At heart this review is about one thing and one thing only: Tony Hill, the cornerstone of High Tide, died last year barely acknowledged. He was one of the most singular musical visionaries of his era and his work has never been given the respect that it was due. There were no obituaries for Hill in the NME or The Guardian, and social media was unusually silent as he finally stepped away from the stage.
Esoteric Recordings‘ remastering of The Complete Liberty Recordings is a welcome reissue of the core canon of High Tide recordings, the two key albums — Sea Shanties and High Tide — and a third disc of demos and unreleased materials. Some of the demos have appeared before as bonus releases on earlier CD reissues.
Perhaps the most notable of these demos are the two 1969 Apple Studios recordings of material from the first album, along with “Dilemma”, a track that somehow escaped their debut. Not only does the studio setting give us a whiff of the potential and interest that the early High Tide had garnered in the hallowed arcades of ’60s hip, but also how consistently they worked on their material. This wasn’t the half-crazed squall of Hawkwind, who they famously lent their shiny new backline to for their first gig; everything was unerringly tight.And as usual we are also given a couple of versions of “The Great Universal Protection Racket”, which was also due to its extended expanse dropped from the first album. If there is any useful comparison to made, this number is not too many light years removed from early classic Amon Düül II. Indeed, comparisons to what High Tide were doing, with the twin attack of Tony Hill’s guitar and Simon House‘s violin, are occasionally somewhere near Mahavishnu Orchestra at their most muscular, although one must remember that High Tide had already dissolved before John McLaughlin’s ensemble had formed.
Similarly, the more deeply composed and considered second and eponymous album, in all of its Gormenghastian glory, occasionally makes us think of those first two Queen albums with their harlequin motley of darkly literate rock; but once again neither of these albums had been recorded by the time that High Tide were unceremoniously dropped by their label.While it’s very nice that this reissue of the first two albums makes this material available to a new generation of fans who are somehow incapable of using Soulseek, this final track brings up a bigger question: what if we could be offered a glimpse of what that third album would have sounded like? What if Roger Hadden‘s psychological breakdown hadn’t splintered the band for so long, and what if we had some sketchy idea of what the original band sounded like during their final year when they decamped to Puddletown, Dorset, the stomping ground of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown?
Well, actually we do. At the end of the ’80s, Precious Cargo, a set of demo recordings of exactly this period, featuring both “Ice Age” and “Rock Me On Your Wave” that would appear on the later Hill / House High Tide of the Interesting Times album, was released on one of those small Italian prog labels. Certainly, Esoteric Recording’s remit, to issue The Complete Liberty Recordings is clear enough from the title, but if they had really wanted to give the fans something worthwhile and interesting, it’s these Precious Cargo recordings that they would have remastered. Remasters of tape artefacts, such as Les Rallizes Dénudés gig recordings, have cleaned up far grubbier material than those Puddletown tapes. Sure, they would have had have had to dig deep for a different title for this CD set (do people really still buy CDs? Really?), but in that case this as an artefact would have been something truly worthy of Tony Hill’s memory.We will see this same material, the two Liberty albums and the demos, issued again in a decade, and maybe a decade after that, and it will do as little then as it will do now to cement High Tide’s reputation as a truly pioneering act, although it would have been nice if the reissue that was most likely intended as a tribute to Tony Hill had given us something substantially new. Sure, it all sounds as great as it ever did, and maybe next time it will even come out on coloured vinyl so that it can add fresh investment stock to the collectors market. Yeah, why not.
Tony Hill was a paradox in that he had the most world-weary delivery of all front men, while his guitar could switch effortlessly from a sweet tone to die for to a face-melting abrasiveness that we would not hear again until Les Rallizes Dénudés, but unlike Mizutani his mystery has remained substantially unexplored. And really this three CD set doesn’t seem likely to do anything much to change that.-Iotar-
