Don't interfere with my mind, try to be kind

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

10/10/71 : Second Album - Curved Air

This is only the third ever mention of Curved Air - both previous ones came on entries for Focus albums which were most peculiar things, so that pretty much sets the scene for some 70s weirdness. I believe they're viewed as pretty important these days though, so I'm slightly intrigued as to what I'm getting.

Yup - it's pretty intriguing, if only because it features a WOMAN! How very enlightened for the world of prog. And it is very proggy, but it doesn't feel like your standard prog - partially because of the presence of the female vocals from Sonja Kristina but also, for me, because it doesn't seem to be taking itself quite so seriously. I liked this a lot more than I was expecting - I'd struggle to argue that it's not a load of old nonsense, but it is at least an interesting pile of old nonsense. I can also imagine it inspired quite a few artists across multiple genres - Kate Bush seems like an obvious fit, but 80s new-wave and 90s ambient aren't a million miles away. 

We're at #11 in the chart this week on their second week of a five week run, with this being as high as it got. The top five this week were Rod Stewart, T Rex, TOTP Vol 19, Deep Purple and Simon & Garfunkel, with the highest new entry being James Last (#30) with Non Stop Dancing Volume 12, which just sounds absolutely horrific on so many levels.

To no-one's surprise, Wikipedia tells us this is their second album and the only thing it really tells us that the tracks on the first side were written by Daryl Way and the ones on the second side were written by Francis Monkman (who went on to form Sky) - they tried writing together but things didn't really work out and the band split up in the following year. That was only their first break-up of many though - their entry lists ten different line-ups over the first six years, including featuring Stewart Copeland for a couple of years, who went on to marry Sonja Kristina (oh, and form The Police as well). The band then didn't do a lot until '08, since when they've mostly played live but have also chucked out a few albums - obviously with several different line-ups! Back to the album, there's no word on critical reception at the time - it received a poor retrospective review from AllMusic, but the general view is that they were listening to the CD which apparently has terrible sound quality. Commercially, this did absolutely nothing away from these shores - which didn't surprise me because it feels to be a very British thing.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a version of this for a fiver, but the most you can spend on it is £40, which surprises me because it feels like the sort of thing that certain people would absolutely treasure. I can't say I would go as far as treasuring it, but I certainly found it intriguing and not nearly as dreadful as I feared.

17/10/71 - Shoddy workmanship