Gooder'n Bad Vinyl

01 - Wishing Well
02 - Suicide Sal
03 - I Was in Chains
04 - If You Don't Know
05 - What You Got
06 - In My Life
07 - Comin' on Strong
08 - Hold On
09 - I Saw Him Standing There
10 - It's Been So Long




Special thanks to my friend Jean C. for letting me digitize this and and the previous Maggie Bell post!

Sleeve notes:
Who was Suicide Sal? Well, there lies a mystery only Maggie Bell can solve. Both are legendary characters, but we know a lot more about Maggie, the Scots' Queen of the Blues. She was undoubtedly one of the greatest blues and soul singers of the rock era, blessed with a powerhouse voice that made fans go weak at the knees. However, Suicide Sal really existed, was famous in her own day and, as it turns out, had a strong family connection with Ms. Bell.
Once the star of Stone The Crows, that excellent hard rock band from the early seventies, Maggie was in the throes of building up her solo career when she unleashed this album back in 1975. It followed on the heels of her debut 'Queen Of The Night' (1974). Both albums were put together by Jerry Wexler, a top US producer who had worked with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. It was Wexler who gave Maggie the kind of encouragement and advice that she needed after two previous projects with other producers had failed to work out. In truth, it wasn't always easy for a girl to break through the rock 'n' roll barriers in the Seventies. There weren't so many female artists around, and very few Scots girls singing the blues.
When Maggie arrived in America and toured the Deep South she actually had to sing behind a screen before black audiences would accept her. But once they'd heard her voice and she stepped out from behind the screen, they cracked up and gave her the warmest of Southern welcomes!
Maggie Bell was born in Glasgow (January 12, 1945) and came from a musical family. As a teenager she sang with local dance bands, then went to Germany in the mid-sixties to sing at US Air Force bases. Returning to Scotland. She and guitarist Leslie Harvey formed a new group called Power, which later became Stone The Crows. They were managed by Mark London and Peter Grant, the man behind Led Zeppelin. After Leslie was accidentally electrocuted on stage during a sound check in 1972, the heart went out of the group. They worked for a while with fellow Scots guitarist .Jimmy McCulloch, but broke up after a year. Grant and London then offered to help Maggie make a solo album. She subsequently recorded two for Atlantic in New York, one with producer Felix Pappalardi of the group Mountain, and the other with Felix Cavaliere of the Young Rascals. Both LP's were sadly never released.
Maggie is frank about the reasons: "The record company said they weren't good enough. I was quite upset about that! To this day I believe it was wonderful stuff. I think it was down to a load of politics."
At this point Jerry Wexler stepped in. He told Atlantic: "She can sing. I'd like to take over and see if I can make an album with her And if you don't like it you can burn the tapes!" Wexler and Bell sat down together and listened to over two hundred songs in the search for material. After they had done their homework, and Maggie had dutifully learned the lyrics of the chosen songs, they put a band of studio top class musicians together The result was 'Queen Of the Night', which earned rave reviews. "It was wonderful," recalls Maggie. 'Bette Midler said it was the best solo album from a female artist she'd ever heard, and it got great notices in the American magazines. There was even an article about me in Time Magazine! The record got to Number Ten in the charts and it did really well."
Maggie put a touring band on the road and remembers some nerve-wracking dates with Earth, Wind & Fire in the Deep South, when the spectacular group were at the height of their fame. "I had to open the show and the audiences were all sitting there with their mouths hanging open and doing nuthin'." This was when she hit on the idea of asking her road manager to make a wooden screen. "I told him that I wanted to sing the first song behind the screen and then come on stage in full view, just to see what the response was like. Well the response was unbelievable! You see, at first they couldn't accept a white woman from Scotland singing the blues. Scotland? Where's Scotland - is that near Alaska?' But we used the screen and then it was OK - ha, ha!" Maggie Bell toured Germany in 1975 to promote 'Queen Of The Night' and the response was so good she was encouraged to record her second excellent album, 'Suicide Sal'. "We recorded it at Ringo Starr's studio at Tittenhurst Park in England, which had once been John Lennon's home. It's where they filmed John and Yoko for 'Imagine'. It was a beautiful house with incredible gardens. It now belongs to a rich Sheik. It had a great atmosphere. We all stayed there in these little cottages, and of course Ringo and his wife Maureen, who has since died, made us feel part of the family. They were wonderful people. It was also a great studio to work in and you could go in at anytime of the day or night and there were no restrictions abut noise or parking."
