Esoteric’s series of Renaissance clamshell boxsets – which began with Running Hard, covering the years 1974-76 – continues with Opening Out, and contains the albums that followed: Novella, A Song for All Seasons and Azure d’Or. If Running Hard could be compared to eating at a banquet in a Michelin-starred restaurant, then Opening Out is rather like rooting around in the bins outside for any morsels to eat; occasionally, you’ll find something fantastic, but there’s also a lot of plain rubbish. I’ve owned these albums for well over a decade, but after a couple of initial listens, they would rarely receive another spin, as the older music is simply so much better. I’m grateful that Esoteric has given me this opportunity to re-evaluate this tumultuous period in the band’s history.
Those who know their prog history will know that the years 1977 through 1979 weren’t kind to any progressive rock band (remember Love Beach?), so it shouldn’t be any surprise that Renaissance (arguably one of the most pompous- and pretentious-sounding prog bands) also suffered due to the influence of punk and new wave.
While most record labels will simply stick all the albums of a band’s career in one exhaustive box set to sell to punters, I’m fascinated that Esoteric have decided to dedicate boxes to specific periods of the group’s career. Perhaps their logic is that punters who have been interested to try the post-Scheherazade albums will find it easier to do so if the good and the bad are all thrown into one rip-the-Band-Aid-off box set. Not many are likely to purchase Azure d’Or by itself; just like Skintight in Skin Alley’s new box set, the album has been thrown in for good measure despite having little replay value.
Still, Esoteric has unwittingly made a horror movie of a box set, one where the listener gets to hear the band’s slide into obsolescence manifest at alarming speed. Worse still, there’s no happy ending; John Tout and Terry Sullivan would bow out of the group, and their label would drop them, leaving the remaining three in a rather sticky situation. This chronological framing of a band that is past its prime and just getting worse is a fascinating focus for the subject of a box set, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It would be wrong to say that things started out badly, however. Novella saw the band still retaining the classical stylings and orchestral approach that had been present in their last few albums. However, there’s definitely a noticeable deterioration in quality; while great ideas abound, there are an increasing number of moments where the record feels dull and lifeless, possibly padding out the songs for time.
The epic Can You Hear Me?, which dominates most of the album’s first side, has a fantastic progressive introduction and dramatic verses sung beautifully as ever by the dazzling Annie Haslam; I usually get chills when she gets to the unsettling line “Some city nights end without warning.” Is she talking about murder? However, an almost tacit three-minute instrumental follows; it’s so repetitive that it feels more like five minutes, and it tends to put my brain to sleep. By the time Annie’s voice comes back, I wonder where the time just went. If this is what the band were intending, it’s very effective, but I would have preferred a more memorable instrumental section.
I sometimes wonder if the instrumental sections of this song were added to it just to pad it out and make it an ‘epic’. Funnily enough, the expanded edition of this album contains an eight-minute single edition of the song that shaves off most of the excess and works as a sort of ‘proof of concept’ of what the song would sound like without the long, boring instrumental. Unfortunately, buyers of this set will not get to hear that version, as this economy set features just one bonus track, a B-side on Azure d’Or titled Island of Avalon.
The following three tracks are… I’m just gonna say it… pretty dull. The Sisters is pretty whilst also being brooding with an acoustic guitar solo that feels very akin to what Steve Howe was playing on Turn of the Century that same year. Midas Man is simpler and more repetitive, with more of a Pink Floyd “Welcome to the Machine” energy. Haslam says she enjoys this one because she gets to sing in a lower register. The Captive Heart reduces the band’s sound down to a minimum, with just Tout’s piano accompanied by Haslam’s angelic voice and occasionally some backing vocals. It’s all fine, but it’s not what I tuned in for.
The one song that I’ve truly re-evaluated this time around is the bizarrely titled Touching Once (Is So Hard to Keep), the nine-minuter that closes the album. Like the other tracks, there is still excess here, with two or three quiet minutes in the centre sounding rather out of place (like when you roast a chicken but the inside remains frozen). Nevertheless, the strength of the remainder of the track makes up for it, as the band launches into a frantic rhythmic section at the six-minute mark. The orchestra and choir create a long crescendo, and the saxophone solo by an unnamed musician is the cherry on top. The repetition of the verse at the end is simply divine, and I’ve started to debate whether I actually prefer this song to Can You Hear Me?.
