A child in time
The long, strange trip of Mighty Baby. By Jim Irvin.
BY 1966, THE Action were wearying of the London Mod scene. On-stage, while still adept at Motown and R&B covers, off-stage, they were more likely getting stoned to Pet Sounds at Keith Moon’s place, marvelling at John Coltrane records, or attempting West Coast “flower music”. In the summer of 1967, when they lost guitarist Pete Watson – less enamoured of LSD than the others – new organ player Ian Whiteman came aboard. His knowledge of jazz, and ability to play sax and flute as well, offered the chance to truly expand their sound. Early in 1968, guitarist Martin Stone joined from Savoy Brown, delighted to be joining a group pointing somewhere original. “I thought they were going to be huge – the next Beatles,” he said. Stone brought with him a library of books on occult magic and mystic philosophy.
An OM symbol appeared on the drum kit. Contemporaries such as Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart and Brian Jones rated the new line-up highly.
Unfortunately, their still R&B-biased audience wasn’t ready for 40-minute covers of John Coltrane’s India. Neither, it turned out, was talented Brit-soul frontman Reg King, who legged it, taking with him all the work they’d completed towards a proposed album. Scraping rock bottom, with dwindling fans, no label, and living together in a squat, in January 1969 The Action took action, allowing promoter John Curd to rename them Mighty Baby and cutting a self-titled album for his Head label, partly produced by crazy scenester Guy Stevens. The result was aptly eccentric, but also excellent psychedelic rock, fizzing with invention. Whiteman and guitarist Alan ‘Bam’ King were singing and the band’s picaresque journey to that point became clearly audible. The album won rave reviews but, being on a brand new label, it was almost bound to undersell.
By this point, their gigs were sometimes entirely improvised – someone dubbed them the British Grateful Dead – and could be either brilliant or a disappointing shambles. Things took a turn for the surreal when Stone was contacted by someone who’d read him talking about his mystical interests in a magazine interview and practically dragged him to Morocco to convert to the Sufi branch of Islam. The rest of the band, bar Bam King, swiftly followed and Mighty Baby began appearing on-stage, fully sober, in djellabas and turbans, everyone’s favourite Muslim psychedelic country-rock blues band.
Their uniqueness, and apartness, was poured into a masterful second album, A Jug Of Love, recorded for the Blue Horizon label (after Curd was sent to prison for marijuana possession), a record that possessed a raw mellowness all its own, but might be likened, atmospherically, to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, for the pedal steel guitar, spiritual lyrics and unhurried pace. Sadly, by the time it was released in October 1971 to dismayed reviews, the band was finished, as the chasm between their religious beliefs and the world they were operating in – student union bars “awash with dope and Newcastle Brown” – effectively swallowed them.
Now Mighty Baby: At A Point Between Fate And Destiny (Grapefruit) HHHH pulls together every recorded scrap from their three chaotic years: both albums, their studio outtakes, demos and surviving live bootlegs of varying sonic fidelity, including long-lost material from a legendary early Glastonbury performance where, drug- and alcoholfree, they spiralled into a beatific state propelled only by their music. Hear a band living and working on their own musical island. All the British commune bands – Quintessence, Hawkwind, Gong etc – achieved moments of transcendence, but Mighty Baby’s have an ineffable power unlike the others. Six CDs and an exhaustive 40-page booklet tell the whole mad story.
“Someone dubbed them the British Grateful Dead.”