The title song 'Suicide Sal' was written by Maggie with a little help from her friends, including Mark London, Mike Clifford and Chris Trentgrove. She explains: " Suicide Sal' was actually my aunt, who was a music hall queen up in Scotland. She was very famous. That was her nickname of course. Her real name was Doris Droy, who was my father's sister But up in Glasgow everyone called her 'Suicide Sal - she's everybody's pal'. In a way she was an outcast because she came from a church-going family, and for a woman to he on the stage in those days was very risky. God bless her soul, I think the furthest she ever got in the world was up to Inverness and back!" Although Maggie felt at home at Ringo's studio, it proved was much harder to get good songs in England than was the case in America. However, she mixed songs by her favourite artists together with some items by well-respected fellow musicians and created an appealing blend of moods. The first cut, Paul Rodgers' 'Wishing Well', certainly got the album off to a flying start. Maggie: "I've always loved Free and that song in particular, so I was keen my do my own version. The next track, 'I Was In Chains', was written by the Sutherland Brothers, It's a nice Scottish theme with bagpipes and stuff.
'If You Don't Know' was by Pete Wingfield, who was a great keyboard player. He had a hit with a song called 'Eighteen With A Bullet' in 1975. "He came on the road with me for a while and he wrote this one for me." Although Ringo didn't sit in on drums at the recording sessions as one might expect, Maggie did have one distinguished guest on her album: Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin chipped in on 'If You Don't Know.' "I asked Jimmy which song he'd like to play on one number, and he picked that one and he played a wonderful solo." Next came the hard rocking 'What You Got' and the Leo Sayer and Dave Courtney ballad 'In My Life'. Sayer was one of Maggie's favourites and she felt the lyrics could apply to anybody, but particularly those in the music business. 'Comin' On Strong' was supplied by her ex-drummer Colin Allen and bandleader Zoot Money. "They had a little songwriting thing going together and it was hard for them to get anyone to record their stuff. Well, I heard this song and thought I could record it and sing it on stage." Maggie covered another Free song, 'Hold On', by Simon Kirke and Paul Kossoff, and then came up with her special interpretation of Lennon & McCartney's 'I Saw I Him Standing There', suitably re-titled. "I used to do a great version of that on stage' with Pete Wingfield. I thought it was just as good as Joe Cocker's 'With A Little Help From My Friends'".
The last item, It's Been So Long', was contributed by Phil May of The Pretty Things. They had done it on their 'Silk Torpedo' album and Maggie thought it was ideal for her to cover. "Phil changed a few of the lyrics for me, and I did my version with Phil doing some of the vocal backings". The album sold well, but it did much better in America and Germany than in Britain. Maggie believes this was due to a case of UK audiences finding it harder to accept her away from Stone The Crows. "No matter who you are, if you split away from a band, people have divided loyalties. Some fans don't like you to do solo albums. But it did okay and I did a lot of tours to promote 'Suicide Sal.' So I can't complain!".
Maggie Bell now lives in Holland, remains very active, and is still singing and touring. But her happiest memories are of the crazy seventies when she'd be cruising the skies of America in luxury jetliners alongside her mates in Led Zeppelin. 'They were great days and we were all very lucky to have lived through them!'
CHRIS WELCH, London, England, 1997
Swan Song 8412

Jimmy Page - guitar
Jimmy Jewell - Saxophone
Billy Lawrie - Bass
Pete Wingfield - Keyboards
Brian Breeze - Guitar, Vocals
Hugh Burns - Guitar
Roy Davies - Keyboards
Paul Francis - Drums
Ray Glynn - Guitar
Delisle Harper - Bass
Cuddley Judd - Bagpipes
Mickey Keene - Guitar
Mark London - Vocals
Clark Terry - Guitar

Encoded at 320K from original vinyl promo album. Includes high quality scan of cover suitable for a CD case.

http://rapidshare.com/files/65905773/mb_ss75.rar

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Enjoy!

