Barclay James Harvest appreciation thread.

Only the songs 'She Said' and 'Ra' mean anything to me. I've tried many albums of theirs over the years, but only hung on to Octoberon and Once Again. Mediocre for me.

child of the universe best song ever !!!!

For some reason I've always been fascinated with the whole BJH imagery - their vinyls' artwork, their photos - but never gave a chance to their music, until this spring. I started from the debut and worked my way up their discography, eventually giving up on 1990's "Welcome to the Show". Those 80s albums are very, very bad, perfectly showing what was wrong with the music business in the 80s and particulary the hardships 70s bands faced trying to adapt to the new sound, the synth era, the MTV decade ("Invisible Touch" anyone? Maybe "Big Generator"?).

As for their earlier stuff - some solid hits here and there ("For No One", "Mocking Bird", "She Said", "Dark Now My Sky", "Ra", etc), but not a single whole album I would recommend...They all overfilled with very samey, comfort-zone, ear-pleasing, major-scale pop-folk tunes, sometimes impossible to tell one from another - that's why things like "For No One" stand out.

For newbies - go with "Live" (1974), it's basically the-best-of played live - and boy playing live they could! Also there's a noticeable level of energy, sadly missing from the sanitized studio recordings, so yeah, begin with "Live"...and maybe stop there.

I'd love to find some more pastoral, Mellotron-heavy prog from that era, but not as tame and senile as BJH or Moodies - more like Crimso ballads or Comus epics

Prog-jester wrote: I'd love to find some more pastoral, Mellotron-heavy prog from that era, but not as tame and senile as BJH or Moodies - more like Crimso ballads or Comus epics

I play all their albums, but Ring of Changes upto River of Dreams almost never.

A real nice 'n' comfy band. So far I've only heard Everyone is Everybody Else and Time Honoured Ghosts. The latter is my favourite of the two.

Don't know much about them to be honest apart from the obvious famous songs. However I did see John Lees BJH at The New Day festival last week and they were excellent. I didn't expect to enjoy them so much and I wasn't even tanked up on booze!

Cosmiclawnmower wrote: [...] If you are looking for a 'truly blistering' version of Medicine man then the version which was on the 1978 live 'Rock n roll star' ep (which was then on 1978's Live Tapes) but the version of medicine man recorded on that tour was used to back this 33rpm 7inch.. I don't know if its been released as an extra on a recent re-issue or available on YouTube but if you can find it, its well worth the listen!!

Kingsnake wrote: Try Cressida. They mad two fairly nice albums. A bit jazzy, a bit folky, but pastoral. For harder edged mellotron bands, try the newer bands like Anekdoten and My Brother the Wind.

thanks, I love these and been loving their stuff for years already)

Lewian wrote: I know BJH pretty much since I got into music and I liked them a lot in the beginning, so my story with them is very different... but these days what you write is very precisely what I think about them, pretty much down to the specific songs mentioned. The only addition is that the "Live"-version of Medicine Man is my favourite by them now.

Yes! Forgot to mention that I too prefer live version of this legendary song of theirs

kenethlevine wrote: you could try Strawbs, particularly "Grave New World".  Very mellotron heavy but with more edge than BJH yet paradoxially more folkie

thanks, I will!

Esoteric Recordings released 3-CD versions of their most important albums:

Edited by Kingsnake - March 02 2018 at 03:48