The Muffins are an oddity: generally labeled “Canterbury” for their musical affinities, but definitely not their native geography (they’re from the U.S.), they recorded a few albums in the ’70s, then returned in the early part of this decade to appear at ProgDay (actually a 2-day festival, held every year over Labor Day weekend in Chapel Hill, NC) in 2001.
I attended ProgDay in 2003 and saw the legendary Swedish prog band Samla Mammas Manna along with the phenomenal (if struggling to find an audience) Minneapolis-based Bubblemath. I was hoping to feature Samla Mammas Manna today, though I could only find one short clip of the band performing live. Then I stumbled on this great clip of The Muffins from ProgDay 2001 and decided to go with it instead. Enjoy!
There are several versions of this video on YouTube, but this is the first one I’ve tracked down with decent video and sound — most are dreadful.
“Golf Girl” is kind of a silly song. The real masterpiece of this album is the side-long “Nine Feet Underground,” but the only versions of that on YouTube are an audio-only BBC recording from 1971 and a reunion show from 2001 without the inimitable Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals. So we’ll go with “Golf Girl.”
I saw Richard Sinclair live at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis back in the mid-’90s in what can only be described as a very unusual show. It’s a tiny venue, without A/C (at least at the time), and it was the peak of July heat. There were about 40 folding chairs set up in the middle of the room. They were mostly full for the opening act, singer-songwriter Clive Gregson. Most of the crowd (if that term is not a gross exaggeration) departed after he played. So there were about a dozen of us left by the time Richard Sinclair — alone — took the stage. And two of those twelve were disinterested friends I dragged along semi-willingly.
The show consisted of Richard (it was so informal I feel I can call him that) sitting in a chair, playing bass and singing bits and pieces of classic Caravan and Hatfield and the North tunes, breaking liberally — often in the middle of a song — to adjust his bass tuning or to take another sip of beer. Still, it was enjoyable to get so up-close and personal with a Canterbury legend. (And it was a good laugh for my companions.) The opening number was a highlight: he performed the trombone lead (played in this YouTube clip by Dave Sinclair on electric piano) vocally, in a “mouth trumpet” style, while playing the bass part as usual.
After the show, I approached Richard to sign my copy of the first Hatfield and the North album, which he happily did. As he was signing it, he lamented that the turnout had not been better. Noting the warm weather, he posited: “Maybe they’ve all gone for a swim.” Priceless.
For reasons I won’t go into, I’m thinking a lot of cryptomnesia these days, and, now that I can clearly hear all of the details of this recording, I feel like I’m observing an instance of it: the drum part Richard Coughlan is laying down during the verses here sounds a lot like what The Mars Volta would come up with years later for their great “L’Via L’Viaquez” from Frances the Mute. But any resemblance between that song and my own “Unnatural Disasters” is purely coincidental.
I’m really on a roll tonight. I wasn’t planning on posting another video but then I stumbled on this gem. It’s another featuring Dave Stewart, my favorite musician to emerge from the Canterbury scene. Here’s Hatfield and the North (the same lineup as National Health shown here, but with Richard Sinclair on bass and vocals instead of John Greaves). The quality of the recording is not great, but these guys sound good no matter what.
One of the most distinctive progressive subgenres from the ’70s, and one I have egregiously omitted from this blog to this point, is Canterbury, named for the English city where these bands originated. A few names are inextricably linked to the Canterbury scene, but for me the definitive Canterbury musician is Dave Stewart. No, not that Dave Stewart. Or this one. But this one.
Though probably best known for his work in Hatfield and the North, or maybe for his earlier organ trio Egg, I’ve always most appreciated his work from the late ’70s best: first with the grandiose (but never fully realized) vision of a rock orchestra that became National Health, and later with Bill Bruford’s fusion band Bruford.
Here we see the Of Queues and Cures lineup of Dave Stewart, Pip Pyle (drums), Phil Miller (guitar) and John Greaves (bass and vocals), showing they could be every bit as over-the-top experimental as Radiohead, a quarter century earlier.
The video quality on this is fairly mediocre. There’s another, better quality version of the same Old Grey Whistle Test appearance here but it’s incomplete.