When Things Go Wrong
It'll Only Hurt a Little While
Don't Cry
Without You
Why Do You Tell Lies
I Don't Want to Know
Many Years Ago
Waitin' in Line
Be Mine Tonite
Kathy Lee
Don't Wait Till Tomorrow




Encoded at 320K from original vinyl promo album. Includes artwork, reviews and tracklisting

http://rapidshare(dot)com/files/7263264/rl_chrtbst.rar


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(By Richie Unterberger)
Even if Robin Lane & the Chartbusters' self-titled 1980 debut album didn't quite meet the expectations of the band and their rabid Boston following, it did capture their blend of new wave pop with dynamic folk-rockish guitar lines for the first time on a widely distributed national release. At the fore were singer-songwriter Lane's own husky vocals, delivering songs that for all their melodic hooks were tinged with far greater darkness and ambivalence than most pop-rock of the time, new wave or otherwise.

Although Robin Lane & the Chartbusters was Lane's first album, she had actually been active as a singer-songwriter for about a decade. Back in 1969 she had sung backup vocals on "Round and Round" on Neil Young's classic Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. In the 1970s she left California to move East, and only a little prior to hooking up with the Chartbusters, she'd been playing far mellower, folk-rock-aligned singer-songwriter material. Those were the kinds of songs she was doing when she got a deal with Private Stock, Blondie's first label.

Soon afterward, a newfound love for acts like Patti Smith, Television, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Tom Petty, Cheap Trick, and Dwight Twilley sent her own music into a much different path. Hanging out with Boston bands like the Real Kids and at the legendary local venue the Rat got her in touch with most of the musicians who would become the Chartbusters: guitarist-vocalists (and ex-Modern Lovers) Asa Brebner and Leroy Radcliffe, bassist-vocalist Scott Baerenwald, and drummer Tim Jackson. "I put this other band together and actually enticed them to be my bandmates, because I had this deal with Private Stock," remembers Lane. "And then about a month or two later, Private Stock folded. So I had my new band and new direction."

The new direction would come as a shock to many of her old fans. "Our first gig, we were opening for another of our manager's bands, NRBQ. I pretty much just didn't sing, I screamed!" she laughs. "NRBQ just hated us. A lot of people who had liked me before went, 'What have you done?' It really wasn't an about-face, because I always felt social issues and identified with the underdog. I just thought that this music was a better way to say it [and] put it in. The people that came to listen to me, [when I was] the mellow Robin, would just kind of sit there, and it would be all nice and peachy-keen. But it wasn't affecting them in the gut. It wasn't passionate. I suddenly realized, 'Here's some fertile soil I can plant some seeds in, and it'll be more meaningful to me.'"

She dropped her old repertoire and penned a new one virtually from scratch, though one of her old numbers would be reworked into her most famous song, "When Things Go Wrong" (the song from which it evolved, "Never Enough," was covered on the 1979 album of the same name by the Pousette-Dart Band). Although several record labels expressed interest, the band signed with Warner Brothers after Jerry Wexler saw a show and offered them a deal. A three-song EP (with an early version of "When Things Go Wrong") had already come out on the Deli Platters label and gotten some airplay in Boston before the Chartbusters went to Los Angeles to record their Warners debut.

In hindsight, Lane feels that the album didn't capture the band as well it could have: "Though some people really liked that album, it lost the guitar sound that we had. They had a really wonderful kind of mesh that was lost. I think I wasn't singing as well as I could have; I was trying to retain the force of the songs that we had live, and pushing too hard. After we came back to Boston, people couldn't believe it when they heard the album; they said, 'This is not you.'"

