Review: Slapp Happy / Henry Cow – Desperate Straights (1975)

Desperate Straights is Slapp Happy’s third studio album and the first one the band made together with avant-prog band Henry Cow.

”We’ll take the piss out of pop”
– Peter Blegvad

Slapp Happy was founded in Hamburg in 1972 by a trio from three different countries. The band was started by Anthony Moore, an English composer who had made a few avant-garde albums, who invited the American guitarist Peter Blegvad (Moore and Blegvad had played in bands together as schoolboys in England), who had been living in England for a long time, to join him in Hamburg. The idea was to make a few pop songs as a joke and make some money at the same time. Because it’s easy to make pop, isn’t it?

The pair started the project with krautrock band Faust as their backing band, but things didn’t seem to take off until the duo realised to ask Moore’s German girlfriend (and future wife), Dagmar Krause, who had mainly sung in folk bands before, to join as vocalist. At this point, the project became a real band and a more ambitious venture. However, Slapp Happy never lost the playful and slightly mischievous attitude built into the band.

”We were snobs about pop music, Anthony was more interested making modern classical music… We loved pop, but we were torn about it, we thought that pop was dumb.”
– Peter Blegvad

The Slapp Happy trio had always been fascinated and amused by a certain banality and musical primitiveness of pop, and it is from these tensions that the band has built an interestingly unique vision of pop music. From today’s perspective, Slapp Happy’s music could be called art pop or art rock, but in the 70s it was probably just weird pop. The band themselves called their output ”naive rock”.

Slapp Happy and Henry Cow originally crossed paths through the Faust tour. Faust and Henry Cow toured together in 1973 and Blegvad, who was Faust’s bassist, became friends with members of Henry Cow at the time. When Slapp Happy, in Faust’s wake, joined Henry Cow’s Virgin label and moved to England permanently, a wider collaboration became possible.

Slapp Happy was very enthusiastic about trying out a collaboration with Henry Cow because the whole trio admired the band’s music. Henry Cow’s members, on the other hand, had basically liked Slapp Happy’s previous albums, but judged them to be a bit too conventional pop. Moore and Blegvad decided to compose more challenging material for the follow-up, partly to show off for Henry Cow, and partly just because they now had Henry Cow’s firepower at their disposal.

”I was in awe of Henry Cow. I thought they were fantastic band. So the idea that they might want to collaborate with us, I just found very interesting.”
-Peter Blegvad

For the members of Henry Cow, the collaboration with Slapp Happy evoked a range of emotions. Most of the members saw it as an interesting challenge to work with pop music. John Greaves, in particular, was very enthusiastic about the collaboration. Fred Frith didn’t particularly like Blegvad’s lyrics (”Too pataphysical and all that crap.”), but he was particularly fascinated by the collaboration with Dagmar Krause and was already dreaming of lining up a vocalist with Henry Cow… The most problematic was Tim Hodkinson who, as a very serious lover of avant-garde jazz and modern art music, felt no connection with pop music. He, on the other hand, had little to do as a player on the album as Anthony Moore was already playing the piano. Hodgkinson concentrated on playing the clarinet on Desperate Straights and took a back seat, focusing mainly on composing new repertoire for Henry Cow.

”The intellectual level of those people was pretty high. For Chris to match wits… with Anthony and Peter, it was pretty high level of communication.”
– John Greaves

As with previous Slapp Happy albums, the songs on Desperate Straights can be described as twisted pop songs. The songs on the album are mostly composed by Moore and Blegvade (Krause has one credit) and arranged by Henry Cow. Henry Cow in particular brings its familiar rhythmic complexity to the songs, with time signature changes and polyrhythms, but at least the rhythms are not as complex as on Henry Cow’s own albums.

slapphappy_henrycow — Anthony Moore, Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson, Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad, John Greaves and Fred Frith

The instrumentation on Desperate Straights is mostly acoustic, with the exception of electric bass and the occasional electric guitar and electric piano. Frith plays mostly violin instead of guitar on the album, Hodgkinson sticks to clarinet. In addition to Slapp Happy and Henry Cow members, the album features a couple of former Henry Cow members, Geoff Leigh on flutes and Lindsay Cooper on oboe and bassoon. The album also features Mont Cambell of Egg fame on French horn, jazzman Mongezi Feza on trumpet, who played on Robert Wyatt records, Nick Evans on trombone, who played on King Crimson records and Pierre Moerlen of Gong on clockenspiel and xylophone on ”Europe”. So the scale of instruments is wide, but the overall sound is relatively small, more chamber-like than orchestral as the whole band’s power is never used simultaneously. The chamber music feel is also reinforced by the fact that Chris Cutler doesn’t play the traditional drum kit in nearly all the songs, and even when he does, it’s not very obtrusive or rock-like.

However, instead of instrumentation and perhaps even compositions, the real star of Desperate Straights is Dagmar Krause, who blossoms on this album. On previous Slapp Happy albums, Dagmar Krause’s vocals sounded more conventional, but on Desperate Straights she is really let loose. Krause’s vocals, sung with a fierce soprano, sound cabaret-style, but there is also a dose of classical singing. Indeed, Krause is a very technically skilled singer, varying her voice beautifully to suit the demands of the songs, sometimes using a chest voice, sometimes a head voice, and switching between them with great fluidity. At the same time, however, Krause’s voice also has a charismatic edge and crackle which, again, is probably a very deliberate effect. Depending on the song, she sounds very different, but always like Dagmar Krause. For me, Dagmar Krause is by far the most remarkable female vocalist in progressive rock. She is a unique combination of emotion, technique and theatrical drama.

