More Canterbury Tales

In late 1972 the bass player and singer Richard Sinclair left Caravan to form Hatfield And The North, a sort of Canterbury supergroup with Phil Miller on guitar, Pip Pyle on drums and Steve Miller on keyboards, later replaced by Dave Sinclair and then by Dave Stewart. These musicians had already been members of important bands like Matching Mole, Caravan, Gong, Egg...
Hatfield And The North relesaed a couple of fine albums in the Canterbury tradition of "progressive jazz-rock", with an inventiveness and a touch of irony that was ignored by most of the contemporary progressive band.
This footage is from a concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London, on 1975.
The band splitted because of commercial failure, in 1977 Miller, Pyle and Stewart joined Alan Gowen (ex Gilgamesh) to give birth to National Health and continue on the same path, with an even more brilliant blend of melody and surrelistic experimentation, especially on their 1978 masterpiece Of Queues And Cures. The Collapso, here performed live for the BBC program The Old Grey Whistle Test, is included on that album.
Unfortunately they didn't receive much attention too, and left the scene at the dawn of the Eightes, also because of Gowen's death in '81.

Hatfield And The North - Halfway Between Heaven And Earth (1975)
National Health - The Collapso (1979)

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Bye

Mirco