But the songs were definitely Lane's, though "Don't Wait Till Tomorrow" was written with Jackson and Radcliffe, and "Kathy Lee" and "When Things Go Wrong" had assistance from Joanne Cipolla (from the band Planet Street), who at one time lived upstairs from Robin. "When Things Go Wrong" was the single that made the charts, though just as impressive were cuts like the sullen and jaggedly rhythmic "It'll Only Hurt a Little While," and the Sid Vicious-inspired "I Don't Want to Know." Lane also likes "Many Years Ago" and "Don't Cry" ("a kind of staple for us: a cute little ditty, and it's pop").

"I gravitate towards minor keys," reflects Lane when asked what set her most apart from other acts bridging the new wave-pop gap at the time. "Actually with the Chartbusters I started writing in major keys more. But still, that minor key always calls me. And that, right away, kind of sets up the more brooding kind of feel." Some of her lyrics were not out of the radio airplay textbook either: "I remember I was playing 'you digest me with facts like a piece of cheese' [from 'Waitin' in Line']. My publisher goes, 'You can't say that!'"

"I think her history gave her a distinct advantage over a lot of what were considered 'new wave' acts of the time," adds Asa Brebner. "The whole 'new wave' thing was kind of stuck on us because of Leroy Radcliffe['s] and my background with Jonathan Richman and so forth, and that colored how they proceeded to produce and market us. I think we were naive and happy to be signed to a major label, and although we liked [producer] Joe Wissert very much, we just went along with whatever they had planned for us. I think now we could have done a much better job producing ourselves. I still cringe at that album cover, which I think largely sunk us as a candy-ass major label contrivance to those uninitiated to our music. The music itself was watered down enough so it could not overcome that basically cosmetic impression that the casual record store [browser] would garner on seeing it in the bins. It didn't represent us, and I felt cheated."

The album did not widely break the Chartbusters beyond their regional base, and after another live EP and a second album (1981's Imitation Life), they were dropped from Warner Brothers. Although Lane's only sporadically released music since then (most recently on 1995's Catbird Seat), she and the Chartbusters have recently reunited, with all of the original members save Radcliffe. A new album is in the works that will mix newly written songs with others that the group performed live in their original incarnation, but never recorded. Lane is also working on a book about her "kooky crazy peripatetic life in the music world and other planets" that, given a career that has spanned many styles and intersected with many musicians of both star and cult renown, should prove to be quite a ride.

Love these guys! Been meaning to digitize this one for a looong time!

First of all - I like the band America! There, I said it! I forgot that I did until I revisited to their Greatest Hits album again.

Now hear where that kind of sound came from (Trivia: the 1st America album came out a little bit after this album in the same year).

Sounds like America, Dan Fogelberg, Loggins and Messina, etc.




Record Label: Atlantic - Released 1971

Personnel:
Guitar and voices: John Batdorf and Mark Rodney
Vibes and piano: Barry Beckett
Bass: Chris Ethridge and Dave Hood
Drums: Roger Hawkins and John Barbata

Produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Batdorf and Rodney

Songs:

01 - Oh My Surprise
02 - Me and My Guitar
03 - Can You See Him
04 - Workin Man, Blind Man
05 - You Are The One
06 - Don't You Hear Me Callin
07 - Where Were You and I
08 - Never See His Face Again
09 - One Day
10 - Farm
11 - Let Me Go

Encoded @ 320 from original vinyl

Also includes tracklisting, reviews and high quality album artwork sized for a CD cover.

http://rapidshare.com/files/16367592/bdn_ots.rar

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This was Batdorf and Rodney's first album. The song "Can You See Him" received the most airplay on FM radio stations. According to Mark Rodney, he did most of the lead guitar work on this song and this is his favorite song from all of their albums.

Although they first met in high school in Hollywood, California, John and Mark got musically together in the mystical desert of Las Vegas, Nevada in September 1970.

John, originally from Dayton, Ohio was in a Cowsills type band called the "Loved Ones", featuring soap opera star Patty Weaver and her brothers. He was 15 at the time. They signed with Atlantic Records chairman Ahmet Ertugen and moved west, but the band went nowhere.

