Fiercely contemporary yet steeped in classic influences, Miracle Temple draws Mount Moriah’s progressive style of country-rock—and the exquisite voice at its center—into devastatingly sharp focus. The record sports bigger arrangements, louder guitars, bolder vocals, and more soulful rhythms than the band’s acclaimed debut. The artful personal storytelling of “Bright Light” and “Eureka Springs” develop a piercing portrait of a “New South” where liberated traditions are still fitfully breaking free from conservative ones. The band’s cathartic vision for their home and themselves is writ large in their lovingly critical negotiation with romantic, political, and gender identities; geographical perspective; confrontation and forgiveness. The drive for change, resolute but tinged with regret, is arrestingly captured in the cover image of a burning barn.

At the heart of Mount Moriah are singer/guitarist Heather McEntire, formerly of post-punk band Bellafea, and guitarist Jenks Miller, exploring a lyrical guitar style outside of his “increasingly ambitious, genre-stretching” (Stereogum) metal project Horseback. Mount Moriah formed in 2008 as an outlet for two close friends to explore more traditional pop outside of their heavier projects, but Mount Moriah soon grew to eclipse them. “I wasn’t really able to discover the nuances of my voice or be the creative writer I wanted to learn to be,” McEntire says of singing punk music. “Building songs around the words in Mount Moriah has been so fulfilling.” Casey Toll joined the band in 2010 and plays bass. On Miracle Temple, James Wallace provides drums, organ, and piano.

Those who were drawn to the uncommon intimacy of Mount Moriah’s debut, which in part explored coming to terms with a progressive identity in the deeply traditional South, will find plenty to hold close in Miracle Temple, where the reckoning continues apace. But the new watchword is confidence. “If the first record was about grappling with the implications of an identity,” Miller explains, “this record has more conviction. I think people who expect a quieter, more acoustic-sounding record are going to be surprised. It’s about owning what we want to do, and that’s reflected in Heather’s lyrics and singing.” Indeed, McEntire’s voice, already the band’s secret weapon, fully discloses its startling power on Miracle Temple.

“I feel like there’s a lot of confrontation in this record,” McEntire says, “that stems from the confidence we developed doing the first one by ourselves.” That new-found clarity of purpose results in music that balances nervy beauty and resounding force, in beautifully wrought lyrics that compress condemnation and confession into subtle poetry.

The perspective is the band’s own, but the richly styled music is rooted in illustrious rock, soul, and country traditions, paying due to the likes of Dolly Parton and Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, and Fleetwood Mac.

“Things that were almost questions before are more like answers now,” Miller says. “There was a timidity to Heather’s voice on the first record, singing in this naked way without distortion. Now, it’s commanding, which allows the arrangements to do more.” The expanded arrangements feature a stellar variety of guest stars. Daniel Hart provides violin and Allyn Love plays pedal steel. Indigo Girl Amy Ray sings gospel-tinged backing vocals, with additional backing by Bibis Ellison, Ryan Gustafson, and Midtown Dickens’ Will Hackney and Catherine Edgerton. Miracle Temple, produced by Mark Nevers, Jenks Miller, and Heather McEntire, mixed by Nevers, and mastered by Alex McCollough, was recorded over five days at Beech House in Nashville.

McEntire, Miller, and Toll wrote the music, with all lyrics by McEntire except for “Union Street Bridge,” co-written with the poet Sarah Messer. Additional tracking was completed by Miller, James Wallace, Jeff Crawford, Jaron Pearlman, and Daniel Hart.

Rooted in the fertile Chapel Hill music scene, Mount Moriah built a devoted national following around their D.I.Y. debut. They were tapped for a national tour with the Indigo Girls; endorsed by Pitchfork, NPR, The Onion A.V. Club, Stereogum, PopMatters, and others; named the creators of North Carolina’s best 2011 album by Shuffle Magazine; and featured on Bon Iver’s celebrity playlist on iTunes. Much acclaim focused on the riveting stage presence of McEntire, hailed by the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle as the kind one rarely discovers, a sentiment echoed by Paste Magazine’s Shane Ryan, who wrote: “McEntire fits into that rarified subgroup of charismatic performers … When she sings, the transformation begins. The energy is evident in her eyes … and in her voice, a powerful instrument capable of finding the perfect emotional tone within the lyrics … I left the venue knowing [Mount Moriah] will be huge.”