Blegvadi’s compositions tend to be a little closer in structure to normal pop music and Moore’s a little more experimental. Blegvad’s clever ”Strayed” could almost be a song by The Beatles from The Beatles album (1968). Peter Blegvad sings ”Strayed” himself and does a fine job. Blegvad is not a virtuoso vocalist like Krause, but he has a charismatic and pleasant singing voice. ”Strayed” is actually also the only song on the album that one could have imagined had some kind of hit potential.

Henry Cow’s bassist John Greaves has composed one of the best songs on the album, ”Bad Alchemy”. This is also the only song that ever made it into Henry Cow’s concert repertoire. The three-minute ”Bad Alchemy” swings irresistibly through a maze of constantly changing time signatures (at least 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 3/8, 2/8, 5/8, 12/8, 10/8), sounding at once contradictorily intriguingly complex, but at the same time addictively accessible.

Most of the lyrics on the album are by Blegvad, and the lyrics of ”Bad Alchemy”, which mix hermaphrodite myth and alchemy, started a very fruitful collaboration between him and Greaves that continued after Desperate Straights with 1977’s masterful Kew. Rhone. album and has continued sporadically with a variety of projects to this day.

Like the first two Henry Cow albums, Desperate Straights was recorded at Virgin’s Manor studio, this time under the direction of Simon Heyworth, who also recorded Tubular Bells. Like those albums, Desperate Straights has a natural, dry sound with almost no studio effects. Desperate Straights doesn’t sound quite as good as, say, Unrest, but is occasionally a little stale and lacks the sharpness that Henry Cow’s records have. This is perhaps partly intentional, as the album aims for a kind of nostalgic effect and Blegvadi says that the whole album was intended to reflect ’elegant decay’. This mood is captured particularly well by the instrumental title track ’Desperate Straights’, composed by Moore, which exudes a vague atmosphere of the ballrooms of wartime Berlin.

The album closes with the strange and minimalist avant-garde instrumental ”Caucasian Lullaby”, credited to Cutler and Moore. Built mainly on a disjointed piano and clarinet, the more than eight-minute track, which has no clear rhythmic pulse, is interesting in its own way, but doesn’t really fit in with the album’s jerky pop songs. ”Caucasian Lullaby” honestly feels like a filler to make up an album-length amount of music. Slapp Happy’s excellent songs are full of great ideas and, with the help of Henry Cow, bursting with musical information, but because the songs are so short in duration, the album would have been very short without ”Caucasian Lullaby”. Originally the album was supposed to end with a tight little tune called ”War” but it was saved for Henry Cow and Slapp Happy’s next joint album In Praise Of Learning. This two-minute song, though, would not have helped much with the challenges of the album’s duration (Slapp Happy’s original version, played on John Peel’ s radio show, is admittedly slightly longer).

Some of the songs on Desperate Straights are even frustratingly short, and while this certainly adds its own kind of abrupt charm to the album, I don’t think the whole would have been damaged if a few songs had been stretched a minute or two longer.

Desperate Straights is a remarkably effective fusion of two different bands. The album combines almost seamlessly Slapp Happy’s strange neo-cabaret-pop aesthetic with Henry Cow’s extreme virtuosity and the deep musicality it allows. The bands themselves were so pleased with the collaboration that it was decided that Henry Cow and Slapp Happy would be permanently united. Both camps found the idea of merging completely absurd, but worth doing exactly because of that!

A continuation of the joint project followed just a few months later in the form of In Praise Of Learning, which was eventually labeled only as Henry Cow. In the long run, however, the union between the two bands did not last, but more on that in our review of In Praise Of Learning.

Desperate Straights is a very distinctive take on art pop and it’s hard to find comparisons to the album. A sort of sister album to Greaves and Blegvad’s 1977 Kew. Rhone. which, however, is much more jazz-inclined. The Art Bears, formed by Cutler, Frith and Krause in the late 70s, can also be seen as a kind of continuation of the Slapp Happy legacy. Slapp Happy himself did not return to the studio until 1998 with the great Ça va album.

Best tracks: ”Some Questions About Hats”, ”Bad Alchemy”, ”Europa”, ”Riding Tigers”, ”Excerpt From The Messiah”, ”Strayed”, ”A Worm Is at Work”

Note: Quotes used in the text are from Benjamin Piekut ’s book Henry Cow: The World Is Problem (2019)

Author: JANNE YLIRUUSI

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Tracks:

Side A
1. ”Some Questions About Hats” Moore, Blegvad 1:49
2. ”The Owl” Moore 2:14
3. ”A Worm Is at Work” Moore, Blegvad 1:52
4. ”Bad Alchemy” Greaves, Blegvad 3:06
5. ”Europa” Moore, Blegvad 2:48
6. ”Desperate Straights” Moore 4:14
7. ”Riding Tigers” Blegvad 1:43
Side B
8. ”Apes in Capes” Moore 2:14
9. ”Strayed” Blegvad 1:53
10. ”Giants” Moore, Blegvad 1:57
11. ”Excerpt from The Messiah” Handel, sovittanut. Blegvad 1:48
12. ”In the Sickbay” Krause, Blegvad 2:08
13. ”Caucasian Lullaby” Cutler, Moore 8:20

Slapp Happy:

Dagmar Krause: vocals, Wurlitzer (”In the Sickbay”) Peter Blegvad: guitar, vocals Anthony Moore: piano

Henry Cow:

Tim Hodgkinson: clarinet, piano (”Caucasian Lullaby”) Fred Frith: guitar, violin John Greaves: bass guitar, piano (”Bad Alchemy”) Chris Cutler: drums, percussion

Other musicians:

Geoff Leigh: flute Pierre Moerlen: percussion (”Europa”) Mont Campbell: French horn Mongezi Feza: trumpet Nick Evans: trombone Lindsay Cooper: bassoon, oboe

Producer: Slapp Happy, Henry Cow ja Simon Heyworth

Label: Virgin