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Henry Cow were an English avant-garde rock group, founded at Cambridge University in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. An inherent anti-commercial bias kept them at arm's length from the mainstream music business, enabling them to experiment at will. They remained in existence for 10 years and produced a body of music that was challenging, provocative and influential for years to come.
While it was generally thought that Henry Cow took their name from Twentieth Century American composer Henry Cowell, this has been repeatedly denied by band members. According to Tim Hodgkinson, the name was "in the air" in 1968, and it seemed like a good name for the band. It had no connection to anything.
THE BEGINNING
Fred Frith met Tim Hodgkinson, a fellow student, in a blues club at Cambridge University in May 1968. Recognizing their mutual open-minded approach to music the two began performing together, playing a variety of musical styles, including "dada" blues and "neo-Hiroshima". Henry Cow's first concert was to support Pink Floyd at the Architects Ball at Homerton College, Cambridge in June 1968.
In October 1968 Henry Cow expanded when they were joined by Andy Powell (bass guitar), Dave Attwood (drums) and Rob Brooks (rhythm guitar). They performed with this line-up until December that year when Frith, Hodgkinson and Powell split off from the rest of the group and became a trio. Powell at the time was studying music at King's College under Roger Smalley, the resident composer. Smalley was influential in Henry Cow's early development. He exposed them to a variety of new music from bands and musicians like Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Smalley also introduced them to the idea of writing music pieces for rock groups. It was at this time that Henry Cow began challenging themselves by writing music they could not play, then using it to teach themselves to play the instruments.
As a trio, with Frith on bass guitar, Powell on drums and Hodgkinson playing an organ Frith and Powell had persuaded him to learn, Henry Cow performed at a number of gigs on the university calendar, including the annual Architects' Ball, the Midsummer Common Festival and on the roof of a 14-storey building in Cambridge. In April 1969 Powell left and the band reverted to a duo again, with Frith playing violin and Hodgkinson ..boards and reeds. In October 1969, after a tryout with philosopher Galen Strawson, Frith and Hodgkinson persuaded bassist John Greaves to join the band, and with the services of a couple of temporary drummers and then Sean Jenkins, Henry Cow performed as a quartet for the next eight months. In May 1971 Martin Ditcham replaced Jenkins on drums, and with this line-up they played at several events, including the Glastonbury Festival alongside Gong in June 1971.
Ditcham left in July 1971 and it was not until September that year that the drummer's seat was filled again, this time by Chris Cutler. Responding to one of Cutler's adverts in Melody Maker, the band invited him to a rehearsal, and it was only when Cutler joined, that Henry Cow settled into a permanent core of Frith, Hodgkinson, Cutler and Greaves. The band then relocated to London where they began an aggressive rehearsal schedule.
After having entered John Peel's "Rockortunity Knocks" contest in 1971, Henry Cow recorded a John Peel session for BBC Radio 1 in February 1972. They later went on to record another session in October that year and a further three sessions between 1973 and 1975.
In April 1972 Henry Cow wrote and performed the music for Robert Walker's production of Euripides' The Bacchae. This involved an intense and demanding three week period of concentrated work that changed the band completely. It was during this time that Geoff Leigh on woodwinds joined and Henry Cow became a quintet.
In July 1972, the band performed at the Edinburgh Festival and wrote and performed music for a ballet with artist Ray Smith and the Cambridge Contemporary Dance Group at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was Smith who later did the "paint sock" art work on three of Henry Cow's LP covers.
Back in London, they started to organise a series of concerts and events under the names Cabaret Voltaire and Explorers' Club at Kensington Town Hall with invited guests, including Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Ivor Cutler, Ron Geesin, David Toop and Ray Smith. For the first time, Henry Cow started getting some attention from the rock press and the then emerging Virgin Records label. After much negotiations and deliberation, in May 1973 Henry Cow signed a contract with Virgin.
UNREST
Within two weeks of signing the contract, Henry Cow began recording their debut album Leg End (also known as Legend) at Virgin's Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. It took three weeks of hard work, but at the end they knew how to handle the studio themselves, which would prove to be invaluable later in their career. The track "Nine Funerals of the Citizen King", sung by the whole group, was Henry Cow's first overt political statement.
To promote its new signing, Virgin organised a UK tour for Henry Cow and Faust, who had also just signed to the label. During this tour, Henry Cow began preparing music for an unorthodox and provocative play, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Some of this music was used on their next record Unrest.
During a tour of The Netherlands in December 1973, Geoff Leigh left the group. Looking for more unusual instruments to draw them further away from standard rock and jazz, Henry Cow asked classically trained Lindsay Cooper (oboe, bassoon) to join. With hardly any time to rehearse, and Cooper having just had all four wisdom teeth extracted, they returned to The Manor in early 1974 to begin recording Unrest. It was during this time that they became acquainted with Slapp Happy, a quirky avant-pop trio of Peter Blegvad (guitar), Anthony Moore (keyboards) and Dagmar Krause (vocals), who had just completed their first LP for Virgin.