List taken from then book edited by Robert Dimery.

The Rascals move into the era of psychedelia with a vengeance on this album — their best of their entire history — which also retains a soulful core and adds a bit of a Latin beat. The original album on Atlantic was a monster seller thanks to the title track, practically the group’s signature tune (number one on the pop charts, number three on R&B), but “Groovin’” was only one small strong point on the album of the same name. “Find Somebody” marked a return to the group’s garage band sound with a psychedelic twist, including phased fuzztone guitars and some catchy lyrics and choruses. “How Can I Be Sure” is the second-best-known song off of this album, but it has a fully successful companion piece, “I’m So Happy Now,” which applies similar instrumentation to very different (but pleasing) effect. Gene Cornish’s “I Don’t Love You Anymore” could be the finest pop song in the band’s repertory apart from “How Can I Be Sure,” with a delectable guitar part, scrumptious melody, and delicious chorus. “You Better Run” was more than a year old when it turned up on this album, and its garage band sensibilities are a bit more primitive than those of “Find Somebody,” but it’s a great piece of rock & roll. The band turns in one superb Motown cover, “A Place in the Sun,” done in a surprisingly subdued fashion. And for a finale, Cavaliere and Brigati turn in an exultant period piece, “It’s Love,” whose soaring lyrics are matched by guest artist Hubert Laws’ flute — alas, his presence would point the way toward less effective, more disjointed work in the group’s future, as they moved more deeply into psychedelia.

“There was a fairly determinate point in the British folk rock movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s where a second string, following on the heels of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, made a bid for eternity. Trees, Mellow Candle, Mr. Fox, and the chamber folk musicians, like Nick Drake or John Martyn or Roy Harper or Michael Chapman, bent their axes in a more idyllic, often trippily electric, singer-songwriter direction, creating everything from full-out jazz improv to fairly quaint hippy platitudes. The rarity of some of the LPs these artists produced is legend — it took the internet to demystify them, and reconnect listeners to a wellspring of achieving, often remarkable, sometimes dated, music.

As a touchstone for inspiration these records are nearly without peer, independent and uncompromising. But having a Vashti Bunyan album in your collection and making music that you make your own is another thing. Chris Wade, who leads the project Dodson and Fogg — as well as being a rock writer in his own right — has done that with Derring Do, the group’s second album. Derring Do elaborates on the first, self-titled Dodson and Fogg record, while taking a leap forward lyrically and musically — the limitations of a home studio have become strengths, the writing delivering songs that fit together. Wade has achieved this by understanding the tools he’s working with, and by having a deep respect for his inspirations while retaining his artist’s eye and ear for what does justice to his songs. So he’s able to coax graceful backing from two of British folk rock’s great singers — Celia Humphris (Trees), and Alison O’Donnell (Mellow Candle) — while maintaining a focus and direction of his own device.

There are traces on Derring Do that listeners might find familiar, the floating-down-a-river sound of Nick Drake or James Yorkston, the pop folk of Iron and Wine, the simple melodic invention of Syd Barrett, and the more pastoral forays of T. Rex and the Kinks. The lyrics are simple and unfussy, straightforward, working with the melodies rather than overly concerned with poetics or narrative. Unexpected touches appear, such as really tasteful, brief guitar solos that work — there’s an ebb and flow that occasionally needs breaking, and Wade has the feel and chops to put some crunch in the right places. There are trumpets, spare percussion, flutes, and Wade’s voice, dwelling at times in the lower registers, can range from a kind of glam-punk bite to the breathy approach that’s come to be so associated with Nick Drake. The remarkable thing about this album, though, is that no voice dominates within each composition. The impulse to go long, as his folk and prog rock predecessors might have done, is also resisted — there are few wasted notes or words. Less is more sometimes, and service here is done to Song.

