While it may not always be seen as favourably as some of 1970’s heavyweight hard rock discs, ‘Very ’Eavy Very ’Umble’ marked a more than credible beginning for British rockers Uriah Heep. While the release never troubled the UK album chart, its mix of blues, rock and occasional psychedelic leanings met with a devoted group of music fans. Having found an audience, it would have been easy for Mick Box and his merry band of musicians to knock out a near carbon copy for their second release, but the album that eventually emerged in February 1971 couldn’t have been any more different.
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HEAD MACHINE – Orgasm
As the 60s gave way to the 70s, some musical fashions began to take a more aggressive turn. The psychedelia and blues that had been a dominance force on the rock scene had started to fade and while some of the psych bands took the leap into full-on prog rock waters, many psych bands merely just fizzled out. Deep Purple, whose early mixture of psychedelia, rock covers and blues took a harder direction and helped forge what would soon be known as heavy metal; Status Quo – who’d had major success with a couple of brilliant psych-pop singles – floundered for a bit and eventually became a lynchpin of a no nonsense boogie rock sound. In February 1970, the Black Sabbath debut changed everything, killing the last remnants of a 1960s optimism for good. For The Gods – a little known rock pop band who’d released two unsuccessful LPs – the writing seemed to be very much on the wall. In what appeared to be a last throw of the dice, they changed their name and beefed up their sound in an attempt to rejuvenate their ailing career.
Ken Hensley 5CD set to be released March 27th
After leaving Uriah Heep in 1980, multi-instrumentalist Ken Hensley embarked upon an often overlooked solo career. On 27th March 2020, Cherry Red Records/HNE Records will release a five disc set collecting his extensive recordings made between 2012-2013.
The new set follows Cherry Red’s previous Hensley anthology (‘The Bronze Years’) and brings together two studio album, an acoustic live set and various live recordings made with Ken’s band Live Fire.
URIAH HEEP – Outsider
For most people Uriah Heep are a band consigned to the seventies with their some of their earliest albums ‘Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble’, ‘Demons & Wizards’ and ‘The Magicians Birthday’ their best known. Those same people probably still regard the band as a poor man’s Deep Purple and are blissfully unaware that the band’s twenty third studio release – 2011’s ‘Into The Wild’, their first for Frontiers Records – is among their absolute best. Although the straight forward hard rock on display owed more to the band’s output from the early 80s and beyond than the flowery fantasies and psudo-prog of their 70s heyday, the whole album showcased a class act – a band still more than capable of delivering the goods in the classic rock vein and in some cases really outshining their peers. Since that last album, the world also lost bassist Trevor Bolder. With that in mind, 2014’s ‘Outsider’ had much to live up to and need to work incredibly hard to match the great impression left by its immediate predecessor.
URIAH HEEP – Firefly
When David Byron left Uriah Heep in 1976, the band’s fans figured he’d be irreplaceable. His dynamic vocal range was an important part of the Heep sound, after all. The band found a replacement in ex-Lucifer’s Friend vocalist John Lawton and to everyone’s surprise, the resulting album – 1977’s ‘Firefly’ – was not only enjoyable, but a big improvement over the workmanlike approach which dominated most of 1976’s ‘High & Mighty’. This was an achievement considering the band had lost a key member, but pretty amazing since they also had a new bass player in tow. ‘Firefly’ also marks the first appearance in Uriah Heep for Trevor Bolder (best known for his work as bassist with David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars).