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01. Mick Stevens - No Survivors Now
02. Mick Stevens - The Girl Came To Our Town
03. Mick Stevens - Book Eight
04. Mick Stevens - '77
05. Mick Stevens - Crazy For Your Love
06. Mick Stevens - Suite (To A Seagull)
07. Mick Stevens - The River
01. Mick Stevens - Out And Running
02. Mick Stevens - Little Miss Freedom
03. Mick Stevens - The Ballad Of Laszió Fehér
04. Mick Stevens - Drunk By Myself
05. Mick Stevens - The Englishman
06. Mick Stevens - The Eagle And Me
07. Mick Stevens - Somewhere
08. Mick Stevens - Steppenwolf
09. Mick Stevens - The Other Side Of The Rever
10. Mick Stevens - Anji (Home Recording)
11. Mick Stevens - The Englishman (Home Recording)
12. Mick Stevens - Sea That My Grave's Kept Clean (Home Recording)
13. Mick Stevens - LBC Interview
ARTIST
TITLE
The River/The Englishman
FORMAT
2CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
SHAD 072CD SHAD 072CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
11/22/2005

These are the last recordings of Mick Stevens, originally released in 1977 (The River) and 1979 (The Englishman), respectively. Mick Stevens arrived on the music scene and then disappeared, seemingly without anybody noticing. Two sublime, inventive, and beautifully-crafted homemade albums in the early 1970s -- See The Morning and No Savage Word -- (previously reissued by Shadoks, SHAD 038CD) were evidence of the superior songwriting and arranging skills that he possessed. Though highly personalized, the performances, the songs, the musicianship, and the painstaking (low-budget and homespun) production of these first two records gave them a sound and a feel that suggested that here was a real talent on the launch-pad of a musical career of some substance. By 1977, and with no record contract in sight, Mick took a group of musician friends into Spaceward Studios in Cambridge (England) and recorded the tracks for The River, the first CD in this 2CD collection. The dreamy vocal layers so prevalent in the earlier albums are subservient to a much harder and "rockier" sound, while Stevens' electric guitar-playing is of the highest order. Since the '70s were a time of much creativity and wholly new approaches to sound, a number of musical influences can be heard in Stevens' music on this particular album. The opening to the lengthy "Suite (To A Seagull)" has overtones of King Crimson or Gentle Giant, developing into a Yes-like section and a middle-eight reminiscent of early Steely Dan. The album The Englishman is self-assured, confidently and beautifully played by a bunch of first-rate musicians including Ric Sanders of Soft Machine, the Albion Band and Fairport Convention, and Michael Gregory -- whose crisp drumming patterns are a real highlight. The track "The Englishman" is the clear apex of the album, with Stevens' voice and solo acoustic guitar completely filling the audio waves in a song about an Englishman overseas. The original vinyl pressings of all Mick Stevens' albums are now collector's items, all exorbitantly expensive. These songs have never sounded as good as they do on these CDs due to the care and attention of the transfer process in removing all the surface noise to be found on the original vinyl and tapes.