By the standards of most entries in the Old Music blog, this song should probably be filed in the classical section. Hard Times (Come Again No More) was written by Stephen Foster in 1854 and published the next year in New York under the title “Foster’s Melodies No 28″.

Foster was acclaimed as a great songwriter in his day and made it into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He is credited with nearly 300 works, including notably titled numbers such as The Glendy Burk, Massa’s in the Cold Ground, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and Open Thy Lattice, Love. Many of his songs had Southern themes, but Foster never lived in the South and visited it only once, when he took a riverboat voyage down the Mississippi on his honeymoon. Apparently his marriage (to the aforementioned Jeanie) was not particularly happy.

Like most of my favourite songs, this one is special because of the context in which I first heard it. Duke Special, the wonderful and under-rated songwriter, sang it in the Union Chapel in London with the English baritone Jonathan Gunthorpe (you can see them performing the song at the National Theatre here). Being a bit of a dope, I asked the Duke after the show if he had written the song. He informed me with much politeness and enthusiasm that it had been doing the rounds for more than 150 years. The song’s first audio recording was a wax cylinder by the Edison Company in 1905. Bob Dylan, James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen have since performed covers and Mary J. Blige sang it during the Hope for Haiti telethon in 2010.

Sadly, the song proved prophetic for its writer. Foster took to singing it quite often in his last days, when he was boxed up in the North American Hotel in Manhattan. He died an alcoholic in January 1864. The attending nurses at the Bellevue Hospital opened his worn leather wallet to discover his fortune: 38 cents and a scrap of paper that read “Dear friends and gentle hearts”. He was 37.

If you’re in any way taken by this story, you might want to make a trip to Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, for their annual Stephen Foster Super Saturday. Fans of the songwriter gather for a day of thoroughbred racing during which the track bugler plays a selection of Foster’s tunes. The day’s highlight is the Stephen Foster Handicap, a Grade I dirt race for older horses. No doubt he would enjoy the slightly peculiar nature of the tribute

It’s been almost 20 years since Lisa Germano released her hazy dream-pop opus Geek the Girl back in 1994. Her unique brand of then-4AD indie introspection hit a nerve among diehard critics and casual fans alike, and this surge of abrupt notoriety propelled her onto mainstream radio stations, a still relevant MTV, and many ‘94 year-end lists. Though her subsequent records never garnered the same level of critical and commercial success as that album, she never ceased to record and play shows of all sizes. But her music, specifically her mid-career releases, has been slowly undergoing a critical reevaluation. Albums like Lullabies for a Liquid Pig and Slide have been gaining esteem as precursors to more current releases by artists such as Nina Nastasia and Shannon Wright.
As her first album in four years, No Elephants finds Germano digging back into her dream pop roots and coming away with an album full of luxuriant melodies, hushed vocals, and delicate instrumentation. There are no concessions to any particular fad or sounds across this record, and Germano sounds as loose and at ease as she did back in 1994 when she astonished people with her affecting dream folk aesthetic. By opening the album with the sounds of birds chirping, the music could very well have come across as undeservedly fey or overly sentimental. But far from backing herself into a corner, Germano uses these sounds to set the mood for the rest of the songs on No Elephants. Equal parts naturalistic feeling and warmly emotional artifice, this record sets her up as both the musical innovator and creative stalwart—not to mention the record sounds gorgeous without feeling overly concerned with its own production.
One of the most noticeable aspects of No Elephants is Germano’s use of repeated sounds and musical motifs as connective tissue between the songs. Whether it’s a tone that sounds suspiciously like a child’s play telephone or the irritating sound that some electronic equipment makes if you get your cell phone too close, she makes no apologies for the sometimes jarring electronic flourishes that are interspersed throughout these tracks. But the heart and soul of these songs still lay in their traditionalist attitudes. We may get some unexpected electronic subterfuge but Germano still bases most of the songs on No Elephants around her immaculate piano playing and hushed, though never fully obscured, vocals.
Tracks like “Apathy and the Devil” and “Ruminants” find her showing off a seemingly new set of musical chops—namely her new found appreciation for subtle sonic manipulation—while others like “No Elephants” and album stand-out “And So On” set clearly defined guidelines that link these songs to others from her past records. And though she does favor the calming grace of gently tapped piano keys and somber violin on No Elephants over the more textured guitar work from her earlier records, her lyrics still seem as visceral and serrated as ever, opening the album with the lines “Ruminants/I need four stomachs to deal…” and ending with “…four stomachs/throw up/start over…” Not the most upbeat outlook but one that matches her often visceral and piercing lyrics.
Germano’s integration of the melodic and electronic doesn’t always work to her advantage though, as tracks like the instrumental “Dance of the Bees,” with its buzzing electrical interference, and the distractingly atonal “Haunted” seem more like experimental afterthoughts than fully fleshed out ideas. The album does finish strong with some of Germano’s most cohesive and engaging songwriting to date. The previously mentioned “And So On” and album closer “Strange Bird” seem to be the perfect examples of what she hoped to accomplish on this record, with the electronic samples interacting seamlessly with her affecting piano playing and lilting vocals. No Elephants may not be as instantly regarded as some of her earlier work but it shows that Germano is not afraid to take her established sound into new and often unexpected directions. If this record gets people who may not be familiar with her discography to take a peek into her substantial back catalog, then all the better. As a stepping stone forward and backward, No Elephants preserves her musical legacy while subtly altering her own approach to these sounds. As an introduction to Germano and her music, you could do a hell of a lot worse than spending an afternoon with No Elephants.

