764 - Henry Cow Box Set "1 : Beginnings"

While modern recording technology and fast improving online distribution capability are making it easier to appreciate the full extent of today's artists' work, the same cannot be said about relatively short-lived groups from the 1970s. This is especially true of groups that, despite being in some cases remarkably influential, remain cult favorites with a relatively small but intensely dedicated fan base.

A case in point is Henry Cow, a British group that began life in 1968 but didn't release its first music until 1973. Cow created some highly innovative and joyous noise throughout its 10 year run. It was also responsible for the creation of Rock in Opposition (RIO)—a loose collective of progressive-thinking bands that initially included Italy's Stormy Six, Sweden's Samla Mammas Manna, Belgium's Univers Zero and France's Etron Fou Leloublan—which has remained in philosophical opposition to the inequities of the record industry.

Cow's relatively diminutive discography—Legend (Virgin, 1973), Unrest (Virgin, 1974), In Praise of Learning (Virgin, 1975), Concerts (Caroline, 1976) and Western Culture (Broadcast, 1979), along with the peripheral Desperate Straights (Virgin, 1975), a reciprocal collaboration with Slapp Happy in return for that group's participation on In Praise (a brief merger of the two groups, in fact)—provided plenty of fine evidence of an intrepid and experimental (albeit constantly shifting) group that emerged out of the nascent Canterbury scene which also included groups like Soft Machine and Egg.

But while Legend possesses some markers to link it to the Canterbury scene, the group's three constants—guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, percussionist Chris Cutler and keyboardist/saxophonist Tim Hodgkinson—quickly transcended even that broad musical categorization to become an entity that embraced, certainly more than most, author William S. Burroughs' iconic statement, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

The music ranged from detailed composition—approaching, at times, contemporary classical music in its rich layers and contrapuntal complexity—to flat-out free improvisation which utilized pre-recorded tapes and a wealth of instruments and sundry items that made the Henry Cow stage look more like a musical instrument yard sale.

But as extreme as Cow could be—existing, at the same time, at both ends of the composition-to-free improv continuum and everywhere in-between—it left a wealth of memorable material, including Frith's knotty "Nirvana for Mice" from Legend, his epic "Ruins," from Unrest, Hodgkinson's idiosyncratic and long-form "Living in the Heart of the Beast" and the Frith/Cutler collaboration "Beautiful as the Moon—Terrible as an Army with Banners." The latter two came from In Praise and featured, for the first time, the group's politics made literal through the introduction of lyrical content, sung by newcomer/Slapp Happy singer Dagmar Krause.

As rich and varied as Cow's recorded music is, it can't possibly tell the whole story about the group, with no shortage of composed material and alternate arrangements either unrecorded or left on the cutting room floor. The studio was an early tool for experimentation, with a myriad of overdubbing and other techniques allowing the group to create soundscapes that, at the time, couldn't be recreated live. And Cow was, indeed, a band to be experienced live—a different beast entirely that, with the exception of Concerts, went woefully undocumented. The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set, promised by Cutler for well over a decade and now finally delivered, goes a long way towards filling in various gaps in the group's musical history and painting a more complete picture of Henry Cow by sourcing material from demos, rehearsal tapes and a variety of live performances. The quality varies, but Cutler and Bob Drake's editing and mastering work is superb, making even the poorest of sound sources—some coming from audience cassette recordings—surprisingly clear and full.

The box is divided into two five-disc sets, each available separately or together—if bought together, a bonus third box is provided to house the existing Cow studio discography. The first box covers the group's earliest recordings from 1971 through to the 1976 Hamburg, Germany radio recording that was bassist John Greaves' final performance with the group. It also includes the Trondheim, Norway performance from the tour that immediately followed Greaves' departure, with the group pared down by necessity to a quartet that also included bassoonist/oboist Lindsay Cooper, who had joined the group for Unrest, replacing founding member/woodwind multi-instrumentalist Geoff Leigh.

The second box contains four CDs that follow the group through to its end in 1978, also including what is, perhaps, the gem of the entire set—a DVD of a 1976 performance in Vevey, Switzerland. Featuring Krause and newcomer Georgie Born on bass and cello in addition to Frith, Hodgkinson, Cutler and Cooper, the sextet performs material from In Praise and more, including Hodgkinson's "Erk Gah"—also known as "Hold to the Zero Burn, Imagine," later released on Hodgkinson's Each In Our Own Thoughts (Megaphone, 1994). There are more surprises still, but the bottom line is: The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set offers, for the first time, a comprehensive account of Henry Cow's breadth and depth.

For those familiar with Cow's existing discography, hearing early versions of Frith's "Teenbeat" and Hodgkinson's "Amygdala" reveal just how far the group would evolve by the time it laid these tracks down for Legend. "Pre-Teenbeat I" and "Pre-Teenbeat II," which open up the first disc (Beginnings) contain many of the markers that would end up on the finished version, but here they're sparer, germinal ideas, as is the case with an extract from Hodgkinson's "Amygdala." The 10-minute version of Frith's "Teenbeat," on the other hand, expands upon the album version with a lengthy solo from Frith and entirely new sections that embed free improvisation and odd conversational snippets, courtesy of Egg's Dave Stewart and vocalists Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal—members of The Ottawa Music Company, a collective ("Rock Composer's Orchestra," according to Cutler) formed by Cutler and Stewart in 1970 that never recorded but performed with an ever-growing group of musicians from (or soon to be in) Henry Cow, Egg, Khan and Hatfield and the North. Frith's "With the Yellow Half Moon and Blue Star" was only represented by a three-and-a-half minute excerpt on Legend; here it's reproduced in its entirety, its nearly 12 minutes featuring a wild, overdriven organ solo by Hodgkinson redolent of Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge.

Beginnings also includes three previously unheard tracks—the brief but knottily arranged "Olwyn Grainger," the freely improvised "Betty McGowan" and Greaves' "Lottie Hare," a neo-classical miniature that's in sharp contrast to his more jazz-inflected "Half Asleep, Half Awake," that would appear on Unrest and also on disc two of the box (Early 2). Two unexpected vocal tracks from Frith reveal a nascent songwriter long before he began exploring shorter song-form with Art Bears and on solo albums including Gravity (Fred/ReR, 1980) and Cheap at Half the Price (Fred/ReR, 1983). Still, these were no straightforward three-chord tunes, with "Rapt in a Blanket" dabbling in irregular meters and "Came to See You" experimenting with episodic shifts in feel and complex arrangements. Both songs show the influence of Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt and, with another overdriven organ solo from Hodgkinson, Mike Ratledge.

AAJ