Length 63:23 Producer Henry Cow | Label Recommended (UK) | |
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Released September 2008 (2008-09) Recorded March 1976, Hamburg
May 1976, Gothenburg
May 1977, Stockholm Genre Avant-rock
free improvisation | ||
Volume 6: Stockholm & Göteborg is a live CD by English avant-rock group Henry Cow, and is disc 6 of the 10-disc 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set. It was released in September 2008 by RēR Megacorp as a free-standing album in advance of the box set release in January 2009.
Contents
Stockholm & Göteborg consists of previously unreleased recordings made by Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio) of concerts performed by the group in May 1976 in Gothenburg and May 1977 in Stockholm. The concerts were later broadcast by Sveriges Radio in July 1976 and June 1977 respectively. Also included on the CD is a song from a concert in Hamburg in March 1976. The original 8 track and stereo 2 track master tapes were used and non-invasively remixed and remastered for this album by Bob Drake.
This was Henry Cow's first new release in 30 years and the first to include Georgie Born, the band's bassist and celloist from 1976 to 1978. It was also the first official release of the band performing "Erk Gah".
Content
The album consists of three improvised pieces, "Stockholm 1", "Stockholm 2" and "Göteborg 1", and five composed pieces.
Featured on the album is "Erk Gah", a never before released Tim Hodgkinson composition that was performed live regularly by the band between 1976 and 1978, but never recorded in the studio. (Hodgkinson later recorded it in 1993 as "Hold to the Zero Burn, Imagine" on his 1994 solo album, Each in Our Own Thoughts with some of the former Henry Cow members and others.) Also featured for the first time is a never before released Fred Frith composition, "March" which the band used to end many of their concerts, and a cover of Phil Ochs's "No More Songs", arranged by Frith and the band's requiem to Ochs who had committed suicide in 1976. "Ottawa Song" is from an earlier concert in Hamburg with Dagmar Krause and John Greaves sharing the vocals, and was included on this CD by accident after having gotten mixed up with the Stockholm and Göteborg tapes. It is the same performance of "Ottawa Song" that appears on Volume 3: Hamburg, except for the introductory bassoon solo, which has been stripped off here.
Henry Cow performed the Gothenburg concert as the same quartet of Lindsay Cooper, Chris Cutler, Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson that had played at Trondheim two days previously. John Greaves had left the group two months previously, Georgie Born had not yet joined, and Dagmar Krause had withdrawn from the tour due to ill health. Without a dedicated bass guitarist and vocalist, the group improvised the set in the dark, as they had done at Trondheim, and used the same tapes they had prepared beforehand.