Mark, who grew up in Hollywood, California came from a famous musical family. As a teenager, he played in various blues bands and jammed with famous bands like the orginal Blues Image, Jimi Hendrix, and many rock stars in Hollywood clubs.

By 1970, both John and Mark had tired of the Los Angeles scene and were both interested in the new music revolution of the 70s....acoustic music! They re-connected in Las Vegas and started playing acoustic guitars together. They were both heavily into the new sound of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, and Simon & Garfunkel. After three months, they had conquered Las Vegas and had enough originals to head back to Los Angeles. By a magic coincidence, Ahmet Ertegun was in Los Angeles and offered to audition them. He immediately signed them to Atlantic Records and produced them himself in legendary Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The group eventually recorded three albums on Atlantic, Asylum (one of their first releases), and Arista Records. The three A's! They toured for five years with groups like Bread, The Youngbloods, Loggins and Messina, Three Dog Night, Dan Fogelberg, Chicago, Seals and Crofts, and every group from that era. They had several regional hits but never broke nationally before they had enough of the business. Batdorf and Rodney were actually before groups like America, Seals and Crofts, and Dan Fogelberg. They were always considered a major influence of that sound.

1 - Tightrope
2 - Lapidary
3 - Eye of the Needle
4 - Candy Man Blues
5 - Ain't Gonna Happen
6 - Polar Bear Rug
7 - House in Central Park
8 - I Am a Want Ad





Encoded @ 320 from original vinyl

Also includes tracklisting, reviews and high quality album artwork

http://rapidshare.com/files/1501424/twd01.rar

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All Music review:
Reviewby Joe Viglione

This exemplary recording by songwriters Aram Schefrin, Mike Zager and singer Genya Ravan was highly experimental in ways that Chicago, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Traffic and other of their contemporaries wanted to be. Imagine Ronnie Spector leaving The Ronettes to join Blood Sweat & Tears, and realize the sweet Goldie Zelkowitz from Goldie & The Gingerbreads did just that by reinventing herself here as the great Genya Ravan. The Ravan co-write Tightrope is five minutes and ten seconds of psychedelic blues/jass/funk. This is the sound Janis Joplin would refine for her Kozmic Blues experience, and while Janis Joplin and Kozmic Blues performed at Woodstock, Ten Wheel Drive were getting such a buzz they turned Woodstock down. History would, indeed, have been different had they played I Am A Want Ad at that event, but with Sid Bernstein as co-manager, and songs like Lapidary, the band had a lot going for it. Lapidary is a complete about face, Traffic's John Barleycorn with a female vocalist. Eye Of The Needle on the other hand, was an eight minute plus show stopper of horns and guitars that come in like some country's national anthem. With Genya's amazing wail at the end it becomes powerful stuff. Songwriter Louie Hoff got to arrange his Candy Man Blues, which puts Genya in a nightclub setting, the piano and flutes changing the mood dramatically. This is such an adventurous and remarkable record by such a talented crew, it is a shame they didn't record twenty or more platters. A Polydor executive made a statement that if they couldn't break Slade they weren't a real company. Polydor did, in fact, fail to launch that British supergroup in America, and one wonders if these recordings were made for another label, if oldies stations wouldn't be playing Ten Wheel Drive today. Ain't Gonna Happen is extraordinary music, a band on the prowl, and a singer that pounces every chance she gets with a voice that does all sorts of wild things. If Polar Bear Rug and House In Central Park were a bit too evolved for Top 40, their A & R man should have brought them a single. Ten Wheel Drive could, like Etta James, play to those who crave this wonderful fusion of jazz and blues with a rock edge. A Ten Wheel Drive reconstructing, bringing this music back onstage, is something that would make the world a better place.

ENJOY!

I kind of run the gamut when it comes to music - don't I?



