A Renaissance woman
Renaissance–Faeries (Living at the Bottom of the Garden)
(from the LP Camera Camera, IRS Records 1981)
Raised from the crib on a steady diet of the British Invasion from one of my sisters and vintage early ’70s AM pop from the other, and claiming punk and new wave as the first musical generation that was mine alone, I never had much use for progressive rock when I was growing up. Indeed, until I was well into my 20s, I was perfectly comfortable with the received wisdom that prog was basically useless wankery, with the exception of a handful of King Crimson songs and pre-Wish You Were Here Pink Floyd. And frankly, I still think most of it is: I have no use for Emerson Lake and Palmer whatsoever, find most Yes utterly tiresome, and consider Rush the single worst thing ever to come from my favorite city of Toronto, Ontario, and that includes the SARS outbreak.
But I’m also a devoted crate digger, and by the mid-’90s, there were a lot of really cheap ’70s-vintage prog albums in the bins. I got into prog via krautrock, which I got into around 1994 a counter guy at Bow Wow Records in Albuquerque noticed that I was buying a stack of Stereolab EPs at inflated import prices and said “Have you ever heard the German group Neu!? Stereolab lifted huge parts of their sound directly off them. You’d probably dig ‘em.” I bought the no-label bootleg CD they had of the first album and was instantly hooked. Onwards to Can, a reawakening of my junior high fascination with Kraftwerk (who were very big in Boulder circa “The Model”), and so forth, and then to the Virgin label back when it had the Roger Dean logo, and then to a further exploration of the Harvest label, and so on. To this day, the proggy stuff I like leans towards the oddball Soft Machine/Hatfield and the North axis, with a sideline in the more instrumental, jazzy stuff from France and Italy. But I’m also rather a fan of Renaissance.
In the ’70s, Renaissance were well-respected in the prog scene, although they never came close to breaking on the pop market. They were mostly on the gentler, prettier side of prog, and their singer Annie Haslam is one of the great vocalists in the style. (Boring historical stuff: oddly enough, Renaissance were originally pretty much what happened to the Yardbirds after Jimmy Page pissed off to form Zep. Keith Relf and Jim McCarty formed the first incarnation of the band, but by the time of 1972’s Prologue, generally considered the first “real” Renaissance record, both were long gone.) Of course, by the time of the new wave boom, almost all of the early ’70s prog bands had broken up, but after a short lapse, Renaissance reformed in 1981 as, of all things, a synth-pop trio.
See, IRS Records was run by Miles Copeland, and Miles Copeland’s first real job in rock was that he was Renaissance’s manager during the Prologue era. So you see where the connection is. You would expect the resulting album, 1981’s Camera Camera, to be an embarrassing flop, but although many hardcore Renaissance fans think of it as just that, I actually kinda like it. They’re not shooting for the Spandau Ballet end of new wave, but for the more mature, arty end where Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush lived: indeed, most of this album sounds like Bush’s The Kick Inside was the direct template. The primary departure is this track, “Faeries (Living at the Bottom of the Garden),” a playful bit of pure pop that sounds shockingly like late-period ABBA. Seriously, if this had a better, more detailed arrangement and cleaner production, it would fit perfectly on Voulez-Vous or The Visitors. The album was a complete stiff, naturally, but it’s nowhere near the fiasco many would lead you to believe.
–Stewart Mason
