All surviving BBC sessions recorded by ‘Proto-Punk’ agit rockers, The Edgar Broughton Band, collected and packaged in one convenient box.
Release Date: 31st May 2024
Label: Cherry Red Records
Formats: 4xCD
The good folks at Cherry Red certainly have a fondness for the work of ‘Proto-Punk’ agit rockers, The Edgar Broughton Band. Back in January 2021, they made a sterling job of remastering and repackaging the band’s later-period (1975-1982) albums and, just last autumn, Cherry Red – and Edgar – surprised us all by releasing Break the Dark, a collection of all-new EB material, on which Edgar exercises his fondness for orchestration and electronica, as well as reminding us all he’s not – and never has been – any kind of slouch when it comes to spanking a 6-stringed plank. And now, here they come again, this time with a boxset that collects every surviving BBC session that the band recorded between 1969 and 1973, and packages them altogether in a single clamshell box.
The Edgar Broughton Band are, of course, a great British musical institution. Starting life in historic Warwick as a blues band and comprising brothers Rob (Edgar) and Steve Broughton on guitar and drums respectively, Victor Unitt on guitar and Arthur Grant on bass, they made a name for themselves in the Warwick area before tentatively spreading their wings and showing their faces in bigger towns and cities like Birmingham, Manchester and, eventually, London.
Victor Unitt became frustrated as the band drifted away from their blues roots to explore the seemingly bottomless possibilities of psychedelia and he left the band. Undeterred, the remaining members relocated to London’s Notting Hill, then the focal point of the “underground,” in 1968. Contemporaries of similarly subversive bands like Hawkwind and The Pink Faries, The Edgar Broughton Band signed to Blackhill Enterprises – the vehicle of Pink Floyd’s early management team, Peter Jenner and Andrew King – and became trailblazers for the UK counterculture.
Their association with King and Jenner gave The Edgar Broughton Band an ‘in’ to the burgeoning free festival scene and also helped to secure them a recording contract with EMI’s ‘progressive’ label, Harvest. Their music was, alternately, psychedelic, bluesy, grungy, compulsively rocky or, as they matured, gently acoustic and often laced with humorously biting satire.
Now recognised as forerunners of the politically charged punk movement, they released a string of five peerless albums via Harvest between 1969 and 1973. Ranging from 1969’s bluesy, gritty Wasa Wasa, through 1970’s psychedelic Sing Brother Sing, the accomplished Edgar Broughton Band (1971) and Inside Out (1972) to the polished Ooora (1973) the band’s output was stuffed with anthems, polemic, environmental statements and, above all, great rock songs and I, for one, was utterly enthralled.
Chart success for the band was as limited as it was fleeting. Sophomore album, Sing Brother Sing, crept into the top twenty of the UK album chart in 1970 and follow-up, the eponymous Edgar Broughton Band (probably the band’s finest album) reached number 28. Out Demons Out – the band’s anthem – managed to sneak into the lower reaches of the singles chart in 1970 and Apache Dropout – a song that integrated The Shadows’ Apache with Beefheart’s Dropout Boogie – reached the heady heights of number 33 in 1971. That was the last time The Edgar Broughton Band troubled the charts.
Be that as it may; soon after their arrival in London, the band had struck up a relationship with leading ‘underground’ DJ, John Peel, and they were invited to record a session for Peel’s Top Gear Radio 1 show in January 1969, several months before their debut album had even emerged. The Edgar Broughton Band were to become a regular presence chez Beeb over the next four years or so, appearing at the studios to record sessions on at least ten further occasions and it’s those appearances that are captured in this boxset.
Disc One of the Boxset represents a kind of alternative history of The Edgar Broughton Band, covering, as it does, a sequence of appearances on Top Gear and on its ‘successor’ show, Sounds of the 70s that span the key years of the band’s career. It’s possible to follow the progress of the band from early airings of songs that would (or wouldn’t) make it onto the debut Wasa Wasa album, though proud performances of some of The Edgar Broughton Band’s best and most enduring material, to the polished offerings that would feature on later albums like Inside Out and Oora. Along the Way, co-founder Victor Unitt would rejoin the band (after his own adventures as Dick Taylor’s replacement in The Pretty Things).
