Ken Fowser Little Echo

From 1973 until this very year (2019 at time of writing) one-time Uriah Heep man Ken Hensley has treated us to a huge amount of music outside of the band that he still can’t quite shake of his long standing link with. The first of these solo sojourns, Proud Words On A Dusty Shelf, arrived in 1973, when Hensley was still part of The ‘eep and very much ‘appy to be so. Together with 1975’s Eager To Please and 1980’s Free Spirit these three albums have been brought together under the banner The Bronze Years 1973-1980 by Cherry Red/HNE Records with a newly recorded DVD, which finds roughly an hours’ worth of new chat with man himself regarding the three albums re-released here and the era in which they were recorded…

This reissue on the British-based BGO label contains the band's second (Strange Affair) and fourth (The Return of Ken Whaley) albums along with the bonus LP Happy Days, which was included free with the Ken Whaley album. The LPs were originally released on the United Artists/ Liberty Records label in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Help Yourself remained on the second tier of British bands and was never able to break out commercially. On this set, the band blends its hippie pastoral sounds with a West Coast-styled psychedelia that will appeal to fans of such acts as the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, or even Phish. While the band did achieve some degree of success in the early '70s and developed a large fan base, it broke up after The Return of Ken Whaley…