Family

Family isn't necessarily synonymous with sound principles: intimacy and complicity are ambiguous terms, which can also be declined in a libertarian key (the commune) or a criminal one (the crime syndicate). The first meaning has always found broad favour on psychedelic turf: think of the lively brood of Gong, or the "family that plays together" ethos of Spirit. When it's a character like Kim Fowley doing the christening, though, the second hypothesis seems far more credible.

The five lads from Leicester are hardly a Manson-style cult, but they're no meek disciples of a religious brotherhood either: raised amid the suburbs, weaned on rhythm'n'blues in smoky dives, they soon strayed from the straight and narrow (and from their original name, the Farinas) among the hippie enclaves of Chelsea and the lysergic all-nighters at the Ufo Club. A family they may be, but there's precious little "traditional" about them, starting with Roger Chapman's voice: a histrionic, nerve-shredding vibrato, the wail of a goat about to be sacrificed. England in the late Sixties was hardly short of "black" voices (think of Steve Winwood or Robert Plant), but Chapman's has no gender markers whatsoever, barely even human ones: less a "screamer" than an alien. On top of singing, he plays harmonica and saxophone, and those aren't the only instruments in the lineup foreign to a standard rock quartet: violin, cello, another sax, keyboards of every timbre. A small orchestra, in effect.

And yet tradition is very much present. In the music, which engages with folk, blues and jazz without a hint of fear ("Fearless" would, tellingly, be the title of one of their most acclaimed albums), but also in the aesthetic they adopted: that of the delightfully British vignette, steeped in everything His Majesty's subjects had ever cultivated (music-hall, vaudeville, Victorian ditties). If anything, it's the attitude that shows little reverence: irreverent and unpredictable, Family quickly made a name for themselves thanks to their wild live shows. This isn't, though, a European answer to the politicised freak-outs of the Fugs or to Zappa-esque satire, but rather a playful pataphysics that anticipates the fairy-tale avant-garde of Canterbury, also kin to the end-of-empire cartoons of the Kinks and the surreal humour of the Beatles.

It's the Beatles, in fact, who end up unwittingly upstaged by the Holy Family's debut: they'd been toying for months with a title and cover art nodding to Ibsen's classic, only to find themselves beaten to the punch, eventually settling for the pure white pantone that likewise proved lucky for them. Good thing too for Chapman and co., who couldn't have chosen a better calling card: theirs is, in effect, an enchanted house made up of countless musical rooms, a wunderkammer displaying some of the most outlandish phantasmagoria around. Not just songs, but comic interludes, found sounds, noise, internal rhymes, in a perpetual circus act transfigured onto the page of a comic strip.

There's still very much a freakbeat air to the sound (the fuzz of John Whitney's guitar), to the effects (Rob Townsend's drums run through the flanger), to the studio tricks (tape run in reverse) and to certain "ethnic" flourishes (the obligatory sitar), but all of it filed down with an aristocratic, arty touch: if not the inventors of progressive, Family were effectively the ferrymen between the two musical shores — or, if you prefer, the lift connecting the two floors of the house. And wouldn't you know it, the new savannah's reigning lion here is the mellotron. The artwork itself, with its taste somewhere between a children's book and an art catalogue, kicks off a graphic trend that would define an era and turn LPs into small objets d'art. The journey from over-the-top rascals to sophisticated harpsichord-strokers recalls that of another great institution of English rock, the Pretty Things, fellow travellers at the Ufo and, that very year, at work on their own most famous record. The finishing touch comes from the arrangements of the young Mike Batt and the production of Dave Mason, a kindred spirit to the antics of these lovable tumblers.

The manifesto is spelled out in black and white by the dazzling "The Chase": the incipit is a raging swirl of choirs and cellos anticipating the hysterical boilings of Magma, before being defused first by a frothy meringue of brass, then by a vortex of pitch-shifting that owes something to the late Russian Romanticism of Mussorgsky or Borodin. Amid this dizzying alternation of drama and parody, it's Chapman's dazzling presence that stands tallest, summing up a stormy relationship with apocalyptic theatricality ("Feel like a fox/ Hounds close at heels at the chase/ Do I see blood in your eyes, babe?/ Is it the end of the race?").

As anguished as the opening was, the following "Mellowing Gray" is just as relaxed: a baroque ballad with a pastoral tone, where amorous feeling is transfigured into tender bucolic metaphors. A mood that carries over into "Never Like This", introduced by a sardonic harmonica, though this time the wonder feels artificial: it's a purely chemical marvel, the little family portrait in which "Her mother is smiling across from the sofa/ Dad's watching the telly but taking no notice/ Instead he just plays with some bright colored blocks", while the protagonist confusedly declares: "Been through this before, but never like this".

The martial little march "Me My Friend" would seem to signal a return to sanity, but that's only an impression: the urge for psychotropic escape is still very much there, in the thoughts of a man who seems to have seen it all yet longs only to "Sail to the stars/ Have the gift to transport/ My whole being, my whole thought/ To a world of dreams", in a burst of hippie utopianism almost mocked by the brief interlude "Variation Of A Theme Of Hey Mr. Policeman". Two more of these "variations" will appear, each based on a track from the tracklist ("The Breeze" and the aforementioned "Me My Friend" respectively, the latter complete with sitar), further proof of the album's strongly unified character.

Naivety turns to urgency in the solid pianism of "Winter", where winter is a metaphor for a state of oppression to be thawed into a liberating summer of the senses ("Wish that I could hibernate/ Go to sleep and never wake/ Until the sun comes shining once again"), evoked by a lazily fluttering violin.

Dominated by Whitney's scorching wah-wah and the horns of jazz veteran Tubby Hayes, "Old Songs New Songs" turns up the heat and seems to adopt a more linear structure, but the staging remains hallucinatory both in the music (stitched through with a Gregorian insert) and in the lyrics (which scramble the blues cliché of discovered infidelity by flipping the roles and distorting the setting).

Providing the balance is the prison lament of "Hey Mr. Policeman", which preserves those same vibrations while diluting them in a broth of violin, saxophone, slide guitar and organ, this time without any plot twists. The lyrics too gain in clarity, unveiling in a shrewd finale a macabre irony worthy of a murder ballad.

Incense burns once more over the dazzling "See Through Windows", yet another journey beyond perceptual appearances, with Chapman's cavernous harmonica caught between the terse piano breaks (reality) and the ethereal flights of the mellotron (illusion), culminating in one of the most menacing pronouncements of the psychedelic era: "Slowly but surely you start coming closer to it". The goal is the longed-for "Peace Of Mind", introduced by a pounding John Barry-esque theme that collapses into a majestic Celtic charge, reached however only at the visionary peak of Family: "Voyage" is a strikingly vivid trip that captures both the sensory disorientation ("A veil unfolds across my eyes/ A shadow falls on open skies/ Seeds of doubt leave me without/ Any idea of my whereabouts/ Where do I look for proof?/ Who do I ask and what do I say/ As I sail on my voyage of truth?") and the philosophical doubts ("Is a red rose red to a man who's blind?") of a clouded mind, aided by a repertoire of noise, echoes and rustles from who knows what dimension.

Having brushed against such flashes of inner depth, all that's left is to drift into the placid oasis of "The Breeze", with the narrator turning into exactly what the title promises: a soft gust of breeze caressing natural and man-made landscapes, invisible yet utterly tangible. We're jolted awake by the soprano sax of "3 X Time", which moves from folk madrigal to drunken fanfare before one last situationist surprise: a brass-band caricature of "God Save The Queen" that, in terms of punk iconoclasm, outdoes the Sex Pistols by almost a decade.

The 2012 CD version adds two bonus tracks: "Scene From The Eye Of A Lens" and "Gypsy Woman". A noteworthy discographic detail: this was the first non-American album released by the legendary Reprise, Frank Sinatra's label, considered impregnable for a band from the other side of the Atlantic.

Starting with the follow-up "Family Entertainment", the sound would begin to solidify, tempering the band's eccentricities without disowning their acrobatic eclecticism. The band would appear at some of the era's most notable gatherings (Fillmore East, the Brian Jones Memorial, the Isle of Wight) and would see major names pass through its ranks, confirming its undisputed centrality in the British scene (bassist Ric Grech would go on to join Blind Faith and then Traffic, his replacement John Wetton joining King Crimson). They would disband in 1973, after seven albums and remarkably few dips in quality. Chapman's earth-shaking voice would go on to inspire pretty much everyone: Peter Gabriel, Peter Hammill, Ian Anderson, David Surkamp, perhaps even David Thomas.

An impeccable snapshot of its era, a keystone between two worlds and a hymn to boundless imagination, "Music In A Doll's House" remains a reliable map for exploring the twisted recesses of perfidious Albion, and one of its happiest creations in absolute terms.

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20/09/2020