Black Widow

Among the various strands running through rock music in the second half of the '60s — some stemming from American psychedelia (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead or Doors), others from British progressive rock (King Crimson) — there was one far more hidden and genuinely underground current that, within a few years, fought its way through widespread suspicion to emerge with a respectable identity of its own. Rock music that had set out to open minds, to seek out light and multicolored landscapes (psychedelic rock), and that crossed paths with the balladeers of imaginary worlds (progressive rock), now fell under the ambiguous spell of darkness, thanks to a growing fascination with occultism and esotericism.

This fascination had already surfaced in 1969 in Chicago with the debut of Coven ("Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls"), a band that — within an otherwise typical psych-rock framework — enriched its lyrics with satanic themes and updated its image with clothing and makeup drawing on esotericism. Even though they were pioneers in this respect, Coven's music has very little that's actually satanic about it, aside from the lyrics and a certain aesthetic taste; their live shows were not so different from those of any other American psychedelic band, and musically too they were fully in line with their contemporaries. Not long after, Britain gave us the legendary Black Sabbath ("Black Sabbath", 1970) and the lesser-known Leaf Hound ("Growers Of Mushroom", 1971), who, with far heavier doses of guitar, managed to bring still-niche lyrics and sounds to a wider audience. The case of Black Widow, however, is different enough to still stand today as a landmark example of that movement that has gone down in history as occult-rock or dark-prog.

Black Widow formed in Leicester in the late '60s out of the ashes of a soul group, Pesky Gee; unsatisfied with the results, drummer Clive Box — a devotee of black magic — proposed a radical shift: staging a series of live shows entirely built around esotericism and the invocation of demons (Astaroth was chosen), complete with a human sacrifice at the climax of the concert. To pull this off, every member of the band began studying the subject and even consulted the expert on pagan religions and British Wicca priest Alex Sanders, who became their advisor for the live shows. The concept was certainly groundbreaking, and — after changing their name to the far more fitting Black Widow — their first shows kicked off, quickly becoming a genuine theatrical avant-garde, redefining what a rock concert could be.

Their first show took place at the Leicester Phoenix Theatre; it was announced in advance that the performance would invoke the demon Astaroth, to whom a naked woman (Maxine Sanders, Alex's wife) would be sacrificed on stage by singer Kip Trevor. For 1970, this was simply too much; Catholic associations gathered outside the theatre entrance trying to talk young people out of going in, even handing out flyers to parents at schools to stop kids from attending the concert. Despite this, the show was a success, as were all those that followed. At London's Lyceum Ballroom, where the venue owners had explicitly asked them to drop the sacrifice scene, Black Widow defied the request, and a group of bouncers stormed the stage to stop the show; the ensuing chaos was such that photos of it ended up on the front page of the News Of The World the following day. In the United States — a country still reeling from the horrors of the Charles Manson murders — things went even worse: esoteric lyrics, occultism and satanism became easy targets for religious groups, who launched veritable "crusades" against "Sacrifice".

Black Widow's stylistic and aesthetic hallmarks are numerous; to begin with, there's the theatrical dimension already described, along with the ritual aspect drawn from the pagan religion of Wicca. Musically, though, they broke away from the typical psych-rock band, embracing sounds rich in instruments like flute, sax and clarinet, which take precedence over the guitar and recall that strand of prog-rock closer to Jethro Tull. The psychedelic element remains, especially in Zoot Taylor's keyboards, which recall those on Doors tracks, while a strong hard-rock streak also surfaces in rare moments, lending energy and drive, especially at the climactic point of the human sacrifice. Also worth noting is the inclusion of tribal music elements, evident in the repetitive, hypnotic percussion running through several tracks.

"Come To The Sabbath" immediately stirs the senses with tribal percussion that seems to draw us into an ancient pagan ritual; the obsessive choral invocation of evil spirits is undeniably unsettling ("Come, Come, Come To The Sabbath… Satan's There"), but it's offset by Clive Jones's flute — a would-be Anderson — which lightens the track with touches of fairy-tale prog. The almost liturgical passages of "In Ancient Days", cradled by organ and sax and evoking lost civilizations and their long-vanished rituals, give way to the repetitive rhythms of "Conjuration", essentially an ode to the demon Astaroth built on percussion and sax, then to the more straightforward rock of "Attack Of The Demon", which betrays its roots in their soul beginnings, and finally to the hippie-festival feel of "Way To Power", reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane. Against this backdrop, the weak bossa nova-tinged ballad "Seduction" feels like an intruder.

But the true high points of "Sacrifice", the prelude to the grim human sacrifice, are unquestionably found in the eleven minutes of the title track (written, like the rest of the album, by guitarist Jim Gannon), a genuine whirlwind of percussion, progressive folk, phenomenal keyboard trips in the style of Ray Manzarek, constant shifts between frenetic rhythms and long flute interludes over a hypnotic backdrop; the sacrifice takes place in the finale — a deafening hard-rock frenzy in the style of Deep Purple's "Child In Time" — bringing to an epic close a pioneering album that helped bear witness to an alternative way of experiencing rock music at the end of the '60s.

The story of Black Widow is unique, an unrepeatable experience, the offspring of a historical era long since ended. Their influence is enormous, and the subsequent history of the relationship between rock and satanism is so vast as to be almost endless; the sounds would grow ever more brutal, drifting far from the world of progressive and folk, but finding the sincerity of the original Black Widow in their future imitators will not be easy.

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07/05/2017