Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark & Mant

Hooray for the re-release of 'A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark' (1969) and 'Mantle-Piece' (1970), two far-too-unheard-of classics from "The Battered Ornaments", the former featuring power poet frontman Pete Brown.

Brown was a consummate band former / catalyst, usually involving a subtle resampling from an extraordinary gene pool of musical prowess knocking about the clubs and backstreet pubs of Soho and Carnaby Street in late 60s London.

For example, the young guitarist John McLaughlin was in the lineup of Brown's "The Huge Local Sun" and "The First Real Poetry Band". Brown also had strong links with the Graham Bond Organisation, another McLaughlin "vessel" and also featuring Dick Heckstall-Smith, another Brown regular. McLaughlin acknowledges Brown's inputs into that early scene with "Pete the Poet", a track on his debut album Extrapolation (1969), but Brown must be most famous for co-writing the majority of Cream's numbers with Jack Bruce, including the hits "I Feel Free", "White Room" and (with Clapton) "Sunshine of Your Love". Brown also played a major hand in Bruce's exquisite "Songs for a Tailor" (1969) and the later "Harmony Row" (1971).

Brown's performances exude a rough urgency shared by fellow northern English and especially Liverpudlian (Scouse) New-Age Beat poets like John Cooper Clark (rather than the more laid back Roger McGough and John Hegley), also characteristic of lyrically-oriented songsters like Roy Harper in particular. Brown's fusion of essential rhythms, the rock & roll edge and beautifully deep and meaningful wordcraft is often referred to as pop-poetry, but Brown took it further into the realm of jazz-poetry; he snarls gravelly, penetrating observations of everyday humanity.

A vital part of "The Battered Ornaments" jazzy sound (Brown describes the band as jazz players who mostly didn't need drugs to play, playing rock and roll) is the dense layering of Butch Potter's thunderously fat bass, freeform brass from Heckstall-Smith and Nisar Ahmed Kahn, plus Chris Spedding's razor-sharp guitar licks. Rob Tait's heavy blues drumbeat set against Charlie Hart's Greg Rolie-like Hammond conjours a Santana scene until Archie Shepp-wild blowing gives this an extra edge beyond any blues rock you've ever heard.

There's everything from 12-bar rock and roll to progressive experiments in the vein of Sam Rivers sinuous flute-tastic freak-outs, plus a few great anthemic rock numbers en route. With Brown's Bruce-like delivery it's no wonder that the Brown librettist glove fitted the Cream hand so well. In fact the similarities are so close that more than one track here could be mistaken for the power trio.

And that's just the first CD!

In fact, there were quite a few changes for the band from 1969-70. Brown was sacked, the Hammond was reclaimed "by it's nude owner" and replaced by more subdued piano and the outfit was generally slimmed down, but not before Brown had written the majority of 'Mantle-Piece'. Now the reins are taken up by Spedding (reknowned session man and Roy Harper's troubleshooter and trusty sidekick) having recently found his steel guitar voice and whose vocal delivery has the same English personality as his predecessor (and a host of Canterbury-based bands), but a lighter, clearer voice best suited to the slow rock that dominates the album in place of the more experimental work from before. The lasting impression is that this album is more poised, less urgent and less dirty, allowing the jazziness more space and ironically lending room for the absent Brown's lyrics to breath. But, because overall it is less exploratory, (there are a few surprising voyages into uncharted waters and a couple of jazzy freakouts), it is also less impressive.

But that's just the second CD!

No worry, there's more than enough on this double release to be value for money. And you get double the fun, including two albums of Brown's wonderful lyrics, a whole album where he sings, plus the chance to compare these two quite different incarnations of "The Battered Ornaments". And, pssst, hey, entre nous, there's a bonus track of an early lineup (the "Poetry Band") with Brown singing too. Enjoy!