Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 109

Record label: Island

Produced: Jimmy Miller

Recorded: Olympic Sound Studios; April–November 1967

Released: December 1967

Chart peaks: 8 (UK) 17 (US)

Personnel: Steve Winwood (o, g, b, p, harpsichord, pc, v); Dave Mason (g, Mellotron, sitar, tambura, shakkai, b, v); Chris Wood (flute, s, o, v); Jim Capaldi (d, pc, v); Eddie Kramer (e)

Track listing: Heaven Is In Your Mind; Berkshire Poppies; House For Everyone; No Face No Name No Number; Dear Mr Fantasy; Dealer; Utterly Simple; Coloured Rain; Hope I Never Find Me There; Giving To You

Running time: 34.30

Current CD: IMCD 264 includes the full US and UK versions of the album plus adds: Paper Sun (S); Hole In My Shoe (S); Smiling Phases; We’re A Fade You Missed

Further listening: Traffic (1968)

Further reading: Back In the High Life: A Biography of Steve Winwood (Alan Clayson, 1988); www.stevewinwood.com (official) www.winwoodfans.com (fan site)

Download: iTunes; HMV Digital

By autumn 1966 Steve Winwood had outgrown his role as teenage prodigy with the Spencer Davis Group and become a restless 20-year-old keenly aware of the new mood sweeping through pop. That summer the Davis band had scored major hits with Keep On Running and Gimme Some Loving, but Winwood was tired of being the star of a group bearing another’s name. Even as their Autumn 66 album appeared, Winwood was jamming around his home town of Birmingham with younger, more adventurous spirits, among them the three future members of Traffic.

In February 1967 Winwood officially quit the Spencer Davis Group and swapped Birmingham for the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold, where Island supremo Chris Blackwell had found him a cottage to rent. Blackwell, with whom Winwood had managerial ties, saw Winwood as a future mainstay of his label as it grew a rock roster from its reggae roots.

Winwood occupied the cottage alone, but there were numerous visitations from the band, and the blend of bucolic Berkshire and the intoxications of the Summer Of Love proved creatively invigorating. So began the myth of ‘getting it together in the country’, a notion that has trapped numerous bands into stoned, fruitless escapism (The Stone Roses’ Second Coming is but one case in point). The cover of Mr Fantasy shows the group gathered in the candlelit cottage. Rural tranquillity does pervade a portion of the record, though Berkshire Poppies is little more than an update of cockney music hall (various Small Faces are present on it).

Produced with striking clarity by Jimmy Miller, the record soared on Winwood’s soulful voice and inventive keyboard and guitar playing. Behind the balmy moods of Coloured Rain and Heaven Is In Your Mind lay much bickering over whether the pastel psychedelia of Dave Mason’s Utterly Simple was fit to sit alongside mournful Winwood creations like No Face No Name No Number. The schism between Mason and the others was there in the pair of singles that preceded the album’s release at the close of ’67, Paper Sun and Hole In My Shoe (both included on the US edition), the latter a sitar and patchouli confection from Mason which Winwood recorded only under pressure. Time has certainly been kinder to the questing spirit of the title track than Mason’s surrealist escapades, yet Mr Fantasy would be a less endearing encapsulation of its era without them.