Eyes Of Blue – The Light We See: The Recordings 1969-1971 [3CD Box Set]

Eyes Of Blue – The Light We See: The Recordings 1969-1971 [3CD Box Set]

How often have you wished that obscure, short-lived band you once enjoyed had just made one more album? It doesn’t count when they reunite several decades later, of course, because their energy and influences will have changed completely. For some lucky fans, this wish has come true with shelved albums from the 70s finally seeing the light of day in the 21st Century. Off the top of my head, Jonesy, Fields, T2, thisOneness and Spring are all bands that had material unearthed in recent years.

When I saw Esoteric were doing an Eyes of Blue box set, I brushed it off as I had already reviewed the band’s pair of albums eight years ago; better to let someone else discover them. But when I looked closer and saw that this was a 3CD set, I squealed with joy: I presumed there was an unearthed album to be shared. That wasn’t quite the case, as the group’s third album Bluebell Wood had definitely been ‘earthed’ all the way back in 1971, but under the moniker ‘Big Sleep’. According to the liner notes, this was the bright idea of the group’s American producer Lou Reizner, but there is no explanation given for the change of name. Perhaps it was intrigue, or perhaps it was to make a humble reviewer in the 21st Century believe they’d stumbled upon a miracle.

The truth is, I really only liked one song the band made when I first heard them in 2016. While there were some interesting ideas on the debut Crossroads of Time, the muddy production quality and pop dross made it an unappetising album for me. In Fields of Ardath showed a refinement of those ideas but there was truthfully only one stand-out track: Merry Go Round. I enjoyed this bombastic, symphonic nine-minute mini-epic so much that I would play it nonstop; I even distinctly remember listening to it as I skied down an artificial slope whilst on holiday in Dubai. I’ll wager that I’m the only person ever to do so as well.

I was surprised to find out that the two best tracks from the first album – the title track and Love is the Law – were covers of Graham Bond songs. Crossroads of Time opens with a blast of Bach’s Fugue in D Minor on the organ before switching to a more rock-oriented theme. Egg would also cover this famous piece by Bach the following year in progressive fashion. Love is the Law, meanwhile, is a more soulful and hard-hitting piece featuring delightful runs on the organ. The other tracks from the first album are hit and miss; I quite like the classically inspired, mellotron-drenched Largo that sounds reminiscent of A Whiter Shade of Pale. On the other hand, I cannot stand the nauseating Never Care with its disgustingly saccharine and overwrought chorus. They might have been experimenting with the boundaries of popular music, but sometimes experiments go wrong.

I also found myself warming to more of the tracks on In Fields of Ardath (although it’s still quite hard to put on only Merry Go Round and stop there, especially since the second track, The Light We See, is so thoroughly weak). Understanding more about the origin of Souvenirs and its composer Django Reinhardt, I can more readily appreciate it for what it is, even if it does sound rather jaunty and aimless next to some of the other tracks. Spanish Blues is another Graham Bond cover and once again, it just works; perhaps I need to be listening to his music instead.

The highly experimental and adventurous Door (The Child That Is Born on the Sabbath Day) is better than I initially reckoned but is thoroughly marred by awful production and a lack of strong themes. Little Bird is annoyingly catchy for how ridiculously simple and unrewarding it is. Extra Hour also features a tasteful mellotron arrangement that gives it a haunting cinematic feel. Apache ‘69 is a cover of the popular song that was originally a hit for the Shadows and would be covered by many groups later. Lou Reizner believed the band’s arrangement would be a smash hit, but it’s easy to see why it wasn’t: the recognisable central theme is buried by incessant noodling and it took me several listens to realise what I was listening to. It’s no wonder that the Incredible Bongo Band had chart success with Apache two years later with their very recognisable and carefully orchestrated version that didn’t sound like some random jam in someone’s shed.

Despite the poor experience I had with the first two albums, I honestly had high hopes for the group’s third. In the liner notes, the band agree that they were too ahead of their time to be successful, mentioning that the members of Yes would stand at the back of their gigs and take notes. One can certainly see how the Eyes might have inspired them with their operatic treatment of Yesterday or multi-part songs featuring layered vocals. I hoped that by hearing an album from the band released in 1971 – by the time the progressive movement had really got going – I might finally get to hear the evolutionary step that I always expected them to take to becoming a fully-fledged prog rock group. And I wasn’t disappointed.

