Colin H on Quintessence
It’s been a while since we’ve had a history of Quintessence around here. On the last occasion, various reviews and previews aside, it was a ‘Record Collector’ piece from 2015. This time it’s piece that was originally published in ‘Shindig!’ in 2016, upon the release of the 2CD studio outtakes collection ‘Spirits From Another Time’. It might as well join our various other long-form Quintessence pieces around here.
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‘This is fantastic,’ says Phil ‘Shiva’ Jones, one-time vocal titan with 60s London counterculture gods Quintessence, on the phone from his home in Woodstock, NY. ‘Why on earth didn’t we release this version?’
At this point I have tell Phil – no doddering 60s casualty but a tremendously witty, vivacious survivor who lives in the present but feels rightly proud of his old band’s music and time in the sun – that, actually, they did. The version of the band’s signature song ‘Notting Hill Gate’ that has blown the man who co-wrote it away was not, in fact, an outtake but the released take, heard now with a sparkling new mix from IFTA award-winning engineer Cormac O’Kane and unabridged – over a minute longer – with new lyrical nods to Ladbroke Grove and extended instrumental bliss.
Phil Jones, rhythm guitarist Dave ‘Maha Dev’ Codling and their original 1969–71 producer John Barham have all been in the loop in Hux Records’ latest Quintessence archive project: ‘Spirits From Another Time’, a 2CD/20-track set of stunning alternate takes, unheard compositions and, in four instances, revealing new unedited mixes of previously released takes. The Sutton Hoo cache of British counterculture rock has just been brought gloriously into the 21st Century sunlight.
Quintessence was the last great ‘underground’ band of the 60s. More so than most of their British rock peers in that distinct window of time between the ‘Summer of Love’ and the glam-rock era – the petering out of the ‘long 60s’, in retrospect – they seem frozen in time. Partly this is because all six members faded from view more or less entirely by 1973, within a year of splintering into a four-piece Quintessence and Phil and Dave’s new band Kala.
So how did Quintessence begin? They formed in March 1969, after founder/flautist Raja Ram, an Australian émigré living off Ladbroke Grove, had put a ‘musicians wanted’ add in Melody Maker and filtered over 150 hopefuls down to five: Phil ‘Shiva’ Jones, another Australian, on vocals; Richard ‘Shambhu’ Vaughan, an American, on bass; Jeremy ‘Jake’ Milton, a Canadian, on drums; Allan Mostert, from Mauritius, on lead guitar; and Dave ‘Maha Dev’ Codling, from Leeds, on rhythm guitar.
Save for Phil Jones, none of the band prior to its formation had done anything to bother future discographers. During 1967, in Australia, Phil had fronted Phil Jones & the Unknown Blues, releasing three singles and scoring a Top 20 hit with ‘If I Had a Ticket’. The following year, still in Oz, Phil released two solo singles. (Amazingly, the Unknown Blues, with Phil flying in from the US, reunited in May 2011 for a prestigious Byron Bay Bluesfest show and a couple of warm-up gigs.)
Within weeks ‘Shiva and the Quintessence’ had outgrown explosive word-of-mouth gigs at Camden Arts Lab to headlining advertised happenings at the Roundhouse. Courted by several labels, Chris Blackwell and Muff Winwood from Island Records turned up at a rehearsal below a Notting Hill Gate fish and chip shop, and at 2am doubled an offer from Warners. By August 1969, Quintessence were recording their first album, ‘In Blissful Company’, with producer John Barham.
‘He’s got the greatest pair of ears in the world,’ Raja Ram told the Melody Maker, in November. ‘He’s very important to us… We have an amazing recording contract with all the freedom we want, and everything is on such a personal basis. It’s all under control and going very nicely. What we really want is for our music to become universal. That’s all.’
One of Ram’s stipulations was that potential members had to live around Ladbroke Grove, a hotbed of underground arts and media activity:
‘Ladbroke Grove really was the place to be at that time,’ says Phil Jones. ‘It was an area where a lot of artists and musicians lived, a hippy enclave scattered around Portobello Road, and at the heart of it all was Island Studios on Basing Street. So I could just walk down a couple of blocks and I’d be at the studio, or at a meeting with the people at Island. It had an energy about it that was pretty amazing.’
Fitting in with the communal vibe, several local collaborators were involved in Quintessence’s records. In 1969 alone, ‘Mike’ and ‘Surya’ were on sitar and tamboura on ‘Notting Hill Gate’, Open Road pianist Simon Lanzon (uncredited) was prominent on the non-LP B-side ‘Move Into The Light’, their spiritual guru Swami-Ji (who lived upstairs from Phil) was a constant inspiration, while manager Stanley Barr contributed lyrics to ‘Giants’, a barnstorming homage to the notion of the Biblical Nephilim or the mysterious creators of ‘Entish ruins’ in Anglo-Saxon lore which had so fascinated JRR Tolkien. To Phil’s memory, Stanley also had a hand in classic first-LP song ‘Gange Mai’, the creation of which gives a flavour of the Quintessence writing process. ‘Gange Mai’, the first song Quintessence recorded for Island, must have confused the engineer that day: the tape box scribbles label it ‘Ganja Man’. Or perhaps Chris Blackwell was having daydreams about Bob Marley even then.
‘I remember ‘Gange Mai’,’ says Shiva. ‘Raja Ram said, ‘I’ve got this riff… dup-de-dup-de-duh-duh, dup-de-dup-de-duhhh…’ I thought, ‘What the hell is this? This sounds like a sailor’s hornpipe – how can I write a song to this!?’ It was like you were doing a little dance on the deck of a ship. But then Dave came in with A to G, as a rhythm, and I thought, ‘Okay, now we’re getting somewhere…’ So I looked through Stan’s lyrics and found this thing ‘Ganga Mai’, so I thought, ‘Okay, how about I just go ‘Ga-a-a-n-ga Mai-i-i-i’ over the top…’ And there it was. Then I thought, ‘What if we do something totally different and put a chant in the middle of it?’ It was a chant that Swami-Ji had taught us. How about we just stop playing and go, ‘Oh, Ganga mai, ganga mai, ganga mai…’ a few times, and then back into the riff?’ It was all very organic.’
‘In Blissful Company’ was released in November 1969; by April 1970 Quintessence were touring in mainland Europe. In June 1970 their second LP, ‘Quintessence’, was released, making No.22 on the UK charts. It included two instrumental excerpts from a live recording at St Pancras Town Hall woven into a heady mix of the band’s stage songs, often deftly edited with tape cutting into tight arrangements, and pure studio creations like ‘Prisms’, conceived by John Barham. John was the band’s very own George Martin – an RCM-trained musician with compositional/arranging skills and a keen ear for rock music. He had already worked on several Ravi Shankar projects and George Harrison’s ‘Wonderwall’ LP/film, and would continue working with both artists, and many others on Apple and other labels up to the late 70s.
‘Someone had lent me this record of Paul Horn playing at the Taj Mahal, with that incredible 20-second echo,’ says John. ‘I said to the engineer George Chkiantz, “Do you think it’s possible to artificially create something like that?” And he linked, I think, up to 16 tracks together in a series to create this very long echo. Of all the engineers we used, he’s the one who stands out. The band were absolutely open to my ideas. For me, it was hearing them rehearsing a song and then getting an idea of how it could be structured to get the best out of it, in terms of proportions – how much soloing, and so on. I was definitely listening as much as an arranger as a producer.’
Amazingly, Quintessence never recorded a session for John Peel’s Top Gear, although they did, belatedly, perform a John Peel’s Sunday Concert in November 1970. Their rise had been so extraordinarily speedy that there had simply been no time, nor any need, for the formative support of the nation’s favourite ‘underground’ DJ.
In retrospect, their career looks like something that could only have happened in the time frame within which the six-piece version of the band existed: from March 1969 up to June 1972. They shone brightly as an underground/overground phenomena, before handing over that particular baton to The Wombles in 1973, by which time the pop world and its progressive elder brother had moved on. The six-piece version of the band did, however, leave behind three Island albums, one RCA album and a couple on non-album singles: a short but enduring body of work.
‘Albums are something which will be listened to in the future,’ Raja Ram mused, presciently, to Sounds in November 1970, as the group were trying to finalise their third LP, ‘Dive Deep’, ‘so we want to use the best resources at our disposal. Live recordings capture the raw sound of a concert, but they always lose something. We did some live recording at LSE a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately the sound was distorted. I don’t know how much we’ll be able to salvage.’
