THE glam bassist.
Although I think he didn't actually play on the record, just mimed for TOTP
But he's in the band for Marc's last TV series.
He didn't just play on glam records though, Herb was in demand session bassman all over the first-half-70s shop.
Check out this amazing performance
Less salubriously, he wrote this monstrosity with Kenny Pickett
There is also this questionable song, as later interpolated by the Happy Mondays (and sung by Alan Partridge in one of his series, in an idle, mooching around sort of way).
I mean, they meant well, I'm sure.
At any rate, Herbie didn't write it, so that's okay.
Herbie was in a heavy rock band called Rumpelstiltskin.
And a blues-jazz collective alongside Alexis Korner, called Collective Consciousness Society - aka CCS.
The latter's version of "Whole Lotta Love" was the Top of the Pops intro theme when I was a kid.
And post-glam, as Phil points out in the comments, he was a member of Sky - a classical rock supergroop also including Francis Monkman ex-Curved Air and the dude who did the triffic snazzy OST to The Long Good Friday.
Herbie Flowers also put out a solo album, Plant Life.
And another one called Potty.
Herbie Flowers - the name is quite close the gangster boss in Performance, Harry Flowers - was also adept at playing the tuba. He did that as a bandsman in the RAF, during which he time he also picked up double bass.
Before he got involved in rock, he had been in trad jazz bands, then a more modern jazz band, and then switched to electric bass and started becoming an in-demand session man.
But let's remember Mr. Herbie Flowers this way
He was also a founder member of big-at-the-time-but-now-totally-forgotten classical rock band Sky.
ReplyDeleteThey were one of those very self-consciously serious "adult" projects that were also a but naff - in the same ballpark as The Alan Parsons Project, Mike Oldfield, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, etc.
Oh yes, alongside Francis Monkman, the dude who did the supersnazzy music for The Long Good Friday.
DeleteSky seemed like a doomed effort from the start, since John Williams could not have been more transparent that he held the genre in contempt and was purely doing this to get more youth exposure - which might've actually worked had he done it in 73, but didn't in 77
ReplyDeleteI actually like Mike Oldfield, partly because he's not anywhere near as forced as most other deliberate concert music-rock crossovers - instead of taking after high classical/Romantic or trying to out-dissonance various 20th century figures (the Keith Emerson/Glenn Branca dichotomy), he's trying to do rock Impressionism, using Debussy, Satie, Ravel, etc. and the more pastoral ends of folk and prog as a guide. Strange as it sounds in this context, he's appealingly modest in his ambitions to me.
"Doomed"? You mean as an aesthetic endeavour? Cos the first two albums sold very well, "Toccata" was a Top 5 hit, group played the Royal Albert Hall.
DeleteLooking them up I had forgotten that John Williams had a big hit with the theme from the Deer Hunter.
Also surprised at how long Sky's career extended.
But then whenever I look up someone on Wiki I am usually startled by how extended careers are. People just slog on. It's a phenomenon I call Wiki Fizzle. There's the bit you - and everyone - knows about. And then there's the continuing to try to have success, do different things. Sometimes they do even sustain a measure of success. Mostly it's fizzle, but persistent, stubborn fizzle.
Sky got me thinking of classical / rock crossovers and I remembered Variations, the Paganini project by Andrew Lloyd-Weber and his cello playing brother Julian. One of which variations is ground deep into Brit brains of a certain generation as the theme to The South Bank Show. https://youtu.be/PgB4j31-SXk?si=lnA9rnDbw0OV6eHK
Looked the album up and guess who's listed as a player on the album? Herbie Flowers. He was EVERYWHERE in the '70s.
Yeah, I suppose I didn't know the extent of their initial success, but I meant more aesthetically. And yes, I was also thinking of the Andrew-Julian collaboration
DeleteSort of related to this, one band I feel I need to check out, because they have such a terrible, terrible, reputation, are Barclay James Harvest, who have been frequently cited as the worst band of all time.
DeleteBut I look at their album covers, and their song titles, and they seem to be outwardly fairly tasteful.
Hmmm........
You are right, they were sort of a byword for irrelevance for punk / new wave people. I think I did give them a brief ear-peruse once - and was surprised that it wasn't that proggily excessive, it was fairly songful and focused. Possibly their crime was less indulgence and more simply being too polite and cleancut and middle class.
DeleteThey probably bracket alongside The Strawbs / Stackridge / Alan Parsons Project more than Yes / ELP or the Canterbury lot.
Other groups I have meant to check out - Greenslade, The Enid.
I recently stumbled across Jeff Wayne's 'War of the Worlds' again, and found it ridiculously thrilling. The orchestral disco sweep, Richard Burton at his most Shakespearean, and those supremely eerie synth effects.
ReplyDeleteNiall Ferguson is often silly, but his vision of 'The War of the Worlds' as a premonition of the horrors of the real World Wars to come is an insight worthy of Adam Curtis. The destruction of the ship packed with refugees, which comes just after the excerpt you posted, is genuinely horrifying.
Huh. Going back to the book, it seems I completely misremembered: it's the warship Thunder Child that gets destroyed, not the refugee ship. Still a chilling moment.
DeleteThe video of this track from Dalis Car ("The Judgement is the Mirror") plays a lot with the reflective qualities of the-then-newish laser disc. The late great great Mick Karn from Japan and a very striking looking Peter Murphy. Oh those cheek bones:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwOPwdjtYBk
Cheers,
Asif
Obviously, this comment & the one below are in the wrong place! My blogspot interface is very f-ed up and am too lazy to fix. Anyway, ignore.
DeleteI'll add that to the mirror post
DeleteOh, meant to add that I always LOVED "Mirror Freak" by Cockney Rebel -- just absolutely brilliant stuff, those drum snare cracks, sounding like bones being broken. The track has a real feral quality about it. And no guitars! (Had no idea it was about Bolan).
ReplyDeleteAsif
I'd like to point out that the Mondays' Harmony is a postmodern fusion of a well-meant-but-still-cynical advertising jingle and a meant-well-but-still-dodgy anthem to racial equality and made it a perfect, pilled-up coda to a perfect, pilled-up album.
ReplyDeleteHappy Mondays: cleverer than you think.
(By the by, today a cat pissed all over my biography of Wittgenstein, so could do with some cheering up)