Javi arrives in a small economy car. He’s barrel-chested, light skinned with a mop of unruly dark hair and intelligent brown eyes. Tattoos cover his hands, arms and the part of his chest that his long sleeved shirt doesn’t hide. It doesn’t take long for me to see that Javi isn’t the hoodlum or the killer or the dope head that appears in his songs. And he’s a long way from some sort of devil worshipper too. To be honest, he’s polite, well-mannered and pleasant.

He was raised near the Rio Grande River in Weslaco, Texas. Javier describes Weslaco as a hard place where half the people there don’t give a shit about anything, including themselves: a place brimming with citrus, drugs, hate, and sweltering heat.

He’s the product of a broken marriage. His dad is a cop and has been married a number of times. Javi never knew his paternal grandfather, but when he did meet the man he learned he had been a musician. When his granddad found out Javi was also a musician, he suggested that he should quit. Thanks for the support, grandpa.

Javi describes more than a normal share of his mother’s side of the family as criminals, murderers, drunks and other types to bad to be discussed even in Weslaco. He never knew his maternal grandfather, but knows that he too was a musician and played the accordion. A stepgrandfather Javi did know was murdered shortly after Javi’s parents divorced: machine gunned to death in Rio Grande city, his body then burned in his own van. The killers weren’t found.

At some point in Javi’s young life, he found himself homeless in his own hometown, sleeping on borrowed couches, working in a bar, saving money so he could get out of town. The day came when Javi sold all his possessions and headed for San Antonio. He arrived with no car, no guitar, just a bag of clothes and a dream. He took a job answering phones and got fired for being rude to some lady.

San Antonio seemed too much like Weslaco for Javi so he struck out for New Braunfels, hoping to make it in the music business. Getting gigs proved difficult, but Javi persisted. He wrote songs, played where he could and saved money to make a record. Roel Piña, an uncle, kicked in additional money and Javi bought five days of studio time. The resulting double CD, A Southern Horror, Madly in Anger, is recorded live with minimal post production work. Javier produced the discs himself because he didn’t want to compromise his vision and couldn’t afford to pay someone else to produce the record anyway. Not many of the songs will be suitable for radio play due to cuss words.

Javi Garcia has recorded a journey through and from the borderlands, a place that has produced few successful musicians, a place whose residents are ignored and marginalized by the countries both to the north and the south; a place where having a real job is the exception to the rule, particularly for those of younger generations. The pictures Javi paints aren’t pretty. I’d call them dark as hell. But with A Southern Horror Javi has written, played, sung and produced exactly the record he wanted to make. Some will love it. Others will hate it. Few will fall between those extremes. Any that dare listen will be moved. I think his is a voice that needs to be heard. For the record, I fall firmly into the love it camp. This one will make my best of the year list, without doubt. Already has.

