Arthur Brown – Dance (Remastered and Expanded Edition)
Arthur Brown – Dance (Remastered and Expanded Edition)
Cherry Red Records
Release Date: 27/10/23
Running Time: 76:25
Review by Dark Juan
9/10 (package), 7/10 (music)
Greetings, my friends from around the world. I am Dark Juan, and I am currently seated upon my throne at Crow Cottage contemplating the increasingly extensive review list I have to complete. Now the summer holidays are over here in jolly old Blighty, Dark Juan’s child wrangling duties have returned to something resembling normal and I will be visiting the fine country of Scotland for a well-earned holiday and lots of single malt whisky sampling in the near future, which means there might be a small gap in reporting from your favourite correspondent while I go and do the Wicker Man Trail with Mrs Dark Juan and the Smellhounds. Hence, I have been trying to fit in as much wordsmithery as I can between shifts at work in order to bring you, my faithful legions, the really good stuff.
It is well known that Dark Juan is a man with a finger on the pulse and a knife to the throat of the contemporary extreme music scene in the UK and France, and that generally, the more obscure it is, the better for Dark Juan appreciates records that are challenging and require effort to enjoy. However, Dark Juan is currently undergoing a self-imposed quest (not, surprisingly, to see whether I can hold the card of Vanquis. Spoiler: I can’t. My credit rating is a bag of shite because I have no debt and apparently that means, counter-intuitively, that I must be shit at managing money according to credit reference agencies. God, I fucking despise capitalism) to discover the building blocks of Metal and extreme music. Which means that I am mining the riches of 1960s and 1970s proto-extremity. Hence, the good burghers of Cherry Red Records offered me the chance to review a remastered and expanded edition of Arthur Brown’s 1975 album, “Dance”.
Dark Juan snapped their arms off, as Dark Juan has been a fan of Arthur Brown since he was a small boy and watched Arthur Brown with his head on fire on Top Of The Pops. “Dance” represents a solo effort of Arthur Brown, rather than The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown or Kingdom Come, and therefore is a more expansive and exploratory work which incorporates rather more influences than the usual guitar, bass and drums. Therefore, the Platter Of Splatter™ is having a temporary hiatus while I instead fuel and power up the Platter Of Psychedelic Wonder™ instead. It runs off liquid LSD and just fuelling it sends you into realms of trippy splendour.
Kicking off the record with a cover of The Animals’ (themselves a formative influence on Metal) ‘We’ve Got To get Out Of This Place’, Brown serves us up to a Psychedelic deity who has taken a perfectly excellent song and twisted it up into a kind of Soul-fuelled, acid addled, jerking thing that takes the bones of the song and rearranges it into something vaguely threatening, yet with attractive plumage. His vocal delivery is… operatic and unique to say the least, and the backing vocalists he employs through the album could be charitably described as… extremely enthusiastic. They croon, wail and weft their way under the decidedly idiosyncratic vocals of Mr. Brown himself, who remains to this day a musical storyteller beyond compare, rich crooning giving way to everything from a primal, rough-throated Hard Rock style voice, through to childishly excited shrieking, with everything else in between. There is another cover version too, that of Chris Marlowe’s “Out Of Time”, that Brown has turned from a straight, old-fashioned crooner into a Hard Rock masterpiece that you could imagine Meat Loaf butchering in an Enormo-Dome somewhere. Honky-tonk piano, squawky sex horn and distorted guitars combine to turn the song into a Pub Rock tune worthy of the likes of Dr. Feelgood. You could easily imagine Lee Brilleaux bellowing it.
Of the original songs that are on the album – Arthur Brown’s music has always taken the path of psilocybin-infused Psychedelic astral travelling and some serious Prog, but this time as well as Rock and Roll, Brown has taken the lush backing vocals and arrangements of Soul and Funk music and amalgamated it with his technicolour world of Psychedelic sound – ‘Quietly With Tact’ and ‘Take A Chance’ more than adequately display this split personality, this trait of Arthur Brown to never be mainstream, to be outside the zeitgeist yet remaining utterly unique and relevant. ‘Soul Garden’ is a Reggae-based song but there are breaks in the song where the irrepressibility of Brown just seeps through, what with the drama of his vocal delivery. ‘Crazy’ hints at 1920s Roots Jazz mixed with Prog silliness. I’m surprised the man hasn’t tried creating old-school Death Metal with nothing but a marimba and a chamber orchestra on this record yet. He’s thrown everything fucking else at it. There’s sexy, sassy backing singers, Soul and Funk basslines, there’s entire fucking gospel choirs and some pretty tasty guitar and keyboard work and frankly sexy drumming.
“Dance”, however, suffers from a lack of cohesion and a flabby formlessness that is not usual from Arthur Brown. Normally, no matter how out to lunch he is, his music normally has some kind of vision or narrative underpinning it all and giving the music a sense of focus. “Dance” appears, to me anyway, that Arthur Brown was making a stab for the mainstream, but his innate lack of concern for the straitjacket of conformity kept making him dial up the insanity, even on the likes of the title track, where his vocal delivery goes from crooning sensuality to massively engorged posturing, frequently within the same verse. Let’s face it, no one listens to Arthur Brown to hear him trying to fit in with a musical genre, we listen because we want to see what outlandish madness the fucker will come up with next, not to listen to conformity.
Cherry Red Records have, as is usual, done a masterful job on the remastering of the record and they have once again expertly curated the choice of live tracks on this expanded edition of “Dance”, comprising six tracks recorded live for the BBC in 1975. Every live track, and indeed the album, are superbly produced with an extremely clear yet rich sound that allows the listener to experience everything. It also shows just how talented Brown and his band are, as they play some seriously complicated music without dropping a note, and just how close Arthur Brown’s live performance is to his studio work. They have also restored all the artwork for the album and there are a lot of new liner notes.
In short then – not one of Arthur’s finer efforts, but a perfectly listenable album for a Prog aficionado, or anyone who is interested in the roots of Metal. If you are solely a Metal fan, it is to be avoided like the plague. If you are an intrepid listener though, there is much to enjoy, for a mediocre Arthur Brown album stands head and shoulders above some of the absolute shite that gets released these days.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System is a bit conflicted because as a package, Cherry Red have served us a dish par excellence, yet with ingredients beyond their best… 9/10 for the package and 7/10 for the music.
LINE-UP:
Andy Dalby – Guitars, arrangements
Bertram “Ranchie” McLean – Guitar (9)
Keith Tippett – Piano (2,5)
Ken Elliott – Moog & clavinet (3), electric piano (6)
Peter Solley – Keyboards (1,7,10), Moog (2,11)
Errol Nelson – Piano & organ (9)
George Khan – Sax (3,4,9)
Stuart Gordon – Violin (9)
Lee Robinson – Bass
Steve Yorke – Bass (1,6,7)
Lloyd Parks – Bass (9)
James Morgan – Bass (11)
Charley Charles – Drums
Charley Dunbar – Drums (9)
Draken Theaker – Percussions, tabla (3), congas (3,6), plank drums (6)
Cynthia Richards – Percussion (9)
Pat Lewis – Congas (9)
Malcolm Flynn – Congas (11)
Enrico Smith – Castanets (5)
Q Modo – Bells (6)
Leslie Adey – Gamelan (2)
Lindsay Kidd – Gamelan (2)
Fuzzy – Backing vocals
Stevie – Backing vocals
Mutt – Backing vocals
Philip Bradbury – Backing vocals (11)
Thunderthighs trio – Backing vocals (1,7)
The Gospel Ayres – Chorus vocals (10)
Don Gould – String arrangements (1,7)
LINKS:
Cherry Red Records:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
