Gathered by Mott
The Dog
Reaped by Ella Crew
5 Stars *****
Over
the last thirty-five years, the goodly folk of Swansea, Wales, have been
trying to let the world know about their favorite sons ‘Man’, which
have mostly fallen on deaf ears. That is all the more remarkable as they
really are very good. They are never backwards about coming forward or
hiding their light under a bushel. Oh yes, there have been other singers
and bands from Wales. Tom Jones and Charlotte Church have flexed their
mighty Welsh throats to applause from every nook and cranny the world
has to offer. That great flying heavy metal thunder of “Budgie” once
ruled the waves, whilst “The Stereophonics” and “The Manic Street
Preachers” often charged up the charts. But one feels they aren’t
quite as truly Welsh as the sons of Mrs. Jones, Leonard, Williams, Ace,
Ryan, and all.
Not that these Welsh musical wizards haven’t dashed
up the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic themselves, one just
feels that perhaps they haven’t really been given the full acclaim
that they deserve. Maybe there are some obvious reasons for this quick
change of personnel as they definitely make Spinal Tap look like a
conservative and stable lineup. All bands have their influences, but Man
seem to have absorbed more than most, with sometimes consecutive tracks
on one studio album sounding like a totally different band. It is always
rock music, but varying from Space/Rock to Heavy Metal.
This collection starts in 1972 with the guitar and
vocals of Mick Jones and Deke Leonard joined on stage by bassist Ace
Martin and drummer Terry Williams at the Roundhouse in London. It was a
benefit concert for the hippie charity group Greasy Truckers in what
many would claim to be the ultimate Man track ‘Spunk Rock’. In its
original studio incarnation it was six minutes long, but here we get the
fully improvised twenty-two minutes. One can only wonder how long this
track would have been, had they not been faded out after the song had
been going on for quite some time. Wonderful stuff all the same. Deke
Leonard and Mick Jones vocals and guitars swoop in and out of the song.
The guitar notes fly out like raindrops, either splashing onto the
audience with the venom of Thor with his mighty axe, or reaching out
with the caress of a kiss. In today’s live set Spunk Rock is normally
held back to be given a real dusting up as the encore.
But Man being Man, within a year Leonard and Ace had
been unceremoniously dumped out of the band (don’t worry, they will
both be back) to be replaced by Phil Ryan on keyboards, Will Youatt on
bass, and returning founder member Clive John on guitar. This lineup
came up with the classic Man album ‘Be Good to Yourself At Least Once
A Day’. The album had only four tracks, but was still over forty
minutes long. We get three live versions of these songs on this
collection.
‘Life On The Road’ is literally a tale of the
woes of life on the road, with its Wishbone Ash dual lead guitar sound
and finishing with both guitars wailing away like police sirens. Through
the years Man were no strangers to the long arm of the law, but our
heroes usually managed to scamper away in time.
You also get the song from the same concert at
London’s rainbow theatre ‘C’mon’, which would be a delight to
any Pink Floyd fan, and ‘Bananas’, which has to be one of the
funniest rock songs ever written. The later two songs are still required
hearing at any Man concert today. Even though Deke Leonard was not in at
the recording of these classic Man songs, he has been playing them live
on and off for thirty years. His unbiased opinion cleverly uttered with
the words: “When you go to a restaurant you expect to find your
favorite dish on the menu”.
As if to even things up we then jump forward in time
to 1999 to finish the first disc of this set with a version of 7171 551
recorded by and released on one of Deke Leonard’s solo albums,
“Iceberg”, when he was on one of his sabbaticals from the band in
the early seventies. There are only five songs on this first disc, but
it still times in at over seventy-two minutes.
Disc two contains ten songs from 1975 to 1999,
including three tunes from their triumphant return to the stage for the
Glastonbury festival in 1994. It starts off with the two minutes thirty
seconds Man boogie ‘Hard Way To Live’, includes the highly charged
‘Romain’, the violent story of a certain officer’s dealing with
Martin Ace, and finishes with the ten minutes of Glastonbury set closer,
the epic ‘The Ride and The View’.
For anybody wondering what the fuss was about from
these boys from the valleys, this set, ‘Man Alive’, makes a
marvelous starting point for the ears. For those of you who would like
to know a bit more about the origins of Man, look no further than Deke
Leonard’s autobiography “Rhinos, Winos, and Lunatics”, the story
of a rock ‘n’ roll band. Never has the field of rock ‘n’ roll
been so candidly exposed or comically told.
Because of the constantly changing lineup of Man, it
is impossible to list all the musicians that played on these two CD sets
of recordings. I doubt whether even the players themselves know for sure
who was there and who wasn’t, especially in the turbulent seventies.
But Mott’s Dream Man Band would be…
Micky Jones - Lead Guitar and Vocals
Deke Leonard - Lead Guitar and Vocals
Martin Ace - Bass and vocals
Phil Ryan – Organ
Terry Williams – Drums
Guest Appearance for Spunk Rock, the late great John Cipollina - Lead
Guitar
Songs
Disc One
Spunk Rock, C’mon, Bananas, Life On The Road, 7171551
Disc Two
Hard Way To Live, Day And Night, Hard Way To Die, Many Are Called
But Few Get Up, Welsh Connection, Kerosene, Romain, Even Visionaries Go
Blind, Chinese Cut, The Ride And The View
Bangkok
Inside Out was co-authored by Daniel Ziv (a seasoned peripatetic) and Guy
Sharett who has managed to sit still long enough to put down some roots in
Bangkok. It was released in 2005 (Equinox Publishing, ISBN 979-97964-6-6)
and printed in Thailand.
Mott’s CD review: The Story of Man – Part Two
