High Tide

The personal history of High Tide's members is shrouded in mystery: as a band whose memory survives today only thanks to the collectors' market, they've never been the subject of in-depth research.

What is known is that guitarist Tony Hill, hailing from some unspecified corner of the surrounding provinces, joined the beat scene of mid-Sixties London and settled into that underground circle in which Mick Farren, future singer of the Deviants, was one of the most prominent names.

Between go-to venues and lodgings provided by rich kids, or otherwise shared and paid for communally, a web soon formed that allowed for lightning-fast rises and brought together deserving unknowns with artists who had already made a name for themselves, completely dissolving the class conflict and the friction between merit and privilege (which continued to define English society outside this bubble).

Hill would recall that High Tide were still in their infancy when they were given a rehearsal room next to that of celebrities such as Blind Faith, just as he happened to play alongside a freshly-debuted David Bowie at some concerts that blended folk songs with the art of mime.

High Tide came together after Hill, having passed through a string of now-forgotten beat bands (among them the Answers and the American expatriates Misunderstood), met, within the network just described, two young talents: Simon House, a conservatory student little inclined to academic discipline, and Peter Pavli. Both played bass, but when Hill discovered House's classical training and his skill on the violin, he suggested he join the new lineup in that unprecedented role, thus leaving room for Pavli. Drummer Roger Hadden, meanwhile, was recruited through the connections of the Liberty record label, which signed the band essentially blind: the guarantee of their friend Denny Gerrard (former leader of a few beat outfits likewise lost to the mists of time), who at that point was trying to reinvent himself as a manager, would prove sufficient.

Gerrard also attempts one last shot as a solo singer, recruiting the newly formed High Tide themselves as his backing band: the resulting album, "Sinister Morning", effectively marks their entry into the recording studio, in the spring of 1969 (though it was released, with considerable delay, only a year later, and quickly sank into obscurity). The sound is an interesting blend of folk rock, beat and acid-tinged shades, in the wake of LSD: the quartet's true character, however, has yet to emerge.

That character emerges with the first album under the High Tide name, "Sea Shanties" (1969), a furious tangle of psychedelia, hard rock and proto-prog: the wall of sound – at times overlapping, at times harmonized – created by Hill's guitar and House's electric violin, powerful and violent in impact, is nowadays enthusiastically cited by the most refined heavy metal aficionados, who see in those searing screeches the origins of their own universe.

It's the second album, however, that meets with less enthusiasm among devotees due to its slightly lower volume, which is where High Tide reach the peak of their originality, forging a formula with few equals, capable of building improbable and daring bridges between different corners of popular music. It's simply titled "High Tide" and hits stores in July 1970.

The band records it in London, partly at Morgan Studios and partly at Olympic, assisted by George Chkiantz in his first role as producer (he had already worked as a sound engineer for several British bands, including Small Faces and Soft Machine, and would soon go on to work with Family, Hawkwind and King Crimson). His skill makes the sound far clearer and more detailed than the untamed racket of "Sea Shanties", which by comparison sounds almost like a demo.

The differences from the first album don't end there: whereas that record consisted of six tracks built around Hill's riffs and melodies, more or less stretched out, here there are only three, none under eight minutes, and the whole band takes part in the creative process, balanced between progressive suite and psychedelic jam.

Chkiantz turns down the volume of guitar and violin, which remain the stars of the show but now leave room for the rest of the arrangement to breathe: this allows the rhythm section's fine nuances to come through (particularly Pavli's bass, tuned like a cello), while the fabric of the music is enriched by the occasional contribution of acoustic guitars and keyboards (the latter played in turn by various members).

High Tide's new sound, however, isn't simply a matter of internal balance within the band: it also absorbs the vibrations of the cultural landscape surrounding it, namely the era in which British cinema was giving rise to the folk horror movement. In mid-1968, released in close succession, came Michael Reeves's "Witchfinder General" and Terence Fisher's "The Devil Rides Out", starring Vincent Price and Christopher Lee respectively as the headline names. Five years of cult films in that vein would follow, culminating in 1973 with Robin Hardy's "The Wicker Man", after which the trend would fade away.

"High Tide" thus arrives right in the middle of this figurative current, in which Christianity appears terrified by sexuality, especially when embodied by the female body, and ready to forcibly smother any form of hedonism. The genre shouldn't be read as anti-Christian, though, but rather as either wholly anti-religious, or simply as a portrait of human nature (in which case religions would be a mere pretext for pillorying the instincts that even today, on numerous occasions, still manage to prevail over reason). Indeed, before long the films in this vein become overrun with elements of the paganism that predated Britain's evangelization: the old religion comes off even worse, with its followers constantly falling into gruesome ceremonies, sacrificing human beings (often young ones), gorging themselves in honor of chaotic demons, and living in unhygienic conditions (one could read into this a depiction of hippie culture, which was falling apart at just that moment, under the weight of its own disorganization, with its most extreme fringes on their way to founding cults of fanatics and outcasts).

Folk horror shows the rural villages of the British hinterland and the small islands that make up its archipelago, exploiting their isolation from civilization as a narrative device for enacting descents into the occult, often drawing on local symbols and mythology: right at the end of 1970 comes "The Ballad Of Tam Lin", directed by Roddy McDowall and based on the folk ballad of the same name (among other things reinterpreted the year before by Fairport Convention on "Liege & Lief", one of the cornerstones of British music).

