Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 134

Record label: White Whale

Produced: RH Spurgin

Recorded: Vancouver Recording, Canada; dates unknown

Released: July 1968

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Jay Kaye (all instruments, v); RW Buckley (ar)

Track listing: Break Of Dawn; Fly; Little Children; Christine; Speed; Crystal Ball; Nobody; O.D; Land Of Sensations & Delights; The Times; The Magical Fingers Of Minerva; Dead

Running time: 33.03

Current CD: Currently unavailable on legitimate CD, though bootlegs exist

Further listening: Ford Theatre – Trilogy For The Masses (1968)

Further reading: You just read it!

Download: Not currently legally available

One of those treasured items record collectors occasionally stumble across and pick up merely because they find the cover to be interestingly tacky, Suddenly One Summer has proven to be a jewel of a record, albeit a mystifying one. Canadian in origin, and issued in the US on White Whale Records – a label with a bizarrely eclectic artist roster that included The Turtles, Nino Tempo And April Stevens, and British under-achievers John’s Children – the record is a whooshing, floating trip.

As its cover credits only three humans to speak of – and anonymously named ones at that – one is left to ponder whether J.K. & Co. was in fact a band or a psychedelic predecessor of the Alan Parsons Project. In some ways it indeed seems a producer’s record: opening vocal track Fly boasts a drum sound lifted straight off The Beatles’ A Day In The Life; a sitar can be heard on The Magical Fingers Of Minerva; Little Children features the inevitable sound effect of children at play and actually breaks into a few bars of Frère Jacques; and, most appropriately, album closer Dead includes the voice of a clergyman invoking burial rites, and – nice touch, this – the sound of someone shovelling actual dirt.

But what holds Suddenly One Summer together throughout is the voice and song of one Jay Kaye, who has crafted a rather special song cycle. From its whirling beginning – in which Kaye in lazy reverie sings, ‘If you want to fly …’ – through the troubled lyrics of Nobody (‘My happiness is a needle/I will escape for another day’), which recalls Love’s Signed D.C. – to the cheery sound of that gravedigger’s shovel, there’s a story of some sort being told here.

Consider this one of those late ’60s psychedelic concept albums – Ford Theatre’s Trilogy For The Masses and Mandrake Memorial’s Puzzle are two others – that in their ambition to tell some sort of life parable emerge with an oddly open-ended suite that can be interpreted in any manner the listener finds appropriate. In the end, the big question is less the matter of J.K.’ s identity and more the motivation of the people who made the record – not to mention the expectations of the label that decided to release it. Stranger still is how Fly manages to anticipate Radiohead’s OK Computer, a mere 30 years beforehand. What goes around …