THE CAMBERWELL NOW

This EP is short at 14 minutes and is much more digestible and streamlined than THIS HEAT. There's a lot of vocals on here as Charles continues his political rants. Such a hit and miss album for me. Yeah, 14 minutes worth! Okay, but the opener and title track is pretty good, especially the first half of it. Catchy with sax and vocals, and the drums can be relentless. I like the bass on "Mystery Of The Fence" but not the vocals. "Know How" is my least favourite of the four tracks. While it's not a ballad, it's close enough, and with male vocals getting emotional, it's just not my thing. A short experimental song ends it.

Get the studio album "The Ghost Trade" if your a big THIS HEAT fan, it's at least in the ball park. EPs can be hit or miss, this was a miss.

I love the album art on this one. Camberwell by the way is a working class district in the city of London, England that Hayward and THIS HEAT were from. Essentially like THIS HEAT we get drums and bass along with a guy who is a studio rat, using tapes and recordings to great affect. This is different. It's not as experimental or powerful as THIS HEAT, but I hesitate to call this THIS HEAT-light. The vocals seem to be even more abundant on here as Charles rants about the political climate in the UK at the time. He would regret going there lyrically much later in life, feeling that his political opinions affected sales, as most bands seemed to protest less in the eighties, as fans were tired of it.

I almost forgot, we get two female guest vocalists as well. There's two tracks I absolutely do not like in "Wheat Futures" which sounds like ART BEARS with the mono-toned vocals and lyrics about working people. Move to Russia then! Also "Speculative Fusion" which sounds like a bad space rock track, veering into dance music. I like the song "Sitcom" and the guest female vocals here. "Green Lantern" is really good, catchy with me waiting for someone to yell "Rock lobster!".

This is a pale version of THIS HEAT in my opinion but most feel they are close to being equals. My apologies to Lewian who ranks this as one of his all time favourites. I wish I felt the same, but 3 stars is all I got.

I heard this for the first time when it was pretty new, and it caught me from the very first moment. Working Nights starts the album off fast fast fast. I'm not sure whether I ever came across a more rousing and exciting start on any album. Charles Hayward on drums and Trefor Goronwy on bass/guitar of This Heat drive each other to peak performances and in the background keyboards and recordings give the sound depth.

This album has speed and sharpness, dizzy bass- and drumwork that at times beggars belief, sudden speed changes, taste and consistency, the very original dry and very well fitting voice of Charles Hayward, interesting lyrics on the state of society, experimental sound design and even some good melodies. The sound is very lean and uncluttered.

Sitcom picks up where Working Nights ended in a very organic way. It tries out different speeds, some of them very pushy, until toward the end it goes into something more relaxed with some round and voluminous keyboard sound.

Wheat Futures is a rather different kind of landscape, slower, stronger in keyboards and sounds with very little drums and bass that rise only toward the end. It has some folk elements and a haunting, conjuring melody.

In Speculative Fiction, the exciting rhythm section is back with very straight drums and a plainly impossible bass part. Could you believe a human being played this? (Actually, if I'm honest, I believe not all of this is a single bass track, but it's the impression that counts.) Very physical and with its hymn-like melody even very catchy.

Green Lantern showcases all the elements that make this album special once more, the tempo changes, the tasteful sound experiments, the sharp rhythm section. It is to my taste the least spectacular track on this album, which is quite something to say because on its own it's a very good and original piece of music.

The title track The Ghost Trade starts slower again and is more sound and voice-driven than the majority of songs on the album. The final of the song turns the music around once more, into a relaxed and spacey place. I'd like to have the words to describe the sounds used here, but I can't; I just mention once more that the sound design is another trump of this album. This also has the to me most interesting lyrics.

In the forum I just posted a top 200 list of albums on which I ranked this among my top 20, which obviously is pretty good, but listening to it again for reviewing I realise once more that this is just spectacular beyond belief and could well be a top 5 of all times album.

I think that the album is no longer available, but is included in full on the collection "All's Well"; the rest there is interesting, too, but not quite as top notch as this.

The first four tracks come from the debut 12" single, Meridian. One track, a brief instrumental called Trade Winds, is not included here, presumably so that everything could fit onto a single CD. The first three songs sound more like Hayward solo than a group effort; he has the sole writing credit, and there is a minimal feel to the arrangements. The common theme is water, a recurring motif in Hayward's lyrics. Cutty Sark opens the proceedings, a song about the famous sailing vessel now moored on the river Thames near Camberwell. The arrangement is simple; a melodica refrain, cymbal and vocal by Hayward with bass and tambourine by ex This Heat colleague Charles Bullen, and the lyrics are about the ship's past as a vessel for trade with outposts of the British empire. Pearl Divers maintains the theme and mood, with keyboards and minimal percussion backing another mournful vocal. Dunkirk Spirit sees the entry of the full drum kit, played with a featherlight jazzman's touch, and an extended scat vocal introduction. Throughout these three tracks there is a feel very similar to Robert Wyatt circa Rock Bottom, and the lyrics reflect the band's left wing political views in an intelligent, understated manner. Resplash is a lengthy instrumental that reworks Splash, the closing track on the original 12" single and which gives the first full flavour of the band; Trefor Goronwy plays some nimble bass and also adds some ukulele, Hayward gets busy behind the kit and adds some simple keyboard motifs and Steven Rickard's loops and manipulations add the same kind of wild card to the mix that Gareth Williams' keyboards and tapes added to This Heat.