It's fairly obvious that the mainstream spotlight doesn't much care for this cross-pollination between music and cinema, allied in portraying an animalistic humanity that rejects progress and is relentlessly eroded by superstition and urges apparently reprehensible to the civilized eye: almost all the releases in question, whether on film or on vinyl, would fail to break out of their own specific market niche.

In any case, in the same year as "High Tide", Black Widow release "Sacrifice" and Spirogyra release "St. Radigunds", while shortly after it's the turn of Comus with "First Utterance" and Jan Dukes De Grey with "Mice And Rats In The Loft", albums that all more or less belong to this same imagery, even while expressing it through different sounds.

"High Tide" opens with "Blankman Cries Again", which describes a group of people stranded in Antarctica and doomed to wander until they freeze to death, spilling over into a symbolist delirium with spiritual undertones: "Born of the massacre and cast into darkness, fallen for the duality of wisdom, scented with flowers and deadly [with] thorns, some are born of pain and others of contempt".

Hill sings in a deep voice that can recall the ceremonial tone Jim Morrison adopted in the most mystical passages of the Doors, carrying it into an unprecedented rural dimension.

The band's sound is built on a dark folk rock, with distorted guitars marked by wah wah that comes and goes, while House's violin turns into a kind of demonic fiddle: the comparison with Dave Swarbrick of Fairport Convention comes naturally, his style being just as frenzied, though he doesn't share the same darkness and seems instead intent on exorcising it. With a bit of imagination, we might cast House as the Saruman and Swarbrick as the Gandalf of the violin within British rock.

The finale is taken up by a jam built on an ostinato from House, whose violin overdubs hammering piano chords, while Hill lets loose with a bizarre solo blending raga-like hypnosis with blues licks.

"The Joke" opens with an instrumental introduction split into small sections, where you can find clean guitar scales treated with echo, tempo changes, an effects-laden violin that ends up sounding like a flute, and rougher passages built around the fuzz pedal. The song proper features a verse dominated by organ chords, but even this is short-lived, spilling first into an electric jam and finally into a folk section for violin and acoustic guitar.

Through convoluted wordplay, Hill wonders whether laughing at a joke before it's due to be told could be considered heresy, and therefore a crime, plunging the listener into that severe (and often fictionalized) medieval age that dominates the collective imagination, where even laughter is an enemy: note that Umberto Eco's "Il nome della rosa" would not be published for another ten years.

That's how the first side of the vinyl ends, while the second is taken up entirely by "Saneonymous" (for some reason rendered as "Saneonimous" on streaming services), whose title fuses the words "sane" and "anonymous", though neither concept is actually mentioned in the lyrics (here too symbols and spiritual introspection intermingle, though perhaps more haphazardly than on the first side).

This is a fourteen-minute suite, the most complex piece High Tide ever recorded. The instrumental introduction (roughly the first three minutes) has the band playing in 4/4, but with the accents shifted due to an additive rhythmic scheme, not unlike those found in Bulgarian folk music. That might explain why it sounds as close to jazz-rock as to gypsy music, with House's violin leading the charge (the following year Jerry Goodman of the Mahavishnu Orchestra would arrive to prove once and for all the instrument's usefulness in a jazz-rock context: seen in this light, House's work looks even more ahead of its time).

After a brief fragment (from roughly 3'05" to 3'22") featuring saturated guitar and a bass glissando, the track settles into song form, with acoustic guitars, piano, a perpetual violin solo weaving under Hill's voice, and a 5/4 pulse (sometimes wrongly touted online as polyrhythm, perhaps due to a couple of unusual violin and drum entrances). The various sections of the composition alternate and repeat until the record ends.

"High Tide" is an album that sounds like nothing else in the prog landscape, so much so that many wonder whether it might be more accurate to call it a final gasp of the psychedelic era. It can certainly be linked to what's known as "heavy psych", which is nevertheless a school apart from the psychedelic pop rock typical of the Sixties: it is indeed a derivation of it, but shifted forward in time, initially tied to hard rock and later, precisely, to progressive rock (so much so that in a country like Japan it ended up overlapping with it entirely).

There's therefore no reason to exclude the record from prog: there are the sprawling compositions, the odd time signatures, the atmosphere of the Summer of Love collapsing in on itself. The rest comes courtesy of the creative verve of an unruly quartet whose story would unfortunately end here: Hadden sank into severe depression brought on by acid abuse and soon became unable to stick with the band consistently. Discouraged, and without even label support anymore after two consecutive commercial flops, High Tide broke up. Not quite immediately, though, given that a couple of decades later a pair of albums made up of archival material - material that had found no outlet at the time - would eventually surface.

Of the four, only House would go on to have a prestigious career: after a brief stint in Third Ear Band, he would land in Hawkwind, leaving a deep mark on their sound and stamping his presence on classic albums like "Hall Of The Mountain Grill" (1974), "Warrior On The Edge Of Time" (1975) and "Quark Strangeness And Charm" (1977). He would later play, among others, for David Bowie, Japan, Thomas Dolby, and Mike Oldfield.

Hill and Pavli would try to capitalize on the High Tide name again over the following decades, but without ever attracting much attention. The last reunion dates back to 2000.

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01/03/2020