The album opens with Death of a Hope, a beautiful elegy that features a very tasteful string arrangement. Free Life has a bluesy feel and ends with an extended jam session based on the same repetitive chords. John Weathers’s snare drum sounds so powerful that it might punch a hole through your ear; did I mention he was Gentle Giant’s drummer from Octopus onwards? I only found this out about the group this time around.

Shorter but no less important is the haunting Aunty James based on a killer piano and bass motif. It’s a song that proves that great music does not warrant great lyrics: “Children call her Aunty James, even though she’s not their aunt at all.” Saint and Sceptic bring us closer to prog-rock goodness, as it is probably the most fully-composed piece on the record, with a scored instrumental bookended by two vocal sections. This piece also features a string arrangement, though it is not quite as extensive as Death of a Hope.

When I looked up the vinyl tracklisting, I was bewildered by how lop-sided this album was. The first five songs (which comprised Side A) took up 27 minutes, while the remaining three only added up to 17. Even if you took the shortest track from Side A and put it on Side B, Side B would still be several minutes shorter. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen such an unnecessarily lop-sided LP before.

Side B holds the highlight, the eleven-minute title track that has grown on me quickly. It’s neither brash nor particularly technical. In fact, it begins in a tacet, stately fashion that feels very soulful. In progressive fashion, there are many mood changes but all are done gracefully. There’s a guitar solo that reminds me of the Looney Tunes theme before an extended jam outro that takes up the final four minutes. Truthfully, I’m a little disappointed that the track doesn’t have a ‘proper’ ending the way that Merry Go Round does, but the outro is not bad for what it is.

Strangely, the last two tracks on the album are the shortest and most straightforward, leading me to think that this was a bonus single and its B-side. Perhaps they were, but they were also included in this album’s running order too, gracelessly lumped at the end. Watching Love Grow is a gorgeous ditty with a delightful chorus. It’s the kind of song that should have since been covered by dozens of artists for its simple beauty and poetic message but has sadly faded into obscurity.

I cannot say the same about When the Sun Was Out which has to be one of the most godawful rock songs I’ve ever heard. Whenever it comes on, I scramble for my phone to make the din stop. It’s annoyingly repetitive with the most basic guitar riff and seems to carry on forever: three minutes and forty-three seconds have never felt longer. Rather than sounding progressive, this song feels like it would have been passé in the 50s. What a sour note to end on.

I’ve taken umbrage with Esoteric’s notes recently since they aren’t always as informative as they could be. However, I’m glad to report an uptick in quality with this set. The most glaring piece of information was that Esoteric’s long-term house scribbler Malcolm Dome had passed away, with label manager Mark Powell incorporating some of his earlier notes and interviews for this set. Although I would often poke fun at Dome’s penchant for hyperbole, it’s notes like these that proved that he knew what needed to go into a decent reissue, and his prose shall be sorely missed.

Through Powell and Dome, I was able to glean a lot more information about the band than I ever had before. I was particularly fascinated by the brief period between their first two albums where they recorded some film soundtracks and worked with Buzzy Linhart. But there’s an odd contradiction in the notes. It seems that the group were asked to record background music for the low-budget adult film The Toy Grabbers aka Up Your Teddy Bear aka The Seduction of a Nerd. Drummer Weathers says they used music that had been written a couple of years earlier but hadn’t been recorded before, while bassist and keyboardist Ritchie Francis says, “The only new song written for the movie was Merry Go Round“.

This sent me down a rabbit hole. Because everything lives on the internet these days, I was able to find The Toy Grabbers and search for the Eyes’ music. First of all, let me declare what a repugnant film this is, poorly shot and edited, and mainly featuring a bunch of men leering at women. As nasty as the experience was, I eventually came across a theme that did sound very similar to Merry Go Round about 55 minutes into the film, in particular the “ba ba ba ba ba ba-ba ba-ba” vocal theme from the verse. Disappointingly, this theme was used in a comedic fashion as a drunken pervert stalks a woman, consistently staring at her derrière (as the camera does too). “Whatever,” I thought, “at least I’ve seen how they used the band’s music in the film.