Recording Unrest was another intense experience, and the strongest period of collective learning since The Bacchae. They only had enough material to fill one side of the LP, and so were forced to spend a good deal of time developing the studio composition process that produced Side 2. The recording session brought out a lot of tensions in the band, and it reflected in the music, but in the end they were pleased with the result and this re-united the group.
In May 1974 they were on tour again around England and Europe with Captain Beefheart. It was during this tour that Henry Cow woke up to the realities of what was happening to them: they were becoming a rock band, playing the same thing night after night. Life was no longer a challenge and they were becoming complacent. After some serious thinking they decided to ask Lindsay Cooper to leave and fulfil their last outstanding concert obligations (a tour of the Netherlands) as a quartet. Without Cooper they were forced to abandon much of their learned material and worked up a 35-40 minute piece unlike anything else they had done before (this later became "Living in the Heart of the Beast" on In Praise of Learning).
In November 1974, Slapp Happy invited Henry Cow to be their band on their second LP for Virgin. The result was Desperate Straights, an almost entirely Slapp Happy composed album that surprised everyone, considering how dissimilar the two groups were. The success of this venture prompted a merger of the two bands.
In early 1975 the merged group began rehearsing for In Praise of Learning in a freezing gymnasium. It was an arduous and extremely demanding time, something Slapp Happy were not prepared for, and it soon became apparent that the merger might not work. Nevertheless, they still went to The Manor and made In Praise of Learning together. But it was only after they started rehearsing with a view to performing live together that it became clear that their approaches were incompatible. The merger ended in April 1975, when Anthony Moore quit and Peter Blegvad was asked to leave. However, Dagmar Krause, whose contribution had added another dimension to Henry Cow's sound, elected to remain, which effectively spelt the end of Slapp Happy as a band.
Having guested on both the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy albums, Lindsay Cooper rejoined in April 1975 and Henry Cow became a sextet and began preparing for what would become the most sustained and rigorous working schedule of their career: two solid years of virtually continuous touring in Western Europe.
EUROPE
Henry Cow's music was challenging and uncompromising and this often lead to them being accused of deliberately making their music inaccessible. As a result they were virtually ignored in their own country. Even Virgin Records, who had started dropping experimental groups in favour of commercial ones, was now showing little to no interest in Henry Cow. This led to the group having to continuously make decisions as to whether to continue or not (there certainly were no economic inducements). To continue required political decisions to survive, and these decisions often reflected in their music. Henry Cow's anti-capitalist stance was brought on partly out of necessity rather than choice. They began working outside the music industry and doing everything for themselves. They abandoned agencies and managers and stopped looking for approval from the music press. Henry Cow quickly became self-sufficient and self-reliant.
Virtual exiles from their own country, they made mainland Europe their second home where they (and their music) were well received. After a concert in Rome in July 1975, Henry Cow remained behind with their truck/bus/mobile home and began meeting local musicians, including progressive rock band Stormy Six, and the PCI (Italian Communist Party). The PCI offered them concerts at Festa D'Unita (large open-air fairs that run every summer all over Italy), and they joined Stormy Six's L'Orchestra, a musicians' co-operative in Milan. Each contact they made lead to more contacts and soon doors opened for Henry Cow all over Europe.
While rehearsing for an upcoming tour of Scandinavia in March 1976, John Greaves left the band to start working on a project with Peter Blegvad, and Dagmar Krause withdrew due to ill-health. Committed to the tour, Henry Cow had to perform as a quartet (Hodgkinson, Frith, Cooper and Cutler) and adjust their music accordingly. They took the radical option and abandoned composed material completely in favour of pure improvisation.
In May 1976 Henry Cow compiled a double LP Henry Cow Concerts for a new Norwegian underground label Compendium (re-released later on the budget Virgin sub-label Caroline). For the first time, they did everything themselves: the mastering, cover design, cutting, pressing and manufacturing. The album included an excerpt from one of several concerts performed with guest artist Robert Wyatt in 1975.
Still without a bass player, Henry Cow auditioned until they found Georgie Born, a classically trained cellist and improviser. She joined the band in June 1976 and their new compositions grew even more complex.
Henry Cow returned to London in early 1977 where they merged with the entire Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong to form The Orckestra. They played their first concert at the Moving Left Review at The Roundhouse in London and then in an open-air theatre in Hyde Park. The Orckestra later went on to tour in France, Italy and Scandinavia (extracts from some of these performances were released in 2006 on a CD-single included in the Henry Cow Box). At more or less the same time they set up Music for Socialism and its May Festival. It had been three years since Henry Cow had performed more than one concert a year in their own country. In an attempt to break the apathy that seemed to be discouraging anyone from wanting to put them on, they tried to organise a small alternative tour themselves, but abandoned it after 11 concerts when they started losing money: clearly nothing had changed.
