Diaries.notes.and.sketches.1969

The debut album by one of Britain's lesser-starred supergroup is a markedly different beast than fans of their former bands, the Remo Four and Creation, might have expected. Heavily influenced by the trio's shared love for jazz-rock, its nine songs are moods as much as music, only occasionally stepping out into something instantly recognizable – distinctive covers of the Bee Gees' "New York Mining Disaster 1941" and Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues" are highlights. But the album peaks with its closing track, "As It Was in the First Place" a lengthy Ashton adaptation from the classical "Adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez."

Anyone who thinks of Humble Pie solely in terms of their latter-day boogie rock will be greatly surprised with this, the band's second release, for it is almost entirely acoustic. There is a gently rocking cover of Buddy Holly's "Heartbeat," and a couple of electrified Steve Marriott numbers, but the overall feel is definitely more of the country than the town or city. "The Sad Bag of Shaky Jake" is a typical Marriott country ditty, similar to those he would include almost as a token on each of the subsequent studio albums, and "Every Mother's Son" is structured as a folk tale. On "The Light of Love," Marriott even plays sitar. Peter Frampton's contributions here foreshadow the acoustic-based music he would make as a solo artist a few years later. As a whole, this is a crisp, cleanly recorded, attractive-sounding album, totally atypical of the Humble Pie catalog, but well worth a listen.

Delia Derbyshire’s incredible 1969 library record 'Electronic', written under the Li De La Russe and Nikki St. George pseudonyms along with a few collaboration/contributions by her BBC radiophonic workshop colleagues, David Vorhaus and Brain Hodgson, who were collectively known as Kaleidophon. The material here tends towards Delia's minimal and best work, carefully detailed sketches full of sci-fi feels and abstract scapes, each with their own apt description in the liner notes, and including among them highlights such as the proto-Ø styles of Restless Delays and the sublime series of Delia-suffixed reveries, waltzes and ideas, plus Vorhaus’s brilliantly titled and tripped out Snide Rhythms, including material that eventually surfaced on The Tomorrow People.