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Rating: Among my most beautiful musical memories is having seen, a couple of times, Peter “Ollie” Halsall (1949-1992) in action on stage. A free and honest spirit, an instinctive and talented musician like no other, this drummer/vibraphonist/pianist is... among the best guitarists one could have the pleasure of listening to and admiring.
For the rock enthusiast who has heard many and thinks they've heard it all but somehow is still unaware of this shy and modest genius, there's a reason to be amazed when listening to him. Even now, in 2006. What was unique about Ollie? He played rock with his mind and heart wide open to music, absorbing everything from it and copying nothing and no one. He thought about the guitar halfway like a saxophonist and halfway like a violinist. His flexible and open-minded brain supplied his fingers with terrifying fluidity and unpredictability. His very tight, almost chromatic phrasing, made possible by a right hand always open on the keyboard with all four fingers, soared over harmony magically and unpredictably, once again FREE, because that's the most fitting adjective.
In the era of frantic pickers and Mesa Boogie amps that bite just by touching them, listening to Halsall delivering six notes with a single pick strike, with the moderate and clean distortion a Fender amp is capable of, with the nuances that his soul and technique abundantly produce, is a comforting thing. Well, having said that, it's worth adding that in this album the crazy Halsall almost doesn't play the guitar! It's 1972, critics have just praised him for the incredible performances on this instrument in the previous Patto album “Hold Your Fire” and he doesn't care and fills the record with piano, avoids solos in much of the pieces and, together with his mates, sets the record in a very playful manner. Titles like “Capitan P and the Attos” are emblematic, but beneath the pranks somewhat reminiscent of Frank Zappa there is a blend of rock + jazz + funk + blues like none will be heard again.
The work opens with “Singing The Blues On Reds”, a rock decidedly turned towards funky. Mike Patto's expressive blues voice keeps it related, but still distant from things like James Brown, bass and drums hold a pattern that sometimes “disrupts” the 4/4 with an offbeat, just to remind every round that we are in the seventies' English progressive music! Halsall, in addition to an electric piano accompaniment, records two clean guitars that embellish and adorn, at the extremes of the stereo image, each on its own, then suddenly switch to unison for an imperial, wide, magnificent sounding arpeggio, which constitutes the instrumental break of the piece. Later, the dry and funky rhythm re-forms for the conclusion entrusted… to a slap and consequent urrrgh! from the singer! Enter “Flat Footed Woman”, eight minutes of pianistic rock blues during which Mike Patto tells of his woman with flat feet, accompanied by a very solid John Halsey on drums. Halsall's piano work is sublime, a rock full of jazz, with divine inversions of tunings and frequent tangential departures with powerful solos. All this from the creative mind of a mostly left-handed guitarist! Damn!
The third piece is titled "mummy" and it's “a cappella” in the… true sense of the word! The humorous drummer Halsey steps up to a microphone and his three mates (Patto, Halsall, and bassist Clive Griffiths) to another, on “backing vocals.” A plausible story of someone waking up abruptly in the night and telling the “mummy” he had a bad dream starts… she compassionately gives him a kiss which, judging by the sound, is not exactly innocent, and then continues with what can only be a splendid fellatio, which ends triumphantly with a Halsey, who meanwhile never kept quiet for a moment, backed by his three increasingly enthusiastic mates! Following this, the album's masterpiece comes in cold, Halsall for once turns up the amp settings to the maximum and the wall of sound “Loud Green Song” starts, an at the time shocking hard rock affair. Surely recorded live in the studio, because it has an insanely “live” sound and also some evident imperfections and distortions, especially on the voice. They all go like trains and Mike Patto struggles to overtake such ardor, and to say he has power in his voice. Here Halsall delivers the album's only real guitar solo and it is devastating, very fast but with an unrivaled, inimitable, timeless sense of anticipation and expressiveness in the speed of execution! Four short minutes of fire that are worth the album.
“Turn Turale” which follows sees the guitar disappear again. It is all entrusted to the piano, this time for a rock blues “stop and go” reinforced by the very solid Halsey, growing more and more orgasmic, with the usual jazz-flavored keyboard flights, in an unmistakably rock total mess. Great piece this too. In “I Got Rhythm” Halsall inserts his Fender's vibrato and creates with the guitar a smoky blues in which Patto’s voice, expressive, personal, gives its best. The last two pieces are full of antics, one sung by Halsall and the last even by the drummer, if you can call singing a performance made up of speaking, raspberry noises, burps, out-of-tune drunk choruses among sounds of surf, broken bottles, etc...
What an album guys!
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