Javi sings most of his songs in first person, some obviously borrowed from the lives of others. He opens with a young man singing to his mom, telling her he’ll kill her piece of shit abusive husband. Before the song is over, the blood of her abuser mixes with the water of the Comal County River. Then we learn that same blood flows through Javi’s veins; her abuser is his dad, and the deed never took place outside of some dream, for Javi was a kid while all this took place. The songs get darker. A vet of the Mid East war appears, a vet that went to war not to defend God and country but instead in a futile attempt to feed his family after the job in Cameron County went away in this goddamned thing they call a global economy. The man now lies near a bed pan lamenting the days before he went to war and left his legs buried in desert sand. In yet offering another Javi places himself into the blue garb of a cop, one bloodstained hand tilting the scales of justice, the other bearing the weight of a loaded gun.

Anger and the pain of failed relationships rip and tear through other songs; misguided forays into booze and drugs rear sneering heads as Javi strains for relief but finds none. The anger of rejection Javi has encountered is laced throughout the work. The music business is tough for a good ol’ white boy, tougher yet for those of Mexican extraction.

Javi has had a rough go so far. The end of his story remains unwritten. I’m reminded of Steve Earle’s Unrepentant, as a young man picks up his weapon and hits the road, headed toward a collision with the devil, only in Javi’s case, his weapon is a guitar and a handful of true words. The gauntlet waits. Fire, blood, brimstone. Anger, fear, prejudice, hatred of the truth. Curses will fly. Bodies will fall. His will be no fairy tale where everyone walks away and lives happily ever after. But it’ll be undeniably real. And not less than a bit scary. True southern horror, you might say.

This is unlike any other release by an English band normally rooted in the blues. Think of it as Spooky Tooth‘s version of Concerto for Group and Orchestra by Deep Purple. After two or three promising blues-based rock releases, one member of the band somehow convinces the others to go for a wildly ambitious, experimental concept album. Jon Lord persuaded Deep Purple to dive into the deep end, and Gary Wright got Spooky Tooth to welcome Frenchman Pierre Henry for this electronic mass. Wright left the band after Ceremony and Lord never had the same influence on Purple again as Ritchie Blackmore led them to heavy metal glory.

I really waffled over reviewing this. Not because of the amazing-yet-horrific quality of the music, but because it’s viral. It infects people. Before listening to this, people are as they are. But after exposure to this music, they start repeating lyric fragments, and going “Tek-suss”. I know this because I’ve seen it happen over the years, again and again. I even managed to infect a few of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s players by accident after giving one of his people a copy of this thing on a mixtape; I’m sitting in Bistro La Strada in Kürten, and one of them comes up with this insane grin and goes “Tek-suss”. It’s dangerous, I tell you.

What this is is a hideous, drunken, sloppy mess that grafts the musicality of Merle Haggard etc onto a very loose/chaotic California punk sound. If that sounds like a bad combination…you’re right. It is. But it’s the sort of ‘bad’ that makes movies like “Plan 9 from Outer Space” so fascinating. This is the sound of country music going horribly wrong. Horribly. Hilariously and gleefully horribly.

Jon Wayne is actually a group, but is also the lead singer, who constantly sounds like he’s singing thru a Shure SM57 that spent a week in a stale pitcher of Miller High Life. The rest of the band creates this vaguely countrified…sound…behind this. There is alcohol involved in this sound, also. Lots of it. In fact, the CD version of this seems to be in chronological order across a single evening’s session, as the tracks get more and more incoherent as they go along, and the offside at the beginning of one track (“…would somebody go to th’ liquor store?”) seems to indicate why.

