I sense summer is starting to close, as the announcements are starting to roll in again. I myself have a couple of weeks of summer vacation still to take, but it's obvious the Fall season is upon us.
Gonzo, a sub label of the same folks behind Voiceprint, will be reissuing Gringo for the first time. I never featured the album prior, as there was a fuzzy/gray reissue from Audio Archives long ago with little backup as to the source. I'm no legal expert, so I just stayed out of the discussion. Well now we have a bonafide legit reissue that you can buy with confidence!
Label says: "You may not have heard the name,
but I am sure that if you are reading this you have heard his music.
John G Perry is best known for his session work, most notably for
Caravan on "For Girls Who Go Plump in the Night" and "Caravan and the
New Symphonia," but he has performed with many other Prog and non-Prog
artists. Although he was born in America, his parents were British and
soon moved back to the UK, and as PERRY grew up, he became more
interested in music. One of his first projects as a musician was called
Gringo. Evolving from student beat groups, Utopia and Toast, in 60s
Bath; Gringo also featured Henry Marsh who later sampled chart success
with Sailor, and Simon Byrne worked with – of all people - Brotherhood
of Man among others. Perry describes the early days of the band: It
started out as Utopia, a five-piece copy band doing all the hits from
the Beatles and the Searchers and lots of stuff playing at college and
parties. Everybody in the band had been at private school and sung in
the choir, so it was a terrific vocal band. We used to do wonderful
renditions of Beach Boys songs, we were really rather good at that. It
was basically the same band all the way through, the three of us : Henry
Marsh on guitar and keyboards, Simon Byrne on drums and myself... That
first band unfortunately split when everybody went their way. I went off
to become a farming student, working on different dairy farms in the
West country of England. But I kept in contact with Henry and Simon, and
they approached me one day, saying they'd have a year off in their
studies, and would I join them to form a new band, you know, rather than
go grape-picking in France, which I thought would be wonderful... I
actually had also decided to have a year off before I was going to go up
to the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. So we elected to get
this band together, which was called Toast. We hired one of the farmers'
cottages, locked ourselves away and worked very hard, rehearsing or
whatever, built up a repertoire and then we came up to London, and three
months later we're on television! The show was 'Colour Me Pop' and we
did three songs on that... So none of us went back to college, and we
all carried on in a musical career. Gringo toured in Europe and even
made a living with a club residency on the south coast of France. They
were opening act on a UK tour featuring Barclay James Harvest and
Caravan. Perry takes up the story: We were there a sort of opening act,
and got to know both bands and kept in touch with them. It was a good
tour actually, very successful, cause Caravan were very well-known in
the South of England and BJH were very well-known in the North of
England, so all the way round the country we had the crowds and stuff,
so for us that was taking us out of the small clubs into concert halls
and theaters and stuff like that, so that was a good experience for us.
Their recorded legacy is a quality album of pop-tinged progressive rock
that still sounds fresh, with a lightness of touch and many distinctive
twists. The song-within-a-song piece, Emma And Harry, is worthy of note,
but all nine tracks are good. It is tempting to wonder if “Land of Who
Knows Where” may have been inspired by a certain Caravan album released
the same year.
Tracks: 1. Cry The Beloved Country
, 2. I'm Another Man
, 3. More And More
, 4. Our Time Is Our Time
, 5. Gently Step Through The Stream
, 6. Emma And Harry
, 7. Moonstone
, 8. Land Of Who Knows Where
, 9. Patriotic Song
, 10. * I'm Another Man (single version)
, 11. * Soft Mud (* Bonus tracks)
."
A listing of obscure progressive rock (and related) albums that have yet to be reissued on CD legitimately
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