Reviews

Pete Brown
Album: Can't Get Off The Planet: The Recordings 1968-1973
Label: Eclectic
Tracks: 12+12+8+10+5+14
Website: https://www.esotericrecordings.com/

This exhaustive six-CD box-set presents all of Pete Brown's recordings between 1968 and 1973 - i.e. the various albums and singles released by Pete with his bands The Battered Ornaments and Piblokto!, plus a bunch of 1970 demo tracks and outtakes, a radio session, a Piblokto! live Paris gig from 1971, the post-Pibklokto! Bond-Brown conglomerate's only album and EP, and, finally, four 1973 session tracks credited to Pete Brown & Friends (these including Jeff Beck, Jack Bruce, Max Middleton and Alan Ross).

Pete Brown's main claim to fame was as lyricist for Jack Bruce's band Cream, producing a number of celebrated tracks (among them I Feel Free, Sunshine Of Your Love, Politician and White Room). That gig has arisen due to Pete's long-established tenure as a performance poet, both solo and in The New Departures (a group which combined the worlds of poetry and modern jazz), and in connection with the innovative Graham Bond Organisation (among whose ranks were also Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker).

Pete soon harboured thoughts of performing his own music, and formed a group of his own, the Battered Ornaments, with Chris Spedding, Rob Tait and Butch Potter as its nucleus but typically also involving a flexible panoply of other musicians. This band released a highly experimental single at the beginning of 1969 and followed up with an album (A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark), the length and quirkiness of whose title was to become something of a Pete Brown trademark! The album was a heady mix of jazz, blues, rock and avant-garde experimentation, and even though the musical climate of the day was receptive to all influences its brave and wild nature may have turned off even the more adventurous prog fans; it was full of contrasts, from jazzy workouts to Cream-inflected vignettes, and Pete was beginning to find his vocal feet. In all, the album's often bewildering mix of styles worked strangely well, and in the end it fitted right in with the rest of the early batch of releases on EMI's "underground" Harvest label in that the listener either "got" its unique vibe or not.

Undeterred by being fired from his own band shortly before a major gig, Pete promptly gathered together a brand new band (Piblokto!), with whom he made the next pair of albums Things May Come And Things May Go, But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever and Thousands On A Raft bookended by two equally uncompromising 45s. Piblokto! turned out to be a more solid outfit, and Pete had found in guitarist Jim Mullen and drummer Rob Tait two ideal collaborators. The musical palette was arguably more commercial, but still determinedly eccentric and eclectic, and Thousands On A Raft was to become the pinnacle of the band's achievement, following which a veritable "raft" of personnel departures ensued, with members of the band Eyes Of Blue coming in to fill roles. Not long after, Pete disbanded Piblokto! and teamed up with Graham Bond and a floating supporting cast to present Bond & Brown, who released the album Two Heads Are Better Than One, which kicks off Disc 6 of this set; it proclaimed a possibly more African-influenced sensibility, and (unsurprisingly) made no commercial headway.

Can't Get Off The Planet is a most useful anthology, and the booklet contains full credits, photos, the infamous cartoon strips chronicling Piblokto!'s adventures, and a suitably authoritative essay by Mark Powell; he says: "In hindsight, the diverse nature of the group's material can be seen as a brave musical statement, albeit one which limited their commercial prospects". By rights, this set should enable a fuller reappraisal of this key phase in Pete's career, for his output over the course of those often cataclysmically creative six years contains some very important music that has nevertheless stood the test of time extremely well.

David Kidman

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