Barclay James Harvest

Barclay James Harvest are the symbol of another era of the record industry.

They came together in late 1966 in Oldham, near Manchester, formed by Les Holroyd (bass), John Lees (guitar), Wolly Wolstenholme (keyboards) and Mel Pritchard (drums), with the first three alternating on lead vocals and backing harmonies.

In 1969 they managed to sign to Harvest, a label owned by EMI and set up specifically to distribute bands belonging to the fledgling progressive rock movement: in retrospect, it's striking how, back then, major-label executives were not only able to correctly read the times, but took it upon themselves to bankroll new musical directions with no guarantee of a return.

This isn't meant, of course, to wax nostalgic about the good old days and set them against some supposed decline today: conditions were, in fact, completely different. The market for LPs, i.e. albums, was at the time in constant expansion, and the climate favourable enough to provide the kind of security needed for those at the top to take on the responsibility of betting on something with no guarantees at all. Reverse the conditions, and yesterday's executives would behave like today's, and vice versa.

Barclay James Harvest recorded no fewer than four albums for Harvest, with an eye-watering outlay of funds: a big-name producer (Norman Smith, who had already been at the helm for Pink Floyd and Pretty Things), an entire orchestra at their disposal, conducted first by Robert John Godfrey (later the mastermind behind The Enid) and then by Martyn Ford (on his way to becoming one of the most in-demand conductors in British rock), and every piece of technology available at the time (Hammond organ, Moog synthesizers, at least two models of Mellotron).

None of these records ever charted, neither in Britain nor in any other country. The costs were only partially recouped, and yet it took no fewer than four attempts before Harvest decided to end the relationship. In more recent times things would have gone very differently.

The rest of the story is even more surprising: after such a failure, logic would suggest that any other high-profile record company would have refused to sign the quartet. Instead, they signed to Polydor in the blink of an eye.

The new album, "Everyone Is Everybody Else" (1974), shows more attention to budget than its predecessors, dropping the orchestra in favour of the Mellotron. The producer, Rodger Bain, however, failed to satisfy the band: accustomed to producing hard rock bands like Black Sabbath and Budgie, his way of working didn't quite mesh with Barclay James Harvest's symphonic ambitions.

This album, too, was a commercial failure, but in the meantime, through sheer persistence, the band had managed to build a solid reputation as a live act. That same summer the group played at London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane and at a stadium in Liverpool: these two dates were captured on "Live", a double vinyl LP that hit the shops in November '74.

The tracklist centres on the most recent album, which supplies five of the eleven songs, while the rest comes from the Harvest-era albums, with the exception of the debut, now generally regarded by the band's followers as too immature - and probably judged in much the same way by the members themselves at the time.

The record entered the British chart for the first time, at number 40. It was only a few thousand copies, but for the band it marked the first time their work had generated any kind of financial return for a record label.

In terms of critical standing and collectability, the album's reputation today is excellent: most guides consider it the band's masterpiece, as well as a classic of symphonic-leaning progressive rock and one of the essential listens for Mellotron enthusiasts.

Its cult status among enthusiasts curiously rests on the very poor reputation that dogs the band more generally: their early albums are considered a case of prog that was already behind the times, unable to compete with the complex structures of Genesis, Yes or King Crimson, and instead echoing the baroque-pop leanings of the Moody Blues, who at least had the advantage of having invented that formula and of arguably being the very first prog band. Neither the timing nor the style, then, worked in Barclay James Harvest's favor: "Live" manages to turn these opinions on their head.

Its tracklist contains all their cult songs, and the new versions are all decisively superior to their studio counterparts.

In terms of structure: several songs are stretched out by a minute or two, and "Medicine Man" is entirely reworked, with the addition of an instrumental surge that pushes it past the ten-minute mark, against the original four.

In terms of tone: in the studio the band works best when conjuring pastoral moods, less so when it needs to sound aggressive. On the album "Everyone Is Everybody Else", for instance, Bain opted for a particularly compressed sound for the electric guitars, whose grain never quite gels with the rest of the arrangement, especially against the acoustic elements (over the years the band has repeatedly voiced its dissatisfaction with the sound of that record).

Live, by contrast, Lees chose to record all the parts on electric guitar, simply removing the distortion on what were originally acoustic passages, achieving a tighter overall sound: moreover, even the beefier parts retain a symphonic tone that in the studio was usually smothered by compression.

In terms of creativity: it's often said that throughout the history of popular music, technological or financial limitations have spurred the creativity of those forced to work around them. That's certainly true of the shows Barclay James Harvest faced on that tour: Polydor had signed them, but they had lost the backing of an orchestra, which on paper would have ruled out a good chunk of their older repertoire.

The band then decided to use the Mellotron as a replacement: no easy bet, since for "Medicine Man", "Galadriel" and "Mockingbird" it meant rethinking the arrangement from scratch, stripping out the orchestral dynamics and replacing them with a wall of pre-recorded tape that risked flattening them.

Wolstenholme, however, proved to be one of the most skilled manipulators of the instrument around at the time: not only did the new songs lose none of their dynamism, they actually gained in charm, taking on a darker sound capable of tempering any baroque preciousness the orchestra might have brought.

The remaining tracks, which already featured Mellotron, were bolstered too, with the dosage turned up: for example, where in "After The Day" the instrument used to come and go, in the new version its presence is constant.

It's also mixed at a higher volume: in some cases it originally served merely as embellishment, but here it ends up filling every empty space. You could say "Live" is an album not merely characterized by that famous keyboard, but downright saturated with it.

It should of course be noted that the Mellotron parts heard on the record are not the same ones Wolstenholme played live: for technical reasons the instrument couldn't be recorded during the shows and was added afterwards in the studio, though this changes nothing from a listening standpoint (and besides, if we started nitpicking every live rock album that was touched up in post-production, probably only bootlegs would survive the cut).

For all these reasons, "Live" is rightly regarded as the record with which the band shook off, at least for a while, its status as a second-tier act, handing down to posterity a work that this time feared comparison with none of the bigger names.

It can be enjoyed either by comparing its versions to the studio originals, in order to better grasp the process of reinvention behind it, or simply as a standalone album, perfectly listenable on its own terms. Indeed, beyond the appreciation for the band's skill in reimagining these songs, what remains at their core are the moods of the most fairy-tale-like, romantic strain of prog: "Galadriel" is a Tolkien character, "Mockingbird" has the tone of an ancient traditional ballad about lost time, "The Great 1974 Mining Disaster" reworks a Bee Gees hit ("New York Mining Disaster 1941") giving it symphonic weight, "Negative Earth" tells of an escape from the frenzy of the city towards a bucolic country life, and so on.

From that point on, Barclay James Harvest's career would be a steady rise: not so much in Britain, actually (where they nonetheless managed to land a couple of albums in the top 20), but in Germany, where quite unexpectedly they became one of the most popular rock bands of the late Seventies and early Eighties.

A hint of the triumph to come was the album "Gone to Earth" (1977), which reached number 10 on the German charts and proved to be a remarkable long seller, staying in the top fifty for a staggering 189 weeks, while the peak came with the live album "A Concert For The People (Berlin)", with which in 1982 they reached number 1.

Their concerts in that period came to draw a hundred thousand people per date, and the band, by then reduced to a trio after Wolstenholme's departure, found itself becoming one of the local symbols of the thaw between the West and the socialist republics, when it was invited to play in East Berlin on July 14, 1987. Not bad, considering that at the start of their career they'd been dismissed as "the poor man's Moody Blues".

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23/01/2022