An interesting question. The whole of 'Lizard' was made by a band that
was evidently never going to last, even by KC's already quirky
standards. Gordon Haskell is a vocalist of truly limited ability, but
at least he has the decency to keep his face shut for long periods of
the title track. The JA song section is fairly horrendous but is saved
by one of the best Mellotron lines KC ever dreamt up, and leads into an
extremely well written and arranged section that stands up quite well
until some witless dolt told the trombonist that improvising was a good
idea. The rest of it is not great in terms of music, but at least it
offers a bit of drama, even though the trombonist plays on, sounding
like some large aquatic mammal with a flatulence problem.
'Suppers Ready', on the other hand, sounds like a collection of ten
wholly sub-standard tunes tacked together to make a nonsensical
side-long epic out of assorted pigs' ears because someone in the band
might have heard Pink Floyd's 'Echoes' the year before and thought that
this was the way of the future. The arch giveaway here is that the band
build themselves up into such a blurry Onanistic frenzy through this
piece of drivel that they resort to roping the usual biblical sludge
into the very end of it because You Can't Get Bigger Than God and that
makes for a finale beyond all others, perhaps even one that makes you
forget that the rest of it makes no sense at all. The manner in which a
myriad lost and clueless souls have tried to read 'meaning' into the
lyrics (partly fed by one P Gabriel who thought it wise to come up with
some sort of vague meaning for these broken-but-glued-together ideas,
as the chances of being approached by people enquiring '
what the
shiny green fuck does this mean?' were better than merely 'high')
describes the other lexicographical games that proved Bacon wrote
Shakespeare, The Pope is the beast of the Revelation and that an
infinite number of typewriting monkeys will one day rattle out the
words 'a misplaced footfall made him stray from the path prepared for
him'.
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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