Milestones

T2

Name: T2 – It'll All Work Out In Boomland
Item: It'll All Work Out In Boomland
Author: Federico Romagnoli

It’ll All Work Out In Boomland

1970 (Decca)

heavy psych, progressive rock

by Federico Romagnoli

The cover reads T.2., but the back of the vinyl repeatedly gives the official name without punctuation. The meaning remains a mystery, perhaps already revealed in the booklet of one of the eighteen reissues that have flooded the market since 1990, the latest of which came out in Japan just a few months ago. Buying them all just to find out, however, doesn't seem particularly worthwhile.

T2 was the landing point for three lads who had already spent a few years in minor English psychedelia outfits such as Please, Flies and Bulldog Breed. It was the manager of the latter, John Morphew, who secured T2 a deal with Decca and a substantial budget to record their debut album, convinced of their commercial potential. Unfortunately, a series of disputes led to his departure, and the record came out quietly, to general indifference.

The project's leader was Pete Dunton, singer, drummer and songwriter. On bass was his friend Bernie Jinks, on guitar a very young Keith Cross, still a minor but already a prodigy on the instrument. The album's title is even more mysterious than the band's name. Nobody has any idea what or where "Boomland" is, and it doesn't seem to have any connection with the splendid cover, a fascinating drawing showing a priest fleeing across a swamp, surrounded by bizarre symbolism (consider the anthropomorphic duck busy fishing, or the oriental-style building in the background).

With so little information available, it's not easy to place the work in context, and indeed it remained buried for twenty years in the folds of time. After a couple of reissues in Japan and Germany at the dawn of the Nineties, the record was finally rediscovered by the small but devoted underground following of prog and it was that a major band on the Swedish scene, the Landberk, covered the track "No More White Horses". Since then, the T2 cult following, while never breaking out of the circle of prog and psychedelia devotees, has only grown stronger. Nowadays it's not uncommon to find people who rank them among the finest exponents of that scene.

In truth, the prog label alone isn't enough to explain the album. The common view is that the band was power trio inspired by the Cream and that they aimed to carry on that legacy in light of rock's new developments. Indeed, the influence of Cream's distorted psychedelic rock is evident in the tones, but what doesn't quite add up is the speed of execution and the constant changes. T2 have little of Cream's heavy, lumbering approach; their songs do have quieter moments, but they're dense with surges that see the trio racing flat out for long stretches, almost epileptic in nature. The constant shifts in song structure also show a full immersion in prog culture, something Cream never really touched. In short, T2 took the harder edge of psychedelia, what's known in the English-speaking world as "heavy psych", and fused it with the elegance of King Crimson, Moody Blues, Traffic and the like. The result was something that's still hard to compare to anything else today.

"In Circles" makes everything clear right away, with short but rather catchy vocal passages, pushed along by a groove basic blues foundation that gets blown apart by nonstop bursts and wild runs. While Jinks stays more grounded, laying down sturdy, hypnotic bass lines, Dunton and Cross engage in a duel of savagery, one pounding the drums with rolls and cymbal crashes, the other with abrasive distortion and razor-sharp solos, stretching the blues fabric toward the unknown. The sheer number of stops and restarts makes the track a puzzle on the level of "21st Century Schizoid Man and Heart Of The Sunrise", just with a bit more grit.

"J.L.T." is a superb ballad where the arrangement ambitions expand, bringing in acoustic guitar, piano, Mellotron and a brass section, arranged by one Peter Johnson (practically no information exists about him). The tone is calm and dreamy, the lyrics a flow of images and sensations with no apparent explanation, which doesn't help in decoding the title's acronym. Still, this constant aura of mystery surrounding their work only adds to its allure, so all that's left is to let yourself be carried away by the grand crescendo finale with all the instruments playing in unison.

The first side of the vinyl closes with the track that sparked their rediscovery, "No More White Horses", which almost seems to point the way toward Wishbone Ash's "Argus". It opens with a jagged instrumental digression led by Cross's guitar, then the mood settles, making room for an acoustic verse in ballad form and a martial chorus. It finally spills into a new epic crescendo, with horns sketching out vast deserts and melancholy sunsets, while the guitar roars and the drums keep pretending to be a machine gun of rolls.

The second side holds a single composition, "Morning", clocking in at twenty-one minutes. As expected, pretty much everything happens within it, reshuffling, in sequence and varying doses, the traits of the first three tracks. So we get calm acoustic sections, where Dunton's ethereal voice can shine, paired with refrain unruly passages where the wall of arrangements seems to collapse in on itself. Or again, nods to raga rock during the guitar solos, bass parts of rare precision (through which Jinks shows how much the most overlooked member actually acts as the glue between his two more flamboyant bandmates), jamold-school blues, passages closer to experimental jazz (with free-form guitar distortion and tribal tambourines wandering through the chaos), brass fanfares and half-serious village-fair marching band tunes soaked in fuzz.

Thinking about it, a summa not only of the band itself, but of much of what had happened just before, or would happen shortly after, in the wildest recesses of the rock intelligentsia.

Sadly, the failure would go on to ruin the band's internal dynamics. A second album, recorded in the months following the release of the debut, was shelved and only saw the light of day in 1997, under the title "Fantasy". However, the recording quality is that of a handful of demos, nothing comparable to "Boomland".

Disillusioned by the project's failure, Cross was the first to bail out. In 1972 he released the album "Bored Civilians", co-credited to singer and guitarist Peter Ross. The record, decidedly softer in tone, would itself become a cult work, blending West Coast, progressive folk and touches of the poppier side of Canterbury. That same year Dunton announced the end of T2.

Little has been heard of Cross since, while Dunton capitalized on the growing interest in his old band, reforming it in the Nineties and producing a handful of amateurish records best left unmentioned. Better to remember him as the frenzied drummer, delicate singer and inspired songwriter who, for a brief moment in 1970, seemed capable of changing the face of rock music.

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16/07/2017

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition