Thursday 10th July

The band had achieved some success but playing with an orchestra had run up huge debts.  They were dropped by their management and eventually signed a new record deal with Polydor.  They made five studio albums and two live double albums between 1974 and 1979, and many critics rate this as their best period.  They certainly wrote and preformed some great songs, but they were slipping into a comfortable zone of album-tour-album, with little musical progression.  In a way this suited their fans, myself included, as they gave nary a nod to disco or punk or new wave, still producing majestic anthemic songs like ‘Suicide’ and ‘Nova Lepidotera’.   The band however was just about hanging together, Wooly was reduced to a couple of songs at most on each album and there was open competition between John Lees and Les Holroyd.  I suspect that even in the studio, while they played on each other’s songs there was little love lost.  In a way this was similar to how the Beatles final years played out too, the Beatles being their musical heroes, they even wrote a song whoich briefly charted ‘Titles’ where every line was from a Beatles song and the melody very Beatlish familiar.

They started during these years to become far more popular in Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland where their albums often topped the charts, while in England the critics dismissed them as an irrelevance, as Punk ruled the waves.

Still the band pressed on and were chosen to sing on the steps of the Reichstag after the Berlin Wall fell.  Then disaster, Wooly left the band.  He was always a bit sensitive and felt he was being relegated to a very poor third songwriter.  Those middle albums are well worth re-visiting though, the songs are so well written they have outlasted almost all of punk and disco and other short-lived trends.