And as five voices gather around the harmonium for Friends, the album closes on a note that mightn’t quite match Kip of the Serenes’ Donnybrook Fair it still ain’t too shabby. If Heavy Petting isn’t quite in the same class as its predecessor that’s more a result of the first album’s strengths rather than any weaknesses the second might possess.
And there, for many years, the story ended. I saw a couple of passing comments that suggested that there was a third album in the works, and duly noted the release of the “difficult third album” Alternative Medicine in 1997 with a mental note that I needed to pick it up at some point in time.
The release of Halcyon Days, prompted me to think that the real third album has (possibly) emerged, and, frankly, to me it’s a disappointment. Given the almost total lack of reference material on the band, it’s almost impossible to know what was going on around the band when these sessions took place.
For a start, looking at the “Productions and Co-Productions” list at the end of Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles, the recording dates between April 1969 and October 1970 seem to put the album in between Kip of the Serenes and Heavy Petting, which suggests that, rather than the third album we’re looking at an attempt to get something together for the follow-up to their debut.
It’s been widely noted that artists who write their own material find it difficult to develop enough new material of sufficient quality to make up a second release immediately after the first album appears.
Of course, you’d expect that the debut album would be have picked the eyes out of the band’s repertoire and that anything left that wasn’t good enough for the first album is going to need considerable further development if it’s going to qualify for the follow-up. Since the debut was probably the result of a lengthy period of writing, rehearsal and live performance, recording the second album is always likely to involve the odd dead end.
Which is, unfortunately, what I think we’re looking at with Halcyon Days. I’ll be giving it another chance from time to time over the next few months, but I think it’s almost time to start looking for Alternative Medicine