There is a lot on here about Texas, as a glance at the track titles will show. But in fact, Jon Wayne is from Fresno. He moved there from Texas because he heard Merle Haggard lived there. Mm-hmm. And the landscape Jon Wayne occupies definitely has neither Texas nor Merle Haggard to it. Instead, there’s a lot of politically-incorrect rambling about foreign gas station attendants, indians, police, matrimony, death, alcohol, the joys of DWI, deviant sexual practices, and on and on and on.

Now, you’re wondering…what’s so ecstatically wild about THAT!? Right? Well, lemme tell you…this thing is INSANE. It’s like a bad fuckup trainwreck between the Shaggs, Butthole Surfers, some drunk band from the chickenwire C&W circuit, The Birthday Party, “Elvis Having Fun On Stage”, numerous bad jokes, The Godz, Buck Owens’ “Bakersfield sound” and California in general. The results are a sloppy, drunken, distorted, gleefully fucko mess that usually has people laughing hysterically along with the whole spew of noise, out of tune-ness, frizzy vocal, incompetent drumming, and an attitude that’s so far out in punkdom leftfield that it’s gone past the bleachers, and out into the frickin’ parking lot!

Attempting to describe the tracks is nearly impossible. I’m not kidding. I could try going into a lot of musical detail, but it would be totally fucking pointless here, as some of this teeters on the cusp of not being music at all! But it IS amazing…your mind will totally implode at the sound of the band playing against a piano a whole quarter-tone off on “You and the Kitten”. You will be in awe at a version of Merle Haggard’s “Working Man’s Blues” that bears nearly NO resemblance to not only the original song, but to anything resembling a song AT ALL. You will swear that “Texas Polka” is actually some Japanese noise band trying to play country hoedown music. Your jaw will drop as you hear the engineer ACTUALLY QUIT at the end of one of the tracks, captured on one of what had to be a number of open mikes laying about whatever shitpile this was recorded in. You will not be able to follow any sort of rhythm at all at the beginning of “Shades”…just like the band itself!

…and on and on it will go if you get your hands on this thing. Like “Videodrome”, it causes permanent changes in anyone who listens to it, and then you’ll go out and infect some other poor bastard with this, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Inside Keaton Henson’s flat in Richmond, south-west London the walls are whitewashed and busy with curios. A small monkey’s skull has been hung opposite a dolphin’s jawbone. There’s an 18th-century cartoon, “The Bostonians in Distress”, and a pencil sketch of a baby with no mouth. The interior is neat, museum-like. Meanwhile, just outside, entirely covering a windowsill, are hundreds of cigarette ends – dead Marlboros left to brown and curl. “They help with the anxiety,” says the 24-year-old musician, who is shy, bearded and smartly dressed today in grey tweeds and boots.

I was a big fan of Dear, the debut album of sad, spare ballads that Henson released last year, his voice as delicate, as seemingly fragile as the monkey skull he displays. Still, I’d had no contact with him until December, when I received a card out of nowhere. “Unhappy Christmas,” it offered. “Yours earnestly, Keaton.” On some level I probably guessed then that this musician (whose second album,Birthdays, is out next week) was the sort who’d wall-mount animal remains at home.

“My family used to call me the Doomsday Kid,” he says, settling on a sofa next to the cigarette-strewn sill and directly beneath a shelf that bears a stuffed stoat. The stoat is upright, paws folded in, posed as if about to bolt from a predator. Henson himself is slight and hunched, with the alert, skittish look of someone who might at any moment abandon our interview to sprint away, without another word, down Kew Road. “As you can imagine, I wasn’t the popular, rugby-playing guy at school,” he says, apologetically.

His dad is an actor and his mum was a ballet dancer but they didn’t pass down much in the way of performers’ genes. Music was never part of Henson’s plan (he wanted to be a graphic artist) because he was sure he’d never be able to get up in front of an audience and play. Moreover, he hadn’t written any songs; not since he was a kid, warbling about monsters into a tape recorder.

A first girlfriend changed that. At 18 he fell in love and was in one of those grave, wobbly-kneed relationships that fell apart very suddenly. “I went home and wrote my first proper, intelligible song.” In the months that followed he wrote over 100 more, usually fashioning a three- or four-minute track in one sitting, idling on his bed or by the window with a guitar. He likens songwriting to sculpting with hot wax. The raw material hardens quickly on hitting the air: so, work fast while it’s warm and malleable and then make do with chipping it back afterwards.