1. Om Mani Padme Hum:
a) Movement one (7:46)
b) Movement two (4:34)
c) Movement three (3:29)
d) Movement four (4:56)
(one long track)
2. Determination (5:49)
3. Song for a king (5:19)
4. Roof of the world (4:30)
5. Looking in (4:42)

Ripped from vinyl promo copy @ 320

Also includes tracklisting, reviews and album artwork

http://rapidshare.com/files/1501471/mndbd.rar

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Mandalaband was the brainchild of David Rohl, musician, composer, producer and now eminent Egyptologist, Director of the Institute for the study of interdisciplinary Sciences and Editor of the Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum. His was the guiding spirit behind the two albums which appeared on the Chrysalis label under the Mandalaband name in the latter years of the seventies.

To trace their origins, we must journey backwards in time to 1967, when the young David Rohl left school in the midst of his "A" level exams in order to form a band called The Sign Of Life, who played their first London 'gig' at Battersea Town Hall on September 28th, 1968. His interest in mythology in general, and that of Egypt in particular, was reflected in the change of name of this band to Ankh, the hieroglyphic determinative for life in Ancient Egypt. Ankh, by then consisting of entirely different musicians from the earlier band, recorded some demos at Stockport's Strawberry Studios with Eric Stewart, part-owner of the studios, former lead singer of The Mindbenders and later to achieve fame and fortune with 10cc. On the strength of these demos, Ankh were signed up by Vertigo for an album to be produced by BBC DJ Tommy Vance. However, Vertigo declined to issue the finished product, and the band split up. Disillusioned, Rohl went to study photography at Manchester College of Art, during which time he was commissioned to photograph The Moody Blues - examples of his work can be seen on the inside of the gatefold sleeve of A Question Of Balance.

Rohl's next venture drew on his experience of working with Eric Stewart and within his own band, when, at the age of 23, he set up a new recording studio just outside Stockport. Camel Studios, in Poynton, was the birthplace of the original Mandalaband. Tony Cresswell had auditioned as session drummer for Camel Studios and became a founder member of the new band. David and Tony then recruited Vic Emerson, a keyboard virtuoso who worked as an arranger and co-director at Camel before joining the fledgling outfit.

Meanwhile, bassist John Stimpson and lead guitarist Ashley Mulford's band Friends had broken up, and he, too, became part of the band after recording at Camel. The final piece fell into place when David Durant, a singer and friend of Stimpson and Mulford, auditioned and became the voice of Mandalaband.

They quickly drew the attention of major record companies, and Chrysalis won the race to sign them. Their first live gig, at Warwick University on 30th January 1975, was swiftly followed by a support slot on Robin Trower's UK tour in February, but problems arose when Rohl was prevented from producing their debut album, Chrysalis preferring instead to bring in John Alcock. Rohl, who says that he has always been happier in the background than performing in the limelight departed from the band he had founded, and the album, an ambitious concept inspired by the Tibetan people's brave resistance to the Chinese invasion and subsequent occupation of their country, largely written by Rohl, went ahead without him. The recording was not an unqualified success, and Rohl's stand was vindicated when Chrysalis Managing Director, Chris Wright, asked him to return to remix the tapes at Air Studios. Despite his ministrations, the album never quite captured the power and epic sweep of Rohl's original vision. The four movements of "Om Mani Padme Hum", affectionately known as "Oh My Papa" by the band, took up the whole of the first side of the debut album, Mandalaband (Chrysalis CHR 1095), which was released on October 24th, 1975, (and re-issued on CD by Edsel in early 1992). With its mantras taken from Tibet's national anthem, sung in Tibetan over a highly complex arrangement for band, choir and string synthesizers, "Om Mani Padme Hum" was as far outside the mainstream of the 'rock' idiom as it was possible to get, and fell on confused and bemused ears! The album was engineered by Tim Friese-Greene, who is now well-known for his success with the band Talk Talk.

