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Egg: The Polite Force LP (1971, Deram)
I have now succumbed to one of the ultimate record collector cliches: I’m into Canterbury. This has been brewing for a while—I chose Caravan’s album In the Land of Grey and Pink as my staff pick way back in July 2020 and I had been checking out Gong and Steve Hillage before that, but the world of Canterbury has sucked me in over the past few months as I’ve spent more time with Canterbury mainstays like Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, and Quiet Sun. I’d been exploring this scene on my own time, but the process got sped up thanks to a couple of folks who sold records to Sorry State. One guy was so attached to his Canterbury records that he kept all those, but sold us several thousand others, and on my house calls I spent a lot of time talking with him about his favorite records. Then, coincidentally, another prog aficionado sold us his record collection. This guy was willing to part with his Canterbury gems, so I scored original copies of several of the records the first guy was raving about. Synchronicity!
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Canterbury refers to the city in Kent, England (famous as the setting of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales), and Canterbury music refers to the explosion of music that happened there in the late 60s and early 70s. For me, what’s interesting about Canterbury music is its unique set of influences. The musicians in that scene were interested in the then-current psychedelic and progressive rock movements happening in the UK, but they were also engaged with jazz (including the contemporary jazz-rock fusion movement Miles Davis was pioneering), avant-garde and experimental classical music by composers like Stockhausen and Edgard Varèse, and early modern English folk music. These aren’t influences that lend themselves to a natural fusion, and a lot of Canterbury albums can feel eclectic, with jarring shifts in tone and style from one track from the next, or sometimes even within a single track.
I’m not sure when I happened upon Egg’s second album, The Polite Force—it may have just been in reading about the Canterbury scene—but when I first listened to it, the monstrous organ riff that opens the record knocked me on my ass. While Egg didn’t employ a guitarist, organist Dave Stewart lays down a riff as dense and sludgy as anything Black Sabbath or Deep Purple did in their heyday. While nothing else on The Polite Force is like that, it’s a great introduction because it demands your full attention, which Egg subsequently tests over the course of the album. In researching the critical reaction to The Polite Force, I found many people were put off by the album’s experimental elements. The Polite Force certainly leans more toward that end of the Canterbury spectrum, with much of its runtime given over to Stockhausen-influenced tape manipulation and freewheeling jazz experimentation. I guess I can see how it’s too much for some people, but for me Egg keeps the ideas coming fast and furious, and even if I like some moments more than others, wondering what they’re going to do next keeps me engaged throughout the record.
Last night, as I was playing The Polite Force, I was pondering why Canterbury music appeals to such a particular breed of nerdy record collector. Can you appreciate this music if you have less than two thousand albums in your collection? Perhaps you can, but having a voracious appetite for music seems to help. Maybe that’s because the Canterbury scene is so embedded in its context that you need some knowledge of the influences they were working with to appreciate what they were doing. Or maybe it’s because the way these bands combined the different elements of their respective sounds was often surprising, even jarring. Maybe it’s perfect for an old head who craves that sense of discovery, but has kind of heard it all before.
Another way the Canterbury scene whets the collector nerd’s appetite is how interconnected everything is. As I was reading about Egg last night, for instance, I learned that guitarist Steve Hillage had played in a group called Uriel, which was basically Egg plus Steve Hillage. While Uriel never released anything, the group reformed in 1969 and released a self-titled album as Arzachel, which streaming service recommendation algorithms really think I’ll like, but I’ve never checked out. Even more enticing is Khan’s album Space Shanty, which came out in 1972. Khan featured most of the personnel from Uriel / Arzachel, and the songs on their LP were intended for the follow-up to Steve Hillage’s solo album Fish Rising, another ye olde staffe picke para moi. The vibe on that one is supposed to be more space rock than prog, and I can’t wait to dive in and learn more.