The answer would be ‘nothing’. A similar distortion problem (only on vocals) had compromised the live recording at St Pancras back in March 1970. A third crack at recording a live album would be made in May 1971, when Island taped two concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall. On that occasion, the recording worked perfectly, but the problems were offstage. For the moment, in November 1970, Raja Ram was talking of ‘Dive Deep’ itself being prepared as a single. A little earlier, in August, he had told Record Mirror about a ‘lovely lyrical’ new song, ‘Revelations’, that they didn’t perform live but hoped to release as a single. Both of these 7-inch aspirations would come to nothing, with ‘Revelations’ seemingly never recorded.
Nevertheless, the regime at Island was one that any band would crave. MD Chris Blackwell had sanctioned incredibly expensive, elaborate sleeves for ‘In Blissful Company’ and ‘Quintessence’ (making the original artefacts well worth tracking down). There was never any problem with studio sessions either:
‘A lot of money was spent on the LP covers,’ says John, ‘but they gave us enough sessions – nobody ever said, ‘Look, you’ve overrun your budget’.’
London was a hothouse of musical adventure at the time, with Island the cool new kid in town. Quintessence played on many amazing bills – with Creedence Clearwater at the Albert Hall, with the Grateful Dead at the Hollywood Festival, with the Who at Lancaster University and at the Oval, and even had Shakin’ Stevens and Roxy Music (both pre-fame) support them on college gigs – and it wasn’t unusual for Phil to bump into other legends in studios:
‘Let’s see… I met Mick Jagger a couple of times – once at Olympic, another time at Island Records,’ he recalls. ‘I met the guys in Yes at a nearby studio. I remember being in the studio with Chris Blackwell when they were mixing ‘All Right Now’ with Free. And I remember Led Zeppelin in Basing Street. They were upstairs, we were downstairs [late in 1970]. I can’t remember if they came down to say hello and ‘what’s that crazy smell?’ Anyway, I went up there, with Dave I think, and Robert Plant was putting down the vocal for ‘Black Dog’, so we hung out with them.’
By the time the album ‘Dive Deep’ appeared, in March 1971 (reaching No.43), Raja Ram had sacked John Barham, the man who had turned their raw onstage magic into a more structured studio gold. He had also turned down a US deal with Bell Records that had been painstakingly negotiated by Chris Blackwell. Quintessence, fatally, would never get to America. Blackwell lost interest and the band signed to RCA, on the assumption of a US tour and Carnegie Hall appearance that never came. The first RCA release was a November 1971 single coupling Raja Ram’s ‘Sweet Jesus’ with Dave’s ‘You Never Stay The Same’.
‘We develop because there are six people, from six countries in the group with their own six personalities, and very strong they are,’ Ram admitted to the NME that month, having recently had a falling out with a man making a documentary about them. ‘The band is in a constant state of evolvement, and from night to night it blows my mind.’
The fourth album, ‘Self’ (No.50), appeared on RCA in May 1972. It had been a long time coming. ‘We took a farm house in Wales and tried that,’ Ram explained, to the NME, shortly before its release. ‘We also tried recording live on various gigs and in different studios. Then we went through all the material and condensed it down and picked the best. … [‘Dive Deep’ was] hard to get to, because the vibes were dispersed in it thematically. This one is definitely a progression of all that was done before. It’s much easier to listen to…’
The selection included three tracks discreetly smuggled out of Island, and a side-long suite recorded live at Exeter University, albeit comprising extemporisations on material from the first album.
In June 1972, after a highly publicised tour of UK cathedrals, including a (now lost) BBC televised concert that had generated a great deal of new interest, and an 18-date European tour, Ram decided to sack Phil Jones and Dave Codling. In hindsight, it was all over.
‘I think Shiva wanted the band to be much more tight, where we like to have a lot of spontaneous feel,’ Ram explained to the Melody Maker. ‘Shiva had a great voice , but our voices are a lot rougher and with four people singing the feeling must be as good if not better. We have written a whole new repertoire which we start recording this week.’
Regrettably, Ram had undervalued the importance, to the wider world, of a truly great vocalist and the charisma they exude. Nothing, for example, that the instrumentalist members of Island label mates Free did under their own names ever matched the popularity or magic of that band with vocalist Paul Rogers out front. Nobody from Jethro Tull ever had success remotely close to the level they enjoyed in the mothership with Ian Anderson. This alone was a crippling mistake. Unfortunately, the mediocrity of the vocal material and performances on ‘Indweller’ was another, although the instrumental pieces were still captivating. After a while, telling the public that your latest album is so much better than the last one stops washing.
