Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 115

Record label: Island

Produced: Chris Blackwell

Recorded: Pye Studios 1 and 2, London; early 1967

Released: February 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Patrick Campbell-Lyons (g, v); Alex Spyropoulos (k); Herbie Flowers (b); Frank Riccotti (g); Alan Parker (g); Alan Hawkes (k); Michael Coe (French horn); Sylvia Schuster (c); Barry Morgan (d); Clem Cattini (d); Sue & Sunny, Madeleine Bell, Lesley Duncan (bv); Brian Humphries (e); Syd Dale (ar)

Track listing: Wings Of Love; Lonely Boy; We Can Help You; Satellite Jockey; In The Courtyard Of The Stars; You’re Just The One; Pentecost Hotel (S); I Never Found A Love Like This; Take This Hand; 1999

Running time: 25.35

Current CD: Island IMCD301 contains both stereo and mono mixes of all tracks on the orginal album.

Further listening: All Of Us (1968)

Further reading: Rainbow Chaser (Patrick Campbell-Lyons: unpublished manuscript extracted in liner notes to Nirvana’s All Of Us)

Download: iTunes

The brainchild of songwriters Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos, Nirvana was originally conceived as a group but devolved into a duo by the time they signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.

‘Blackwell said, “You’ll have to have an album” because he wasn’t interested in singles as such,’ Lyons remembers. ‘It just evolved. We went back to a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and used to work long days and long nights completing songs. This character Simon came out of the song Wings Of Love which also inspired the sleeve artwork.’ A lonely kid, living in a six-dimensional city, is obsessed with the idea of sprouting wings and flying. After reaching the stars, he encounters an extra-terrestrial centaur and is taken to Nirvana where he meets and ultimately weds the impossibly beautiful mermaid creature Magdelena.

They dubbed their creation ‘a science fiction pantomime’. ‘To describe it as a concept album seems naff to me now,’ Lyons cautions. ‘We saw it as a musical pantomime for grown-ups with a slightly druggy undertone to it. I don’t know if we really knew what psychedelia meant but we had our own feeling about it. Many people were living psychedelic lives in those days.’

The musical backdrop was an oddly eclectic mix emphasising the schizophrenic divide between pop and rock in 1967. As ambitious songwriters, Lyons and Spyropoulos had one foot in Denmark Street’s Tin Pan Alley but were also aspiring towards more adventurous studio experiments.

The album included upbeat singalongs like We Can Help You, the catchy Wings Of Love and even a bizarre trad jazz item, 1999. It says much for the interest in the album that these songs were covered by acts as diverse as Alan Bown, Herman’s Hermits and Kenny Ball, respectively. The key track on the work was undoubtedly Pentecost Hotel, one of the finest pieces of orchestral pop ever released. ‘It really encapsulated the whole concept of the album,’ Lyons notes. ‘It was a journey somewhere out there. There was a lot of poetic licence in the whole concept. Maybe that’s what makes it attractive, its naïveté, which is missing in a lot of things today.’