Rohl returned to engineering, at Indigo Sound in Manchester, working with such luminaries as Marc Bolan, Thin Lizzy and Barclay James Harvest, whilst the remainder of the band, with new vocalist Paul Young and an additional guitarist, Ian Wilson, (both formerly of local band Gyro) renamed themselves Sad Café and recorded another album. Chrysalis failed to see their potential, and Sad Café and their album were sold to RCA, with whom they went on to have hits with songs such as "Every Day Hurts" and "My Oh My"; Paul Young also tasted success in Mike And The Mechanics. In 1976, Rohl took over from Eric Stewart as Chief Engineer at Strawberry Studios where he produced a series of albums and singles for artists such as Barclay James Harvest, Maddy Prior, Tim Hart and Roy Hill. Chrysalis retained his services as a writer and performer during this period, and at their suggestion the Mandalaband name was retained for his next project, a series of three albums based around the theme of a fabulous gemstone with mystical properties. The first part of the trilogy, The Eye Of Wendor: Prophecies, was act in a prehistoric world peopled by characters who would not be out of place in a Tolkien bestiary (in fact, the opening theme was originally penned for a soundtrack to The Lord Of The Rings).

Recording the album called for a new approach, Rohl no longer had his own band; instead, he created the "Mandalaband Club" from friends, acquaintances and colleagues met during his many years in the music business. Musicians of the calibre of Justin Hayward, 10cc, Barclay James Harvest, Maddy Prior, Paul Young and many others gave their services free and were recorded singly or in groups in the small boom when the studios were free. The whole album took nearly two years to record, and the resulting tapes were then painstakingly pieced together and mixed down by David with assistance from Martin Lawrence, who was fresh from engineering Godley & Creme's mammoth project, Consequences.

The main characters in the tale of Wendor are played by individual vocalists: Justin Hayward sings the pail of King AEnord, ruler of Carthilias, Maddy Prior plays his daughter, Princess Ursula, and Eric Stewart is Florian, the young hero whom the prophecies tell will retrieve the Eye Of Wendor from the evil Witch Queen, Silesandre. The narrative vocalists, Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley and Paul Young, describe Florian's adventures in his quest and the characters he meets, including Almar the alchemist in his laboratory, the primeval sea-serpent Elsethea and Damien, the old King's heir. The major instrumental contributions were made by Rohl himself, Barclay James Hamest's Woolly Wolstenholme, Kim Turner and Steve Broomhead (who both later joined Woolly in his band Maestoso), Phil Chapman and the late Ritchie Close (to whom this CD release is dedicated), not forgetting members of the Halle Orchestra.

The album, The Eye Of Wendor: Prophecies, was finally released on Chrysalis (CHR 1181) on 12th May, 1978, and, whilst it didn't set the world alight, sold respectably in Britain, Germany, Holland, Canada, Japan and Australia. As time has passed, it has achieved cult status and commands high prices on the collectors’ market. This RPM issue is its first appearance on CD, and is mastered from the original mixdown master tapes to give a new clarity and depth to the album.

The original album included an illustrated story sheet which has been omitted from the CD, as David feels that the music has stood the test of time better than the rather derivative, sub-Tolkien text. That sheet promised that the story was ‘to be continued’: as far as the Mandalaband project was concerned, that rash statement was the kiss of death! Whilst The Eye Of Wendor cost just BP8,000 to complete (a derisory sum for an album of such complexity, even in 1978), any follow-up would have been considerably more expensive, and Chrysalis decided not to take the risk.

However, David has since continued to work occasionally in the industry, collaborating with Woolly Wolstenholme on soundtracks for TV, including Cosgrove Hall's animations for Cinderella, 'The Pied Piper’ (which received two British Academy Awards) and Gerald Durrell's "The Talking Parcel", Thames TV's series "S.W.A.L.K." and "The Squad", and writing the music for "The All Electric Amusement Arcade" on his own. Since then, he has written and produced recordings for the band Vega and a fine song called "Peace On Earth" for a children's version of Live Aid. He continues to study the ancient world, preparing a Ph.D. thesis entitled, A Test of Time: A reinvestigation of the Chaser of the Ancient World, and is currently planning a TV project which would combine the two abiding themes in his life - music and the study of Man's ancient past.

In the meantime, we could do a lot worse than re-appraise his earlier work; The Eye Of Wendor has worn very well, and repeated listens reveal hitherto unnoticed nuances in the music, which make each playing a voyage of discovery. The Eye Of Wendor has a strange history, but it lives on, and we are now its guardians - the story continues…

Keith Domone, 1992