WOOLLY WOLSTENHOLME & MAESTOSO
Strange Worlds: A Collection 1980 – 2010 esoteRic Exhaustive anthology of late, lamented BJH keyboardist’s solo work.
It’s now not far short of a decade since the suicide of Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholme. Inevitably Wolstenholme remains best known for his membership of Barclay James Harvest. But while BJH dominated his career, to confine one’s exposure to him just to Oldham’s finest excludes hearing a body of other work by an often underappreciated talent.
Having been a co-founder of BJH way back in 1966, Wolstenholme chose to decamp from the band in 1979 following the release of the previous year’s XII album. His first move was to become a bandleader, fronting his own Maestoso project and releasing an eponymous nine-track debut album in 1980.
That debut – on which he sang and played keys, guitar and bass – has withstood the passage of almost 40 years admirably. Opener Sail Away bears an audible resemblance to Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and in more prominent hands might have yielded a hit. Elsewhere, Wolstenholme stretches the musical boundaries to a greater and thoroughly satisfying extent.
But his efforts ultimately found scant commercial reward and, following a tour, work on a successor to Maestoso was abandoned. He turned his focus away from music until he reunited with BJH, or more specifically the John Lees-helmed iteration, in 1998. Wolstenholme’s return to the musical fray with BJH presaged further solo work, beginning with 2003’s Black Box Recovered, the recordings from the shelved second album. While that and 2004’s One Drop In A Dry World don’t match the heights of the debut, there are plenty of enjoyable moments.
The other four discs in this sevenCD clamshell box set are Fiddling Meanly, a 2005 live album recorded at London’s Mean Fiddler venue, Grim and Caterwauling from 2006 and
2007 respectively, plus a collection of previously unreleased demos and “fragments”. This last 20-track CD does what it says on the tin and has some intriguing moments for the completist.
Strange Worlds does detailed justice to Wolstenholme’s singular talent.