The band’s next album, A Song for All Seasons, was technically more successful than its predecessor in terms of sales figures. With a top 10 single in Northern Lights and a TV theme song with Back Home Once Again (used for ITV’s The Paper Lads, which debuted the previous year), this album put the band more squarely in front of the British public and presented shorter, more commercially-viable songs to camouflage a pair of longer tracks that they also wished to unleash on unsuspecting listeners.
The album opens with Opening Out, which was selected as the title for this box set. It’s another piece that has grown on me, and sounds rather symphonic despite its short length. It feels like an introduction for a longer Renaissance song, so it’s a shame it doesn’t go further. This is quickly followed by a track I had completely forgotten about: Day of the Dreamer. Nearly ten minutes long, I had forgotten that this was another of the band’s mini-epics, as it doesn’t really feel like one, but more of a three-minute ballad inside a four-minute pop song with a fun instrumental to link them. In short, it simply doesn’t feel epic, but it’s quite nice.
A litany of shorter songs follows, each of them dissatisfying in different ways. Closer than Yesterday is short, quiet, pretty filler. Kindness (At the End) bamboozles the listener with a fun prog instrumental at the top of the song before a languid main section. The aforementioned Back Home Once Again was specifically designed to be a sappy TV show jingle, which does absolve the songwriters Jon Camp and Michael Dunford just a little.
And then there’s the bizarre She Is Love, an experiment with the string section of the orchestra and Jon Camp straining to provide a high vocal. Annie Haslam was supposed to provide the vocals for this number, but couldn’t; the reason why is disputed between the two members. In an interview, Camp said the score had been played by the orchestra in the wrong key for Haslam, but in the booklet in this box set, she said she had been feeling ill and wasn’t able to make the three-and-a-half-hour commute to London to provide the vocals that day. Whatever the truth is, it illuminates that music is not recorded in a vacuum where the artists have unlimited time and resources to get everything right. However, the band should have opted to simply scrap the track or re-record it for the following album rather than put out such a lacklustre version; even Haslam deems it as the low point of the album in her notes.
Then there’s the single Northern Lights, which is jolly and fairly catchy but still feels rather stuffy somehow. I still can’t really believe that the British public were bopping to this in 1978. When you realise the word play in the phrase ‘Northern Lights’ (Annie Haslam was from Bolton) the meaning of the song does elevate it somewhat.
Capping off the album is the title track, the only song I ever used to play from it. With eleven minutes to fit an album’s worth of prog into it, the track spares no time getting into it with a complex introduction featuring another great amalgam of band and orchestra. Only at the four-minute mark do we reach Annie’s dramatic verses. I seem to have made a habit of not enjoying the quieter parts in the Renaissance canon, but I don’t mind it hear as it’s short and contrasts nicely with the climactic last few minutes of the song.
It’s easy to see the slide in quality between these first two albums, even if the band themselves fiercely maintain that A Song for All Seasons was business as usual and ranked amongst one of their best albums. However, even the musicians themselves couldn’t keep up the delusion when it came to Azure d’Or, where each band member had something else to say in the booklet.
This was the first Renaissance album since Prologue to not feature an orchestra, which upset many fans and indeed some of the band members too. Jon Camp tries to defend the choice in the notes, saying that the change was not because the band wished to experiment more with keyboards, but that it was more about trying to break the expensive habit of hiring an orchestra for each album. “When do you get off the roundabout?”, he asks. “If we had put an orchestra on the album, we’d have only been doing it for the fans.” Haslam disagrees, pointing to several songs which could have used the orchestra, such as the prog-lite Secret Mission and The Flood at Lyons.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, though and say that the presence of an orchestra could not have saved this album. With five short songs on each side, there’s nowhere for an epic to hide and the band’s signature long-form songwriting is stifled. The stuff you like about Renaissance is simply gone here; the only remnant is Haslam’s lovely voice. Yes, there are morsels of prog here and there, and most of the songs aren’t heinous, but it’s a far cry from where the band were just three or four years earlier.
The most bizarre track on the album, however, is Only Angels Have Wings which I was surprised to find out is inspired by the 1939 film of the same name as well as 1949’s White Heat. Ironically enough, I’ve seen both films a review of the first one) and I like them both about as much as I like this song, which is to say, not a lot. Without Haslam, the song is sung entirely by Jon Camp whose flat vocals are accompanied by a cheap-sounding synthesiser only. And there are four minutes of this sonic torture. What on earth were they thinking? It’s one of the most lifeless songs I’ve ever heard. To make up for this tedium, the next song – Golden Key – delights in a more standard way for the group, with symphonic trimmings and even a mini instrumental.
