... AND OTHER SHORT STORIES

"In this heaving, milling restaurant of rock, Barclay's present another room, just a turn off from the main eating hall. There's a good oak table, skeely steel knives, fresh napkins and a different menu, golden, weaping butter, no smarmy marg, brown bread and something tasty..." I'm quoting Roy Hollingworth's liner notes to "BJH and other short stories" here, cause they say it best... and who should disagree ???

Sandwiched between the band's classics "Medicine Man" and "The Poet/After the Day" you get a brunch of several styles... beatlesque numbers such as "Blue John's Blues", "Harry's Song" and "Someone there you know" interspersing with folky stuff such as "Little Lapwing" and lovely poetry in "Ursula ( the Swansea Song )"... carefully arranged and well played, a sheer pleasure to hear after so many years still cause like most of the band's 70's output it's timeless music. BJH had quite a lot to live up to after "Once Again", and they had to handle both, the change of producer as well as orchestral arranger/leader, and it's all to their credit they created a wonderful successor !

When critics mainly despise a band like them you can only wonder if they have the slightest notion of what they're writing about... sometimes arbitrariness ain't far, so let me come back to ( and close this review with ) the album's original sleeve-notes: " They create peaceful, lotus emotions. They are that field of sunshine, that slow, graceful movement... " Touché !

Rupi