“Feels Good to Me” and “Back to the Beginning” by Bruford
From the 1977 album Feels Good to Me
Bill Bruford has perhaps the most impressive pedigree of any prog musician: original drummer of Yes, he quit the band on a high note after the release of Close to the Edge in 1972 to join a newly reformed King Crimson, a band he would continue to perform with through the late ’90s. After King Crimson went on indefinite hiatus in 1974, and Peter Gabriel went solo in 1975, Bruford became the touring drummer for Genesis, allowing Phil Collins to step out from behind the kit as the band’s new lead singer. After a couple of Genesis tours, Bruford started his own prog/jazz fusion band, appropriately named Bruford. Dave Stewart (of Egg, Hatfield and the North and National Health fame) was the keyboardist, and for most of the band’s brief life, the now-legendary jazz-rock bassist Jeff Berlin held down the low end. For a time Allan Holdsworth was the guitarist, and the first couple of Bruford albums also featured Annette Peacock on vocals, giving the music even more of a Canterbury influence than Stewart already brought to the proceedings.
In this video, ex-National Health (and future Whitesnake, if you can believe it) bassist Neil Murray appears in place of Jeff Berlin. I’m not sure how the timing of this Old Grey Whistle Test appearance corresponds to the recording of that album — whether Murray was the original bassist in the band and was replaced by Berlin for the album, or if this followed the album and Berlin was, for whatever reason, unable to appear on the show. Neil Murray does a fine job here nonetheless, but the main appeal for me is simply the chance to see Bill Bruford and Dave Stewart in action together.
I’m not sold on Annette Peacock’s vocals here, but at least the mix is a little more balanced than on the album, where her vocals are so inexplicably loud that you can scarcely hear the rest of the band — and, seriously, who’s listening to Bruford for the vocals anyway? It’s worse than the mix on Trout Mask Replica.
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.