His first album (initially self-distributed, then given a formal release by Oak Ten Records last March) featured 10 tracks taken from that period of despairing creativity. “Most of the songs were about one day,” he says, meaning the day his relationship went pop. What happened? Henson yanks open the window and lights up. “There was someone else involved. That was it really. A very simple thing. Quite a long time ago now.” He smokes. “I think a lot of art is trying to make someone love you. Doing a little dance for one particular person. But it’s all bigger than that now.”

For at least a couple of years Henson wouldn’t play his music to anyone. Tracks accumulated in folders on his computer but “like most artists, I was 100% convinced the work was awful. I thought maybe people would hear it when I was dead.” Eventually he let a friend listen, and was encouraged to put tracks online. In 2011 Zane Lowe took a fancy to a song of Henson’s called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, and played it on Radio 1. The wracked, pleading lyrics sounded as if they were aimed at a rival who’d pinched Henson’s girlfriend, and listeners were intrigued. He suddenly had far more fans than the probing few who’d stumbled across his stuff online.

So a gig was arranged. Henson refers to this, now, as The Incident. “Anxiety got the better of me. I let people down. It’s not stage fright, fear of forgetting lyrics… It’s a jumble of other anxieties. I got there and pulled out.”

He retreated, again, to his flat, writing the tracks that would fill the second album, Birthdays. “I consider myself a writer, with adequate tools for that. But being a performer is a vastly different thing. To be able to work an entire room full of people… I have trouble working one person in conversation.” He points out that he’s lost friends and girlfriends in recent years, being too blunt in disclosures of his feelings, sometimes through song. “Singing about someone you’re in a relationship with,” he grimaces. “That’s a trap.”

With a second album imminent, Henson has been persuaded to gig again. Two nights at south London’s Cinema Museum in October went reasonably well (though he recalls, dimly, telling the crowd in the middle of the gig that he’d rather be at home). Recently he played in Glasgow and Manchester. “I’m trying to be realistic. I’ve been given the opportunity to stay in my room and write songs – as a job. I’ll do what I’m asked to do.”

He stubs out a Marlboro, another for the brimming pile, and closes the window. “I want people to be interested enough to allow me to keep doing this. Until I feel like I’ve written what I’m here to write. Then I can go and have a sit down for a while.”

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• Keaton Henson (matterhornuk.wordpress.com)

One of the better entries to emerge from a genre that was quickly growing tired. Return to Forever drummer Lenny White, while not as powerful or talented as counterparts Billy Cobham or Alphonse Mouzon, had an excellent feel for funk and an amazing sense of taste. “Chicken-Fried Steak” contains enough odd-time beats and fills to satisfy any drum fanatic, but White proves to be more than just a technician. “The Venusian Summer Suite” and “Mating Drive” are both moody pieces that were obviously influenced by the music of Tangerine Dream. But the primary reason this session succeeds is “Prince of the Sea.” It is a strong composition that features Al di Meola and Larry Coryell. This was their only recorded performance together in the ’70s and fans are still seeking this recording out to see “who won”.

A versatile drummer, Lenny White is still best-known for being part of Chick Corea’s Return To Forever in the 1970’s. White was self-taught on drums and he largely started his career on top, playing regularly with Jackie McLean (1968) and recording “Bitches Brew” with Miles Davis in 1969. White was soon working with some of the who’s who of jazz including Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Gato Barbieri, Gil Evans, Stanley Clarke and Stan Getz among others. As a member of Return To Forever during 1973-76, White gained a strong reputation as one of the top fusion drummers, but he was always versatile enough to play in many settings. After the breakup of RTF, Lenny White headed several fusion projects but none of the recordings (for Nemperor and Elektra) have dated well at all, emphasizing commercial funk. However his work with the Echoes Of An Era and Griffith Park all-star groups were been more successful and he has been a valuable sideman for a wide variety of projects.