Next up is a stand alone track, originally issued only on an obscure and long deleted cassette compilation. Daddy Needs A Throne is effectively a curtain raiser for their album; the backing of the song is played on bass and drums with Trefor Goronwy using the full range of his instrument to play both low end rhythm and high end riffs and solos. Steven Rickard's tape work adds extra textures in the breaks, but it's basically a manic vocal/bass/drums performance with some extremely tight changes of tempo and metre. The Robert Wyatt influence is a lot less noticeable here - the sound is closer to Krautrock, with echoes of Can, Neu! and Faust discernible although the the lyrics and vocals are unmistakably English.

The band's solitary full length album, The Ghost Trade, was a remarkable achievement that demonstrated just how powerful a unit The Camberwell Now had become. Hayward and Goronwy had coalesced into an unbelievably tight, focussed rhyhtm section and the songwriting had found a distinctive, unique voice of its own. There are just 6 comparatively lengthy tracks on the album, and the musicians give themselves plenty of space and scope without degenerating into pointless noodling. The first two tracks, Night Shift and Sitcom, are in the same style as Daddy Needs A Throne - voice, bass and drums carry the bulk of the arrangement, with keyboards or tapes providing simple washes of sound or background drones. Abrupt shifts of rhyhtm and tempo occur throughout, while the lyrics take critical sideswipes at Mrs Thatcher's Britain. The pace slows down with Wheat Futures, which features no drumming for its first half, followed by a lengthy and discordant coda with ritual percussion and dark keyboard figures that recall Univers Zero's more sombre moments. 80s production values are in evidence on Speculative Fiction, which has what sounds like a sequencer generated bass line and a hypnotic bass/snare drum beat, which Hayward and Goronwy play over, around, under, across and through. Portions of the lyrics are spliced together from different voices (friends and neighbours, according to the credits) and the whole thing has bizarre echoes of 80s Pink Floyd. The Green Lantern is the shortest piece on the album, and features some heavy electronic distortion - it wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Can album circa Ege Bamyesi. The album closes with the title track, which clocks in at over eleven minutes. The lyrics hark back to This Heat's mighty SPQR, while the music builds up at its own pace. The instrumental section which closes the piece is carried by a simple motif that sometimes sounds like a glockenspiel, other times like a musical box. The bass and drums weave ever stranger patterns, while a simple electronic drone holds the whole thing together. All in all, The Ghost Trade is a masterful album which repays repeated and careful listening - an essential piece of 80s RIO.

A couple of significant changes had taken place by the time of Green Fingers, their final recording. The line up was augmented by Maria Lamburn on reeds and viola, and for the first time they were not recording in Cold Storage, the studio established by This Heat ten years previously. The result was something of a mixed success; the title track, apparently an old This Heat song, is a superb piece with extremely powerful bass and drums and some excellent jazzy interjections from Lamburn on soprano sax. The mood is maintained on The Mystery of The Fence, which moves into slightly more discordant territory and which has an extremely busy arrangement. Know How features Goronwy's only lyrical contribution to the Camberwell Now, and is a mournful, oddly inconclusive piece followed by a brief, sombre instrumental. For the first time since the songs which opened Meridian there is a note of uncertainty in evidence, and like the debut 12" single Greenfingers is good but rather patchy.

The Camberwell Now experienced little commercial success in their lifetime, which is odd given the extremely high standard of their output. Their bass/drum/vocal excursions may well ahve been a formative influence on Ruins - Yoshida Tatsuya is a big fan of Hayward's, and Cutty Sark was to remain in Hayward's solo live set. Comparisons with This Heat are inevitable, but they were emphatically not This Heat part 2; this was a band with its own sound and agenda and which developed into an entity as disticnct from its parent band as Art Bears was from Henry Cow or Matching Mole from Soft Machine. On the Ghost Trade they equalled This Heat's considerable achievements with their own, and on their other releases they explored other ideas and styles with varying degrees of success, some of which would inform Charles Hayward's solo career. All's Well is an excellent collection even though not quite complete, and is best listened to in segments corresponding to the original releases. Strongly recommeneded.