Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 155

Record label: Kapp

Produced: Silver Apples and Barry Bryant

Recorded: Universal Studios, Los Angeles and Apostolic Studios, New York; late 1968

Release date: February 1969

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Simeon Coxe III (oscillators [often known as ‘The Simeon’], banjo, v); Danny Taylor (pc, v); Jack Hunt (e)

Track listing: You And I (S); Water; Ruby; Gypsy Love; You’re Not Foolin’ Me; I Have Known Love; A Pox On You; Confusion; Fantasies

Running time: 40.21

Current CD: Radioactive MCD 11680 adds: Silver Apples; Oscillations; Seagreen Serenades; Lovefingers; Program; Velvet Cave; Whirly-Bird; Dust; Dancing Gods; Misty Mountain

Further listening: Long-lost third album The Garden (1970) is now available; two recent albums, Beacon (1997) and Decatur (1998): see also the collaborations The Alchemysts And Simeon (2000) and A Lake Of Teardrops (1998), with Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3

Further reading: Long interview with Simeon in Ptolemaic Terrascope 22, February 1997 (www.terrascope.org); www.silverapples.com

Download: Not currently legally available

In 1967, Simeon Coxe III began to spice up the performances of his conventional rock band by adding electronic effects. ‘One of my best buds then was a serious composer called Harold Rodgers. He had an old Second World War oscillator. He used to get loaded on vodka and try to play along with Beethoven, Bartok, etc. One day I put on a Stones record and played along. I was hooked!’

The band quickly became a duo, based around Simeon’s rapidly multiplying and interlinked battery of audio-generators and Danny Taylor’s massive, carefully tuned drum kit. Their 1968 debut introduced the maverick coupling, but Contact marks the apotheosis of their sound. ‘The first album was a recording studio project, whereas Contact was recorded during and after a three-month tour and my pipes were road-toughened,’ says Coxe. It’s a harder record than their debut – titles such as A Pox On You and the harsh, edgy wailings of Cox’s electrickery speak volumes.

‘I was fortunate enough to know Hendrix [Danny Taylor had drummed with Jimi’s Blue Flames]. We traded gear and talked about new sound distortions. He called me Mr Apple and I called him Mr Experience.’ The influence is apparent on the bucking electro-ballistics of You’re Not Foolin’ Me and Gypsy Love, while Taylor’s urgent, human-drum-machine beats provide the perfect underpinning. Coxe: ‘By 1969 a lot of the hippy dream had faded. I’m not sure the world had become dystopian, but I was sure feeling the darker side.’ This finds a perfect expression in the dissonant flower-power anthem I Have Known Love, a perfectly curdled pop song. And if things didn’t sound weird enough, Simeon – who was raised in the Tennessee mountains – found time to play banjo on Ruby and Confusion, to create a sort of techno-bluegrass.

Unfortunately, Kapp had no money to promote Contact, and Silver Apples went into cold storage for almost 25 years before enjoying a renaissance thanks to the patronage of bands like Stereolab, Moonshake and Spacemen 3. ‘At the time,’ Coxe notes ruefully, ‘electronics as a musical concept had not yet been embraced by musicians and fans as something that could stand on its own, other than in universities and laboratories. We embraced that concept.’