But the plot thickens. After two pages of describing the band’s work on the obscure Bette Davis/Michael Redgrave film Connecting Rooms (and how some clips of them can be found on YouTube), the notes suddenly return to The Toy Grabbers where both Weathers and Francis become adamant that there was no crossover between In Fields of Ardath and the film’s soundtrack. Weathers says “Everything you hear on the record was completely unconnected with the soundtrack for the film,” while Francis agrees “There was never any crossover between these two records.” Entire paragraphs are devoted to the band member’s consternation. If this is true, though, how come Francis states earlier that Merry Go Round was “written for the movie”? And how come I can hear that musical theme myself when I watch the film? On the vinyl of In Fields of Ardath it literally says “Merry Go Round (From the film “Toy-Grabbers”)”. Did Weathers and Francis simply forget this in their old age? Or perhaps they didn’t want to remember the film because of how bad it was. All the same, I wasn’t expecting this kind of controversy from some Esoteric notes.

The only recordings by Eyes of Blue missing from this set are the two singles they released with Deram in ‘66 and ‘67, the latter of which was called Supermarket Full of Cans. It’s a delightfully whimsical tune that is reminiscent of the period it was made, although I did mishear the chorus as “You can’t follow my cart in a supermarket full of cans!” I lamented these lack of inclusions in 2016 as well, but perhaps Esoteric couldn’t get the rights to those songs since they were on a different label.

Another nitpick for me is the title of this set. As I previously mentioned, The Light We See is one of the weakest tracks of the set, so it’s disappointing that this song is used as the title of the box set. But there is a factual inaccuracy too: most sources agree that Crossroads of Time was released in 1968, with some saying it was released as far back as September of that year. But Esoteric’s subtitle The Recordings 1969 – 1971 would have you believing differently. Well then, which one is it? Lastly, I noticed that Apache ‘69 is included as the final track of the In Fields of Ardath vinyl but is listed as a bonus track in this set. Have Esoteric really done their homework? They did fix one thing from the 2016 editions: there’s finally a list of personnel for each album. Still, there is some ambiguity as to whether original vocalist Wyndham Rees was present for In Fields of Ardath; the personnel list claims he is while the liner notes state he was fired before the second album.

These are small qualms, however. This set is such a wonderful surprise; if Esoteric had never released it, there’s a chance I would have gone the rest of my life without knowing that Eyes of Blue and Big Sleep were the same group, or that they ever released a third album at all. While it’s not the most polished set of recordings, it does show prog rock in its embryonic form and shows how the group of Welshmen pointed the way for many groups to come. Now, could somebody please find the lost Fruupp album next?

TRACK LISTING
DISC ONE:
Crossroads of Time
01. Crossroads of Time (5:07)
02. Never Care (3:24)
03. I’ll Be Your Friend (3:56)
04. 7 + 7 Is (2:38)
05. Prodigal Son (5:34)
06. Largo (3:20)
07. Love Is the Law (5:22)
08. Yesterday (4:28)
09. I Wonder Why (3:20)
10. World of Emotion (2:55)
11. Inspiration for a New Day (3:16)
~ Bonus track:
12. Q III (2:36)

Time – 45:52

DISC TWO: In Fields of Ardath
01. Merry Go Round (9:13)
02. The Light We See (2:17)
03. Souvenirs (Tribute to Django) (2:47)
04. Ardath (2:40)
05. Spanish Blues (4:05)
06. Door (The Child That Is Born on the Sabbath Day) (6:52)
07. Little Bird (2:34)
08. After the War (3:35)
09. Extra Hour (2:33)
10. Chances (3:01)
~ Bonus track:
11. Apache ’69 (3:00)

Time – 42:32

DISC THREE: Big Sleep – Bluebell Wood
01. Death of a Hope (5:36)
02. Odd Song (3:55)
03. Free Life (6:30)
04. Aunty James (4:46)
05. Saint and Sceptic (6:37)
06. Bluebell Wood (11:27)
07. Watching Love Grow (2:36)
08. When the Sun Was Out (3:43)

Time – 45:06

Total Time – 133:29

MUSICIANS
Gary Pickford-Hopkins – Vocals, Guitar
Wyndham Rees – Vocals (Disc 1, possibly Disc 2)
Phil Ryan – Organ, Piano, String Arrangements (Disc 3, Tracks 1 & 5)
Raymond “Taff” Williams – Guitar
Ritchie Francis – Bass, Keyboards, Piano, Vocals
John “Pugwash” Weathers – Drums, Vocals

ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Esoteric Recordings | Cherry Red Records
Catalogue#: ECLEC 32887
Country of Origin: U.K.
Date of Release: 25th October 2024

LINKS
Cherry Red Records – Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | X