Unrest is the second studio album by the British band Henry Cow, formed in 1968.
Henry Cow continues on Unrest with the same line-up as the band made their debut Leg End previous year, with one exception. Saxophonist Geoff Leigh is absent.
Geoff Leigh’s decision to leave Henry Cow was the sum of many reasons. Firstly, he had been unhappy from the start with the band’s deal with Virgin Records, but the musical reasons were still the main reason. Leigh felt that Henry Cow’s compositions were becoming too complex and, on the other hand, although he enjoyed free jazz jamming, he did not feel at home with the band’s increasingly abstract and experimental improvisations, which the band wanted to play more and more, especially live.
Leigh was replaced by Lindsay Cooper (1951-2013), the band’s first female member, who had impressed guitarist Fred Frith and drummer Chris Cutler after performing with the improvisational theatre group Ritual Theatre. Cooper’s influence on the band’s sound was significant. Where Leg End’s Geoff Leigh played saxophones with a free jazz feel, the classically trained Cooper’s oboe and bassoon took over, bringing a new seriousness to the music. Keyboardist Tim Hodginson does play alto saxophone at times on the album, but Cooper’s oboe and bassoon play much more central roles and bring a strong influence from the direction of the art music Cooper had studied at the Royal Academy Of Music’s most prestigious training programme. After leaving the world of classical music, which she found oppressively conservative, Cooper joined the prog-folk band Comus for a year and did some session work before joining Henry Cow (shortly after recording Unrest, Cooper also played on Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge).
”This was serious. She’s got an oboe and she knows what to do with it.”
Although Cooper’s influence on Unrest is already strong as a player, she was not yet composing anything for the band at this stage, but even in that area She later became a strong contributor to Henry Cow and many other projects. Cooper’s strong background in art music and virtuoso playing skills inspired Henry Cow to move towards that world at the expense of jazz/jazz-rock influences. As the band’s bassist John Greaves said ”This was serious. She’s got an oboe and she knows what to do with it”. Henry Cow was very keen to compose music suitable for Cooper’s instruments, the clearest example being the beautiful interlude ’Solemn Music’, composed by Frith for wind instruments played mainly by Cooper and lasting just over a minute. Cooper fitted in with the group in other ways. He was not only a skilled and fearless musician, but also a politically clearly left-leaning intellectual like the rest of the band.
The first track, the less than three-minute long, crisp ”Bittern Storm Over Ulm” is a song built around Frith’s guitar solo and in all its raucousness is most stylistically reminiscent of the mood of the previous debut album. Frith reworked the composition of ”Bittern Storm Over Ulm” by chopping and re-cutting the bass line from Yardbirds’ ”Got to Hurry” (1965) and building the song around it.
John Greaves’ composition ”Half Asleep; Half Awake”, which follows, is somewhat amusingly the most accessible of the album’s offerings, although it is in fact rhythmically and structurally very sophisticated piece of music. The patterns originally composed for Leigh’s saxophone were quickly adapted for Cooper’s oboe. Cooper battled the challenging parts on tape during days of recording sessions, made all the more challenging by the fact that Cooper had just had his wisdom teeth removed! ”Half Asleep; Half Awake” is one of the few Greaves compositions to end up on Henry Cow’s album which is a shame as the song is stunning and Greaves’ subsequent solo career is also testament to his great talent as a composer.
The highlight of Unrest, however, is the 12-minute ”Ruins” composed by Frith. The piece is built around a stunningly complex 55/8 time signature which is then constantly varied throughout the piece using the Fibonacci number sequence. Frith got the idea for this from a biography of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók in which the subject was discussed. The more ethereal middle section of the song features Frith’s violin solo (Frith started playing the violin at the age of five and switched to guitar at 13) which recalls the playing of King Crimson’s David Cross. Frith, however, later regretted his performance, saying his violin playing was inferior.
Drummer Chris Cutler occasionally accompanies the song effectively with a xylophone and Cooper’s bassoon reinforces the contemporary chamber music feel of the ”light-hearted” section. Around eight minutes in, the music becomes more atonal and very experimental. And probably also very annoying for those not used to this kind of music. Finally, the song becomes more melodic again and returns to a modified version of the main theme. ”Ruins” became an important part of Henry Cow’s live repertoire and is one of the band’s finest compositions. (Random tidbit: Mike Oldfield engineered ”Ruins”.)
The B-side starts with Frith’s aforementioned composition ”Solemn Music” and then moves into the last 17 minutes or so of the album, which consists of four studio improvisations. Henry Cow recorded their debut album Leg End after years of existence, but the band went on to record this second album only a few months after that one. Because of this and their busy touring schedule, the band had a shortage of formally composed material. And Henry Cow, like many other bands, was not a band that was in the habit of jamming songs together in the studio. However, Henry Cow was interested in using the studio as a ”composing” tool and the band decided to build half of the album as studio improvisations. Rather than jamming or collective improvisation, it was more a case of improvising instrument by instrument and reacting to what the previous musician had played on the tape.
It is true that the decision to make half the album through improvisation was dictated in a way by necessity, but on the other hand Henry Cow took up the challenge of using studio improvisation as a new way of composing with great enthusiasm. After all, free improvisations had been a major part of the band’s gigs for a long time. Whereas live improvisations were created from scratch, the studio environment allowed for a different way of improvising.
Using overlapping recordings, the band members were able to react to each other’s performances in a more structured way, and the band also made use of complex tape loops, building music around them piece by piece.
Henry Cow’s improvisations do not aim for the same kind of rock-sounding improvisations as King Crimson for example, but Cow’s songs are much more experimental and do not seem to follow any of the rules of normal popular music song structures. This makes them rather vague and, at least for the uninitiated, certainly difficult to listen to. Personally, I enjoyed the wild soundscapes and several individual virtuoso performances, even though the songs may not necessarily sound very sensible as a whole by any normal standards. But there is some crazy logic to their madness! In particular, the boisterous playing of the rhythm section in ”Upon Entering the Hotel Adlon” really impresses. Cutler and Greaves are both real beasts as musicians!
Henry Cow’s studio improvisations are hard to find a comparable work in the world of rock or jazz. Admittedly, the studio experiments of the German rock band Faust and the Miles Davis edits of producer Teo Macero are something of a kindred spirit. But Cow’s improvisations are more akin to modern art music and musique concrèté, even if the result is not based on strict notation but on painstakingly improvised piece by piece in the studio, cutting and pasting tapes and fading or highlighting parts of the raw material in the mix. The band experienced moments of despair during the process and initially feared the whole experiment was doomed to failure, but in the end the band was satisfied with their achievements. And so is this listener. Unrest’s improvisations are challenging to listen to, but once you surrender to them they sweep over the listener like a massive wave and while the experience can be exhausting at times it is also rewarding. Henry Cow’s record label Virgin, on the other hand, was not so enthusiastic and much to the band’s disappointment, the band were rather lukewarm about the album they were excited to present.
To Virgin’s credit, the company did not demand any changes to the music, but on the other hand, the promotional funding was minimal and the company did little to help organise the tours (even though the Virgin programme agency was included in the contract). This was the beginning of very lean times for the band as they travelled around Europe in their rudimentary gig bus, which was also their home. The band had no money to spend and lived largely from hand to mouth, preparing their own food in the coach’s on-board kitchen. Most of the time the band also slept on the bus.
Lindsay Cooper’s journey with Henry Cow was to be short lived. Cooper had a personality that was intelligent, charming and boisterous. She was a sexually confident bisexual and feminist who flirted with pretty much everyone in Henry Cow’s organisation (which, incidentally, was equal in pay: the roadies earned as much as the band’s musicians) regardless of gender. This caused some confusion, but personal feelings were eventually especially strained by Cooper’s sexual relationship with the married Frith. Henry Cow’s solution to the problem was to ask Cooper to leave the band. The band thus fell into a rather patriarchal solution, despite their best efforts to be progressive in all their activities. On the other hand, it is easy to understand the band in the sense that if the problem can be solved by removing Frith or Cooper from the band, it is clear that the founding member who has been with the band since 1968 is on stronger ground than the newcomer who has just joined.
In the end, however, Cooper’s dismissal did not seriously damage relations between him and the band, and soon Cooper was already performing at the band’s concerts at Cutler’s invitation. By the time of the 1975 album In Praise Of Learning, he had been asked to rejoin the band. Cooper returned to the band in even stronger form and became an increasingly important part of the band, eventually writing half of Henry Cow’s final studio album Western Culture (1979).
After Henry Cow, Cooper founded the avant-progressive band News From Babel with Cutler and composed experimental and complex music for theatre and film. Cooper’s influence on the avant-progressive genre has been great in terms of instrumentation alone: it is no coincidence that the bassoon and oboe have become a standard instrument in so many bands of that genre, from the Belgian Univers Zero (1970s) to the Aksak Maboul (1980s) and all the way to the American Jack O’ The Clock (2010s).
Towards the end of Henry Cow’s life, Cooper learned that she had MS. Cooper hid his illness until the end because she didn’t want it to distract from his art, which she invested intensively in for as long as she could, until the early 90s. Lindsay Cooper died at the age of 62 in September 2013.
With Unrest, Henry Cow seems to have finally found its own style 100%. With Unrest the Frank Zappa influences and Canterbury spirit have been almost completely eradicated in favour of pure Henry Cow music that would go on to inspire numerous bands in the coming decades in the most challenging fringe of progressive rock. Unrest is a masterpiece and one of the cornerstones of avant-prog.
Best tracks: ”Ruins”, ”Half Asleep; Half Awake”, ”Upon Entering the Hotel Adlon”
Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI
Tracks:
Tim Hodgkinson: organ, piano, alto saxophone, clarinet Fred Frith: guitars, violin, xylophone, piano John Greaves: bass guitar, piano, vocals Chris Cutler: drums, percussion, xylophone Lindsay Cooper: bassoon, oboe, recorder, vocals
Producer: Henry Cow
Label: Virgin
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