Their contract with Virgin Records had now become a burden to both Henry Cow and Virgin: none of Henry Cow's records were licensed or distributed in the countries in which they spent all their time playing, and Henry Cow were not making any money for Virgin. Henry Cow needed to record again but Virgin (understandably) refused to give them studio time at The Manor. When Henry Cow referred to the contract ("one month at a first class studio"), Virgin Records (in October 1977) agreed to cancel it.
By now Krause's health had deteriorated to such an extent that touring became impossible for her and she decided to leave the group, although she agreed to sing on Henry Cow's next album. The recording of this album was to begin at Sunrise studios in Kirchberg, Switzerland in January 1978. However, a group meeting one week before threw into question the material planned for it. Cutler and Frith hurriedly wrote a set of songs which, along with some of the planned material was duly recorded. On returning to London, another meeting was convened to question the predominance of songs on the album. The group agreed that the songs would be released separately by Cutler and Frith, while the instrumentals would be released later by Henry Cow. This decision, however, spelt the end of the band. Cutler, Frith and Krause released the songs, with four extra tracks recorded at David Vorhaus' Kaleidophon Studio in London, as Hopes and Fears under the name Art Bears, crediting the rest of Henry Cow as guests. Later that year Henry Cow returned to Sunrise, by then without Dagmar Krause and Georgie Born, to record their last album, Western Culture, an instrumental.
DISCOGRAPHY
1973 - Leg End
1974 - Unrest
1975 - Desperate Straights (with Slapp Happy)
1975 - In Praise of Learning (with Slapp Happy)
1976 - Henry Cow Concerts
1979 - Western Culture
2008 - Stockholm & Goteborg (previously unreleased radio recordings from 1975 and 1977)
The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set (2009)
A number of people passed through Henry Cow over the years, including:
Dave Attwood – drums
Peter Blegvad – guitar,voice,clarinet
Georgie Born – cello, bass guitar
Rob Brooks – rhythm guitar
Lindsay Cooper – bassoon,oboe,recorder,voice,flute,piano,soprano sax
Chris Cutler – drums, percussion,toys,piano,whistle,voice,radio,noise,trumbet
Martin Ditcham – drums
Fred Frith – guitars,violin,viola,bass guitar, piano,xylophone,voice,banjo,sax
Joss Graham – bass guitar
John Greaves – bass guitar,piano,whistle,voice,celeste
Tim Hodgkinson – organ,piano,alto sax,clarinet,voice,hawaiian guitar
Sean Jenkins – drums
Dagmar Krause – vocals,piano
Geoff Leigh – flute,saxes,clarinet,recorder,voice
Anthony Moore – piano,electronics,tapework
Andy Powell – bass guitar, drums
Anne-Marie Roelofs – trombone, violin
Robert Wyatt - voice, percussion
Mongezi Feza - trumbet
Irene Schweizer - piano
ROCK IN OPPOSITION
Henry Cow agreed to disband as a permanent group, but did not announce the fact immediately. They continued for another six months, creating a new set of material (recorded later to complete Western Culture) and revisited for the last time, all the places that had supported them over the years.
In March 1978 Henry Cow invited four European groups, Stormy Six (Italy), Samla Mammas Manna (Sweden), Univers Zero (Belgium) and Etron Fou Leloublan (France) to come to London and perform in a festival Henry Cow had organised called Rock in Opposition or RIO. Throughout Europe, Henry Cow had encountered many "progressive" groups refusing to bow to the hegemony of American and British rock music. Instead they drew on non-American music sources, such as local folk music and 20th century "classical" or "art music", and often sang in their own languages. As was the case with Henry Cow, these groups struggled to survive: record companies were not interested in their music. Although these groups and Henry Cow were musically diverse, what they had in common was: (1) their independence and opposition to the established Rock business; and (2) a determination to pursue their own work regardless.
After the festival, RIO was formalised as an organisation with a charter whose aim was to represent and promote its members. RIO thus became a collective of bands united in their opposition to the music industry and the pressures to compromise their music.
Henry Cow's last concert was held in Milan on 25 July 1978. A final performance scheduled at the Annual World Youth Festival in Cuba never materialised. In August they returned to the Sunrise studios to compete Western Culture after which the band officially announced their break-up in the press, stating that "… although the group as a commodity, as a name, ceases to exist the work of the group will go on …"
Western Culture was released on Henry Cow's own Broadcast label. Shortly afterwards, Chris Cutler launched Recommended Records, his own independent label and non-commercial record distribution network.
www.rermegacorp.com
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