Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Mellotron Group

An interesting question. The whole of 'Lizard' was made by a band thatwas evidently never going to last, even by KC's already quirkystandards. Gordon Haskell is a vocalist of truly limited ability, butat least he has the decency to keep his face shut for long periods ofthe title track. The JA song section is fairly horrendous but is savedby one of the best Mellotron lines KC ever dreamt up, and leads into anextremely well written and arranged section that stands up quite welluntil some witless dolt told the trombonist that improvising was a goodidea. The rest of it is not great in terms of music, but at least itoffers a bit of drama, even though the trombonist plays on, soundinglike some large aquatic mammal with a flatulence problem.

'Suppers Ready', on the other hand, sounds like a collection of tenwholly sub-standard tunes tacked together to make a nonsensicalside-long epic out of assorted pigs' ears because someone in the bandmight have heard Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' the year before and thought thatthis was the way of the future. The arch giveaway here is that the bandbuild themselves up into such a blurry Onanistic frenzy through thispiece of drivel that they resort to roping the usual biblical sludgeinto the very end of it because You Can't Get Bigger Than God and thatmakes for a finale beyond all others, perhaps even one that makes youforget that the rest of it makes no sense at all. The manner in which amyriad lost and clueless souls have tried to read 'meaning' into thelyrics (partly fed by one P Gabriel who thought it wise to come up withsome sort of vague meaning for these broken-but-glued-together ideas,as the chances of being approached by people enquiring 'what theshiny green fuck does this mean?' were better than merely 'high')describes the other lexicographical games that proved Bacon wroteShakespeare, The Pope is the beast of the Revelation and that aninfinite number of typewriting monkeys will one day rattle out thewords 'a misplaced footfall made him stray from the path prepared forhim'.

Lizard wins by a KO but misses the title shot.

Mike Dickson



Mark Pring wrote:

Not sure which is worse, Supper's ready or Lizard. On
balance I think Supper's ready is just worst, as the
end of Lizard is quite interesting on headphones and
Supper's ready has no redeeming features, on other
hand Lizard has Jon Anderson, hmmm.

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