With only about three salvageable songs on it – although I hate to admit that the catchy Jekyll and Hyde has grown on me despite its ridiculous execution – Azure d’Or was the final album to feature the classic line-up of Tout, Haslam, Camp, Sullivan and Dunford. The band don’t seem to blame their label too much for the stylistic changes, and I reckon the deterioration in quality happened due to creative juices drying up, possibly coupled with the pressure to put out an album each year (something which seems impossible today).
Regarding Esoteric’s repackaging, I was disappointed to see that the CD slipcases only feature the front cover art, while the backs are kept black with white writing. The rest of the cover art can be found inside the booklet, but it’s a shame to divorce it from the slipcases. The inner gatefold art for Novella is also discarded, but you can see the original U.S. cover with the ‘nun’ on it. Once again, the liner notes from each of Esoteric’s original releases (two by the late Malcolm Dome and the third by Mike Barnes) have been ported over to this booklet for more extensive reading, but I was disappointed that the band didn’t get into the inspiration of each song like they did in the previous box set; I would have loved to find out what Touching Once (Is So Hard to Keep) actually means!
While Renaissance’s downfall is sometimes hard to palate, we must be grateful that the band even got the chance to have a downfall period at all. With prog going out of fashion so quickly, many bands were snuffed out of existence, never to be heard of again, so I’m grateful that Haslam and co. managed to slide gracefully out of relevance instead, leaving a few gems as they went.
It’s also important to note that, although I’ve whinged a lot about the deterioration of the music over time, very little of it could actually be deemed ‘bad music’ – although Only Angels Have Wings is a true offender. Most of the tracks on the final disc are perfectly listenable, just rather bland and forgettable compared to what came before. Some fans will draw the line with Azure d’Or, and conveniently forget how the trio of Haslam, Dunford and Camp would struggle on in the new decade with 1981’s Camera Camera and 1983’s Time-Line. I double dare Esoteric to try and repackage these 80s abominations for the sake of completeness.
I may have initially winced at the thought of spending any length of time with these albums (and especially Azure d’Or), but some forced proximity helped me to realise that Renaissance didn’t become creatively bankrupt as soon as the Scheherazade sessions had concluded, and that their transition away from longer-form writing still had its high moments. This box set is not the best place to start your Renaissance collection, but it tells a vital, fascinating part of the band’s downward trajectory if you’re brave enough to face it.
TRACK LISTING
DISC ONE: Novella (1977)
01. Can You Hear Me? (13:39)
02. The Sisters (7:12)
03. Midas Man (5:46)
04. The Captive Heart (4:16)
05. Touching Once (Is So Hard to Keep) (9:32)
Time – 40:25
DISC TWO: A Song for All Seasons (1978)
01. Opening Out (4:16)
02. Day of the Dreamer (9:44)
03. Closer Than Yesterday (3:19)
04. Kindness (At the End) (4:49)
05. Back Home Once Again (3:17)
06. She Is Love (4:13)
07. Northern Lights (4:07)
08. A Song for All Seasons (11:00)
Time – 44:45
DISC THREE: Azure d’Or (1979)
01. Jekyll and Hyde (4:44)
02. The Winter Tree (3:06)
03. Only Angels Have Wings (3:46)
04. Golden Key (5:18)
05. Forever Changing (4:53)
06. Secret Mission (5:05)
07. Kalynda (A Magical Isle) (3:46)
08. The Discovery (4:28)
09. Friends (3:35)
10. The Flood at Lyons (5:05)
~ Bonus track
11. Island of Avalon (B-side of single) (2:44)
Time – 46:30
Total Time – 2:11:40
MUSICIANS
Annie Haslam – Lead Vocals
Michael Dunford – Acoustic Guitars, Electric Guitars, Vocals
John Tout – Keyboards
Jon Camp – Bass, Bass Pedals, Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Vocals
Terence Sullivan – Drums, Percussion, Vocals
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Cherry Red Records | Esoteric Antenna
Catalogue#: PECLEC32914
Country of Origin: UK
Date of Release: 25th July 2025
LINKS
Renaissance – Website | Facebook | Facebook (Group) | YouTube | Info at Cherry Red Records
