Comus

Some records manifest Evil and don't even grant the tormented grace of an exorcism. They're haunted by ghosts, demons and nightmares, and yet - or precisely because of that - they exert an irresistible magnetism. You have to reckon with the dark forces of this world, look them in the eye at the risk of falling in. Because if the sirens' song is dangerous, their silence is even more fearsome.

For forty-five years, unwitting treasure hunters have kept running aground along the routes to perdition charted by "First Utterance", enchanted by sadistic folk melodies about murder and abominations, by sibylline arrangements redolent of chamber music, and by an attitude as prog in its rhythmic development as it is psychedelic in its epileptic instrumental sarabands. A wicked, seductive potion, unique and unmatched, brewed in the cauldron of British acid-folk that, over the span of three years - between 1969 and 1972 - produced not only masterpieces of medieval fascination courtesy of Incredible String Band, C.O.B. and Strawbs, but also buried dark gems under the dust of time, exhumed only by the reissue market with the advent of the internet: the enchanting (and enchanted) "Full Circle" by Forest, the Anglo-Saxon folk turned West Coast psychedelia of Trees' "On The Shore", and "St. Radigunds", the sinister debut by Spirogyra - the only work whose mood can be vaguely likened to the Comus debut, which nonetheless remains an album that stands in a category of its own, one that anticipated the apocalyptic folk of Current 93 and Death In June, as well as inspiring esoteric bands like Opeth.

Among the Greeks, Comus was a supernatural entity who presided over drunken excess and dissolution. In 1634, John Milton revived this mythological figure to make him the subject of a masque - a genre of masked pantomime, accompanied by music and dance, staged at British courts - turning him into a woodland faun on the hunt for young virgins to corrupt. It was Robert Youle, a university classmate of Roger Wootton's and future manager of Comus, who suggested his friend use Milton's masque as the name for the band he was putting together, since the only two original compositions in the repertoire at the time - "The Bite" and "Drip Drip" - exuded unhealthy instincts and ancestral urges.

Back then - around 1968 or so - Comus were a work in progress. Wootton and Glenn Goring had played together since their school days, when they discovered a shared passion for Pentangle and, above all, Velvet Underground, whose repertoire they reworked in acoustic form for the folk clubs of Kent. Trawling through college acquaintances, the two friends later recruited a violinist, Colin Pearson, and one evening decided to poach bassist Andy Hellaby from an unknown band playing at the Beckenham Arts Lab. But that wasn't enough. For Wootton's new songs to take on the shape of proper pagan rituals meant to celebrate Milton's character, something was still missing.

What was missing, first of all, was a multi-instrumentalist able to play the bongos as if officiating a bacchanal, while also handling flute and oboe in the manner of satyrs with the aulos. They found him in Rob Young, who actually arrived to replace the recently departed Mike Rose, a flautist of Jamaican descent whom Wootton and Goring had recruited via an ad placed in Melody Maker.

Also missing was a female voice - the Apollonian to feed to the Dionysian. They found that too. It was sixteen-year-old Bobbie Watson, met at a party, who provided the angelic vocalizing to be offered up in sacrifice to the pandemonium, like abjured purity, innocence corrupted by the allure of crime.

The songs on "First Utterance" somehow herald a return to a pre-Christian realm, envisioning an amoral arcadia where nothing is forbidden and man can freely unleash his animal instincts, without asking permission of any social law, let alone feeling obliged to answer for it to a merciful God. If there's a shred of mysticism in this music, it's a gnostic, occult mysticism. If there's a god to celebrate, that god is only the perverse Comus, whose revelation is steeped in malevolent prophecies. The first is the rape enacted in "Diana", a conclave of sorcerers gathered around a fire lit by orgiastic percussion and a licentious viola that invites the gypsy spirit of Bela Bartok - whom Colin Pearson followed closely - to a Walpurgis Night. Then comes the slaughter of "Drip Drip", its slide-guitar intro foreshadowing the gushing flow of blood ("Drip drip from your flaccid lips a red liquid floods your body"), its feral drumming inflicting violent blows, and a Mephistophelian voice obsessively repeating: "I'll be kind to you, I won't hurt you". Finally we reach the tortures of "The Prisoner", the psychotic soliloquy of a madman locked away in an asylum, subjected to shock treatments.

The manifesto of the album and of Comus's entire aesthetic is the dithyramb "Song To Comus", an unbridled ode for guitar, shamanic percussion and blazing flute that revives the glories of the komos, the collective ritual of alcoholic and sexual abandon in vogue in Ancient Greece. In certain passages it almost sounds like Jethro Tull raised on occultism and LSD, and indeed, when Wootton wrote the piece - putting himself in the shoes of King Comus - he was under the effect of an acid trip.

On the opposite end, the only moment of bucolic respite, though wrapped in an atmosphere of palpable esotericism, is the daydream of "The Herald". In the original edition the track ran five and a half minutes, while later reissues would instead opt for a twelve-minute version, crystallized in Glenn Goring's fingerpicked harmonic progressions and Bobbie Watson's alchemical melismas.

An album dealing with rape, mental illness and murder could hardly avoid being crowned with an iconic cover to match its content. It's an allegory of the primal scream, a fantastic pen drawing – made by Roger Wootton himself when he was still a teenager – depicting an abominable creature dragging itself laboriously across the floor. Despite the repellent imagery and disturbed themes, "First Utterance" was initially meant to be released by a record industry giant like Rca, but due to internal upheavals at the label, the deal fell through. The lost deal had no particular repercussions for Roger Wootton's commune. If anything, among the regulars at the Arts Lab – the venue where Comus first played live – was a certain David Bowie, who was so spellbound by their acid-folk covens that he invited them to play at the Purcell Room in June 1970. Around the same time, director Lindsay Shonteff cast them for the softcore film "Permissive", himself equally struck by a hair-raising audition during which Wootton, having cut his finger on a guitar string, began spurting blood in gushes while the rest of the band carried on playing an accelerated version of "Venus In Furs".

These two moments of pure underground legend served as a prelude to the interest of Dawn, a Pye subsidiary label specializing in prog and occult folk, which pressed the first run of "First Utterance". Around ten thousand copies, a laughably small number from which one must still subtract a fair share of unsold stock that, over time, has delighted collectors, not least because on the first pressing the tracks' listed running times are completely off from their actual length. Left off the album's final tracklist were two songs – "In The Lost Queen's Eyes" and "Winter Is A Coloured Bird" – which, together with "The Prisoner", made up the demo originally sent to Rca. They would later be recovered on the anthology "Song To Comus", alongside the wondrous chant of "All The Colours Of Darkness". All the colours of darkness, even though darkness has no colour. Still, it must be reckoned with. That's what Comus's music is here for.

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09/10/2016