence Nightingale, who oversaw the nurses during the Crimean War. She prays that her Balaklava “comrades” will all return “safe to shore.” The record trails off with Trumpeter Landfried’s opening again. It’s a reminder that everything is a circle, that everything “comes back again,” both love and hate.

***

While not a perfect record, and certainly not for every ear, Balaklava’s best moments overflow with a perceptiveness, mystery, and beauty not usually occurring in rock music. Today, we hear the word “alternative”—which means “different” or “unconventional”—applied to a certain style of music (for the sake of convenience, branding, and marketing).  But Pearls Before Swine’s Balaklava defines the word alternative.  There’s not another record like it.

Even more, the record is a unique and fervent indictment of the idea that warfare is some kind of glorious endeavor. It is music with meaning. But unlike most anti-war artists of the Sixties—idealistic and well-meaning, but who relied on anthems or derivative platitudes about peace and love—Tom Rapp used irony, surrealism, and religious and historical allusions to present his worldview. He drew from a war in 1854 to indict a war of 1968, which still resonates in 2018.

We’re all familiar with that line in Tennyson’s famous poem…that universal expression of blind patriotic duty, which goes “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.” Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine question that sentiment with Balaklava. And, I think they’re also saying…shouldn’t everybody?

Photo by Mel Zimmer

Curved Air

Personnel:
Sonja Kristina: lead vocals, acoustic guitar
Darryl Way: electric violin, keyboards, vocals
Francis Monkman: keyboards, guitar, VCS3 synthesizer
Florian Pilkington-Miksa: drums

Taking their name from experimental musician Terry Riley‘s influential album, A Rainbow in Curved Air, this English band occupied a respectable position in 1970s progressive rock scene, though the US market eluded them. Today, they’re usually mentioned in reference to a late-period drummer from the US: a Police-man named Stewart Copeland. Above personnel is the core of early lineups. (Band had revolving door of bass players.)

The nucleus were two classical music students: violinist/keyboardist Darryl Way (graduate of Royal College of Music) and keyboardist/guitarist Francis Monkman. They met in a London music store, discovered they both liked rock, then formed the band Sisyphus in 1969. After introduction to hippie-chick singer Sonja Kristina, veteran of London stage production of Hair (as well as interim singer in Strawbs, post-Sandy Denny), they changed name to Curved Air.

First album, Air Conditioning, was first British issue by industry behemoth Warner Bros., and notable for having one of the earliest picture discs. But bidding war, extravagant signing bonus, radio spot promos, and the gimmicky LP packaging backfired on group, as rock fans smelled hype. Record still managed to climb to eighth position in UK charts, helped by single, “It Happened Today.” Way’s violin and a foxy femme singer invited comparisons to West Coast act, It’s a Beautiful Day.

L to R: Monkman, Pilkington-Miksa, bassist Ian Eyre, Kristina, Way

Second Album (1971) was substantial musical improvement. Monkman focused more on keyboards than guitar, and at least one side is good mix of crafty rockers and melodic psych, Way writing music and Kristina doing lyrics. Second side, however, is Monkman-written, three songs, the extravagant, 13-minute “Piece of Mind” of most interest to hard prog fans. Single “Back Street Luv” from album was band’s commercial peak, hitting #4 on UK charts. (UK sleeve of Second Album is cool pastel diecut, while US has more generic, non-diecut art.)

Phantasmagoria (1972) continued respectable standard of predecessor, with risqué chamber-pop of “Not Quite the Same,” spooky “Marie Antoinette,” and Kristina’s acoustic showpiece, “Melinda (More or Less)” (reminiscent of “The Lady Rachel” by Kevin Ayers). But this third LP again highlighted compositional schism between Way-Kristina and Monkman and band splintered soon after album release. Way formed Darryl Way’s Wolf, Monkman went into session work. His keyboards, however, are highlight of groovy ’72  single, “Sarah’s Concern.”

Way’s classical, occasionally crazed electric violin playing, and his arrangements, were critical element of group sound, as were Monkman’s keyboard flourishes. But Kristina, drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa, and (third) bassist Mike Wedgwood continued, bringing in 17-year-old violin and piano prodigy Eddie Jobson (future member of Roxy Music and Asia) for 1973 Air Cut album. Then Way and Monkman returned for Curved Air – Live (1975), designed as a tax write-off, before Monkman again exited, joining Phil Manzanera in 801 then forming classical rock outfit Sky with guitarist John Williams. Also exiting were original drummer Pilkington-Miksa (who joined Kiki Dee) and Wedgwood (who joined Caravan).

Final two studio albums were the ones with drummer Copeland. But the music was more conventional, less interesting, and possibly secondary to a budding romance between Kristina and him. They ultimately married (are now divorced) and have several kids.

***

Musically, Curved Air’s trademark is probably Darryl Way’s solo electric violin, a rare instrument in rock even by prog standards. His virtuosic playing betrays his appreciation of the classics, notably on the violin extravaganza “Vivaldi” from Air Conditioning, or “Cheetah” from Phantasmagoria. On top of that you get Kristina’s sexy, vibrato vocals, Monkman’s imaginative keyboard soundscapes, and a very underrated drummer in Pilkington-Miksa.

Curved Air could, and did, “rock out” well (see link below). They truly excelled where they could be slightly strange, principally on the shorter Way-Kristina songs. The best examples – and where Curved Air offered musical paths I wish they’d continued following – are on songs like the swinging sixties pastiche “Not Quite the Same,” seemingly a toss-off tune, but in truth a thoughtfully arranged synth and horns dynamo. Or the floating, carefully paced, autumnal song “Jumbo,” from Second Album. These are both proof that progressive rock could be progressive while also being humble.

Sonja Kristina has kept the flame alive with various lineups, concerts, and live releases. Way regularly releases solo records. After Sky, Monkman composed for film, notably the award-winning The Long Good Friday (1980). He died in 2023. Pilkington-Miksa died in 2021.

Singles:
It Happened Today / What Happens When You Blow Yourself Up (1971)
Vivaldi / It Happened Today (1971) (Italy only)
Back Street Luv / Everdance (1971)
Sarah’s Concern / Phantasmagoria (1972)
Baby Please Don’t Go / Broken Lady (1976)

Original Albums:
Air Conditioning (1970)
Second Album (1971)
Phantasmagoria (1972)
Air Cut (1973)
Curved Air – Live (1975)
Midnight Wire (1975)
Airborne (1976)

Reunion Album:
North Star (2017) (only Kristina and Pilkington-Miksa from original lineup)