OFF: High Tide, Tony Hill, Simon House, Pete Pavli, Ade Shaw, Long

[Stephan Forstner]

I've spent part of the weekend listening to 2 new releases from the High
Tide camp: High Tide - Open Season, on Black Widow Records, via CDServices,
and Tony Hill - Inexactness, direct from Woronzow, and here's a bit of a
description of them.

Open Season is 2 new tracks bracketing a compilation of older material. The
new stuff probably shouldn't be called High Tide material - the 1st track is
really a Tony Hill solo piece, the last is a Pete Pavli solo piece, each
backed up by Adrian Shaw on Bass/Drums and Drums respectively, but they are
definitely good whatever they choose to call it. The artwork is nice, a
thorough copy of, I mean homage to, Sea Shanties. Everything from the layout
and artwork on the front and back covers to the sailing ship inner art
mimics Sea Shanties - I rather like the overall effect.

Artists appearing are:

Tony Hill       - TH  - gtr, vox
Simon House     - SH  - violin
Peter Pavli     - PP  - bass, cello
Roger Hadden    - RH  - drums
Android Funnel  - AF  - gtr
Drachen Theaker - DrT - drums
Dave Tomlin     - DvT - violin, bass
Adrian Shaw     - AS  - bass, drums

Info on the tracks:

1. Open Season

  2000 - TH/AS

Tony still has it.

2. Unearthed
3. Static in the Attic
4. The Ballad of Norris Mill
5. The Great Universal Confidence Trick

  1970 - TH/SH/PP/RH

Original lineup. This material has better sound quality than the Precious
Cargo Live Jam, but the material is very similar - in fact, a version of
track #5 (TGUCT) appears on Precious Cargo where it's titled 'Exploration'.
This is fine stuff.

6. Icarus Phoenix
7. Unhinged
8. All of One Race

  1971 - TH/AF/PP/DrT

This continues in the vein of the previous tracks from '70 - if it weren't
for the absence of Simon House and the noticeably differnt drummer it might
almost sound like it was from the same sessions. PP plays cello on one track
making up for the lack of violin, and this is more fine material.

9. Resonance

  1974 - TH/DvT/PP/DrT

This track is a bit of a return to the heavier prog/psych sound of Sea
Shanties and High Tide. An excellent piece.

10. Turn Yourself Down

  1990 - TH/PP/DvT/DrT

Wow. This is absolutely fantastic. A 24 minute instrumental piece with PP
playing orchestral-style keyboards as a very effective backdrop to TH's
amazing guitar explorations. Very space/jazz/rock. If High Tide was putting
out more of this kind of music at this time, then I am mightily pissed at
having missed it.

11. Light Your Torch
12. Steady in E

  1976 - TH/PP/DrT

Again, this is similar to the other 70's material, but the arrangements
sound more stripped-down, presumably the result of being down to a trio and
no apparent multi-tracking.

13. Garage Gods

  1990 - TH/SH/DrT

1990 seems to have been a very good year for High Tide. This is yet another
fantastic piece, in a completely differnt vein from Turn Yourself Down. The
slightly jazzy touch on TYD is replaced by a very spacerock, Hawkwind
'Warrior' feel. This track is also very reminiscent of the material on
Interesting Times, but the presence of a live drummer addresses one of the
minor problems I had with that release.

14. Spindle

  2000 - PP/AS


So, all the 70's material is excellent stuff, mostly in the more
melodic/folkish vein of Precious Cargo, rather than the heavy psych/prog of
the 1st 2 releases. The real surprise for me here was the 90's material. As
I understand it, all the material except #1 and #14 was compiled from
various High Tide releases - The Flood ('70-'76), and Ancient Gates/A Fierce
Nature/Reason of Success (all '90), and maybe the Tony Hill solo LP Playing
for Time, none of which I've heard. I've listed all the tracks/years/players
above partly in the hope that someone who owns these albums will tell us
what is on them - for example, is all of the material from The Flood here?
And is the 1990 material on Open Season representative of the other music on
the '90 releases? Which albums did these tracks appear on? etc. Also,
depending on the answers to these questions, I'd like to know if anyone
knows where one can get copies of those releases.


The Tony Hill release (Inexactness) has the following players:

Tony Hill    - gtr, vox
Pete Pavli   - bass on 3 tracks
Ade Shaw     - bass
Andy Ward    - drums
Matt Kelly   - violin/viola
Nick Saloman - gtr/organ/synth

I went into this one hoping for more of the great guitar excursions which
Tony Hill/Andy Ward/Ade Shaw had produced on the 2 tracks 'High' and 'Tide'
for Acid Jam 2. So initialy I was a bit disappointed - here, only the 1st
track and the 14-minute 'Of Foundries, Ships, and Steeples' follows that
general pattern. Most of the rest of the pieces here begin to approach a
standard-song-like structure - much more so than just about anything I have
yet heard from Tony Hill. Still this is Tony Hill we're talking about and
when I say approach, that means it's still pretty far from a pop song. Some
of what makes me call them song-like are more vocals than usual, lyrics that
seem to be a bit more staightforward in some cases, and a tendency of the
musicians to find a groove and stay with it. High Tide often found a groove
as well, but they never stayed with it long, jumping out and going off
exploring, maybe to return to the groove later, or to find another groove
altogether. That said, this one has definitely grown on me quite a bit, and
pretty rapidly too. After discarding my preconceptions and listening to this
for what it is and not what I want it to be, I'll admit that these are
pretty strong songs and well worth getting. There are also plenty of High
Tide moments scattered throughout - just don't expect to hear High Tide from
beginning to end - something Woronzow has apparently anticipated by
releasing this as a Tony Hill rather than a High Tide release, even if Tony
Hill pretty much is High Tide like DB is Hawkwind or Lemmy is Motorhead.

So to sum up, these are 2 excellent releases. I would say Open Season is
pretty much essential for High Tide fans if, like me, they don't have the
hard-to-find releases containing material that dates from after the early
70s. And the Tony Hill disc may actually appeal to a wider audience since
the progressive tendencies of most of Tony's material is tempered by the
Woronzow crew's straight-ahead rocking psychedelic predilections.

Stephan