With an instrumental line-up of acoustic guitars, fiddle, mandolin, penny-whistle and harmonium it sounds very much like what you'd expect from a group of Dublin hippies getting together in their commune. From the start, the lyrical content name-checked various of the band's friends and acquaintances, and incorporated various stray musical and lyrical influences.
The spoken word introduction to the second track Dr Dim and Dr Strange, for example, comes straight from the pages of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up, published in 1621.
Then there are the two tracks with lyrics straight out of James Joyce’s 1907 Chamber Music (although one of them, Lean out the window, doesn’t actually appear in the “official” track-list.
When the time came for the follow-up album in 1970, things had changed. While the band’s first live gigs were in folk clubs and poetry readings, the arrival of sixteen-year-old guitarist Gary Moore on the scene meant Heavy Petting had a harder edge, though the pastoral elements were still there in abundance in the opening Ballad of the Wasps with its cautionary tale of metamorphosis, Kilmanoyadd Stomp, the Latvian blues of I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes, with it’s concluding quotation from W.H. Davies “Leisure”, Jove Was At Home, the instrumental When Adam Delved and Ashling.
On the other hand the more electric material doesn’t always rock out, although Gave My Love An Apple tended to get people near the Underworld stereo hoppin’ and boppin’. Sign On My Mind took the pastoral elements, threw in some tasteful guitar work from Gary Moore and meandered away across the meadows. Things are not, indeed, the way they seem so while Summer Breeze and Mary Malone of Moscow don’t feature in Hughesy’s list of all-time classic tracks they don’t have me reaching for the skip/shuffle button either.