I’m tempted to say that time has been kind to the recordings presented here, but that probably depends on how familiar you are with the music of the Edgar Broughton Band. The two songs from that first ever session, aired on 27th January 1969 – Why Can’t Somebody Love Me and For What You Are About to Receive are clean, fresh-sounding and packed with subversive energy. There’s a lot more polish in evidence at the January 1970 session, when the band preview a couple of tracks from the forthcoming Sing Brother Sing album and – I might be courting controversy here – the immediacy of the live recording of There’s No Vibrations But Wait probably beats the album version hands-down.
By September 1970, the band were looking towards the future. Victor Unitt had rejoined and they were testing out new material on their Top Gear session that month. Freedom is clearly still a work-in-progress (it would appear officially in 1971 as the B-side to the Apache Dropout single) but it’s no less fascinating for that, whilst The House of Turnabout is, perhaps, more fully-formed. Parent album, Edgar Broughton Band, was in the stores by the time of the band’s next pair of Top Gear appearances in July and August 1971. As well as taking the opportunity to showcase songs from the new album and the concurrent single, Hotel Room, songs from 1972’s Inside Out album also see early light of day. There’s also lots of discussion about the notorious free concerts that Edgar and the band had attempted to perform in numerous locations around the country that summer – only to be met with much resistance from local authorities … and the law. The versions of Hotel Room and its soon-to-be-B-side, Call Me a Liar are sizzling but the reworking of the normally grungy Momma’s Reward is surprisingly insipid. Poppy is great fun as usual and the early takes of the songs from Inside Out demonstrate that they still need a bit of work.
No such worries though with Gone Blue from the June 1970 Sounds Of The 70s show. The song was about to appear both on the imminent Inside Out and as a single, and the version here is a corker. No wonder it was chosen as the title for this boxset!
If Disc One to this set provides a potted history of The Edgar Broughton Band from the band’s earliest days to the peak of their maturity, then the remaining three discs capture the band in snapshot form at two stages of their development. Disc Two is of particular interest to me; broadcast on 25th February 1971 as part of the John Peel’s Sunday Concert series, it features the newly-reformed 4-piece band just at the point when they’d got the Edgar Broughton Band album in the can. The particular significance of the show, as far as it concerns me, is that I tape-recorded it on the night that it was broadcast and I played that recording incessantly for many months thereafter. It’s part of my youth!
The band are cooking, that’s for certain. Freedom, What Is A Woman For? And I Wanna Go Home all get thoughtful extended treatments and The Birth is classic Broughton – dirty, gritty and rocky. But it’s perhaps the breathtaking rework of Captain Beefheart’s Dropout Boogie that really takes the plaudits here – almost 14 minutes of spaced-out grungy, punky proto-metal that sozzled by 15 year-old brain and prompted me to seek out the source material. Even John Peel was astounded, commenting how far the song had come “…since first appearing in the amazing mind of Don Van Vliet.”
The version of Poppy included here was actually recorded at the same concert but was, somehow, deleted from the BBC master tape. It was recovered from a German archive and reintroduced to its setlist comrades. It’s good to see it back, even though the sequence is somewhat disturbed – and it’s the very version of the song that first got me to join the Edgar Broughton voyage.
The May 1972 BBC Concert captured on Discs Three and Four of this set (Disc Four is the overseas broadcast version) might just be the definitive document of one the most exciting live bands of the 1970s, performing at their very peak. Broadcast just before the release of Inside Out, it showcases a band at the top of its game. The material is strong – all the best songs from Inside Out are here, alongside blistering versions of Call Me a Liar and The Rake. Poppy has been worked up into the showstopping crowd-pleaser we all know and love and, of course, they close the show with Out Demons Out. The audience are well up for it – raucous and participative – and the band’s delivery is top-notch with, once again, the magnificent Gone Blue taking centre-stage.
This boxset has been a revelation to me, a rediscovery of a band and an attitude that made me embrace a particular style of music in the first place. The Edgar Broughton Band aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, I know that. But, if they mean as much to you as they do to me, you’ll love this collection.
Watch The Edgar Broughton Band perform their 1971 single, Apache Dropout, here:
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