Still, as bassist Shambhu explained to the NME in April 1972: ‘If you enjoy what you do and it gets you away then it gets to a lot of people. But if it doesn’t, so what? Certainly, our music has been an education and joy to us, and if it can be a joy to other people then it’s cool.’
In 2009, Brian O’Reilly at Hux Records asked Universal (owners of Island) if any Quintessence live recordings were extant. Two releases, comprising almost all of the two Queen Elizabeth Hall concerts and a monitor mix of half the St Pancras concert (all that could be found), duly appeared, as ‘Comic Energy’ and ‘Infinite Love’. Reconnecting through these releases, Phil and Dave performed a one-off gig as Quintessence at Glastonbury in 2010, having opened the very first festival 40 years earlier, with John Barham also present. The trio built a splendid new Quintessence live/studio album, ‘Rebirth’ (Hux, 2011), around the best of the Glastonbury recording.
In 2015, Universal agreed to let Hux license studio material from their 1969-71 Quintessence archive. The full story is told in the 11,000-word booklet to ‘Spirits From Another Time’ (named after one of the hitherto unknown songs discovered), but, in brief, 23 reels were selected and digitised at Abbey Road, at some expense, while Brian held his nerve and hoped that the vague tape-box scribbles of long ago would indeed be cryptic clues to studio gold. And they were. In fact, almost everything on ‘Spirits…’ derives from 13 multi-track reels, and highlights are many. ‘Marwa’ is a magical 16-channel tapestry, written by John Barham and featuring Phil’s vocals and Ram’s flute among harps, tablas and piano – rejected by Ram at the time as not quite a ‘Quintessence’ song. ‘Tree of Life’ (finished with 2016 lead guitar from Dave) could easily have been a second album song. Of the alternate takes, one towering highlight is a 12-minute live-in-the-studio ‘Epitaph For Tomorrow’ with astounding, transcendent guitar interplay. Another is a live take of ‘Only Love’, with staggering telepathic ensemble playing. A 6-minute early take of ‘Brahman’ by a quartet of Phil with lead guitarist Allan, Shambhu and Jake has incredible taut energy, exploding into a visceral solo that recalls Led Zeppelin. The same instrumental trio, just a year earlier, deliver a Hendrix Experience-esque live-studio version of ‘Twilight Zones’, to which Phil has added amazing new vocals, 46 years after. Amazingly, a multi-track of one song, ‘Body’, from the missing half of the St Pancras concert was found, which is Phil’s favourite of all the ‘new’ tracks.
Until recently, after settling in Woodstock, NY, Phil had toured the US for over 20 years giving interactive workshops and lectures on Sacred Breath and Primordial Sound using the Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo. Over the last couple of years he’s enjoyed playing throughout New England with an unplugged ensemble, performing the Quintessence songs he had written, Kala songs and some new material.
One of the great pleasures of being involved in this project has been sharing the excitement with Phil, Dave and John, and their willingness – for absolutely no direct benefit to themselves, purely for love – to patch in new vocal and/or instrumental parts on three of the 20 tracks, where elements were missing. It’s perhaps surprising, in this era of tombstone-sized box sets (Sandy Denny, Spooky Tooth, et al.), that Universal has not itself done anything with the Quintessence archive. So, hats off to Hux for taking quite a financial risk to create this album (the label’s 150th release) and for delivering a glistening new slab of pure London ‘underground’ gold.
Colin, a little lite on detail I’m afraid…
I actually like the Quints, as well as founder member and flautist Raja Ram’s “new” band, Shpongle, now into their 3rd decade of Colin-bothering. Raja Ram’s real name is Ronald Rothfield and he is 77. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oL6u9eujSU
There was a time , 1971 perhaps?, when every single London gig I went to had Quintessence as support. It got so bad that I took to arriving late, something I never did, just to avoid another forty minutes of whimsical meanderings. I haven’t listened to one note of Quintessence since then. Thanks to your lovely piece (although as already mentioned a piece sparse on detail) guess what I will be doing this afternoon when the Comtesse goes to Pilates? (and no, Moose, not that…)
…er, *not* listening, again, to another note of Quintessence? 🙂
http://www.mywifesatpilates.com is every married man’s special bookmark.
Is that a database of music women don’t like and won’t let men play when they’re in the house?
I refer the honourable gentleman to…