Touch,Touch Reviews

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Good Points: CD reissue of an album that probably changed the face of rock.

Bad Points: Some of the bonus tracks don't pass muster.

General comments: There have been several acts called 'Touch'. This is the least well known but most influencial of them all.

Remember The Kingsmen's 'Louie Louie'? When that song hit the resultant publicity caused the underage keyboard player to have to quit the band.

Years passed, and his Louie Louie riff had broadened considerably. He linked up with a few friends and they went into a studio and set out to record an album. Out of nowhere they developed an over the top sound that most people nowadays think they recognise as the prog rock band Yes.

But this was several years before Yes. Synthesizers didn't even exist yet, the band had to create all those sounds by manipulating the studio equipment. In keeping with the times their songs were either about deep and meaningful mystic stuff or protest, not that the content of the lyrics mattered much, it was the sound of them. Falsetto harmonies banked one on top of the other until one of them (I won't tell you it was the guitar player to spare his blushes) passed out. No one, not the BeeGees, not the Eagles, had ever gone this high and lived.

Meanwhile the backing ranged from almost silent to non-stop crescendo as Don Gallucci hammered the bells out of his assembled keyboards, playing riffs that to many people sounded as completely wrong as his Louie Louie riff had all those years earlier, and which nowadays we're all so used to that it's hard to imagine that there ever was a time when they caused people to question whether the keyboards were playing in the same key as the rest of the band.

The album kicks off with 'We feel fine', a track that, somewhat disarmingly, sounds like Vanilla Fundge on heat. It sounds like it was assembled from the bits of several different songs. Get used to it. Most of them do.

Just two tracks sound like properly thought out and constructed songs. The first is 'Miss Teach', a rail against the school system that predated both Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper by a year or two (Or three, or....), set to an almost traditional rock'n'roll piano riff, it runs through the predjudices we all learn on the way through school, finishing with a triumphant climax as you finally learn "The most important thing in life. Rich to the left and the poor form a line on the right." It was stirring stuff at the time, and to my surprise, still gives me a bit of twitch even now.

The second 'real song' is maybe a bit of a cheat. On the face of it 'Alisha and Others' is just a short, corny little bit of lounge jazz, but somewhere along the line a little morse code riff starts to intrude and before you've realised it morphs into '75', an eleven minute tour-de-force that changes style more times than Madonna and Bowie combined, finally finishing with one of life's great guitar solos courtesy of Joey Newman.

In addition to Yes, Kansas also claim this album to have been a seminal influence (Although I don't quite see that one...), but what a lot of people don't know is that after the departure of Peter Gabriel, when Genesis were thrashing around for what to do next, this is where they turned. 'A trick of the tail' is awash with references to 'Touch'. So now you do....

Alas both the album and the band sank without trace because, unlike Yes, Touch were positive that this sound could never be reproduced live on stage, and without a tour to promote it the distributors simply weren't interested. This Electric Discs re-release then, is your chance, maybe your only chance, to pick up a little piece of rock history, a missing link between what is and what wasn't.

And anyone who thinks that Bonzo was heavy, just hasn't heard John Bordanaro yet...