KINGDOM COME/NICHOLAS GREENWOOD

Two branches of the Arthur Brown family tree are given a good shake.

From Carl Palmer to a drum machine. That’s an interesting journey, but exactly the kind you’d expect from great British loon Arthur Brown. After his Crazy World was dismantled in 1969 when Palmer and Vincent Crane left to form Atomic Rooster, Brown set up shop in Kingdom Come, an adventurous bunch who were among the first bands to use synthesisers.

By album three, Journey, they were operating in a different sphere altogether, with their beats provided – in a world first – by a Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine. The result is a kind of peculiar prog rock proto-glam space opera affair, with tracks ranging from opener Time Captives, which accelerates in barely perceptible fashion until crackling into life and climaxing amidst a sea of bubbling synths, to closer Come Alive, built on a wobbling, almost krautrock rhythm. In some places the album feels a little tentative, as if the musicians are a little fearful of operating with such a rigid backbone, but when it works – as it does in spectacular fashion during the trampoline bounce of Spirit Of

Joy – it’s a surprisingly soulful collection.

Meanwhile, over in the £2,800-on-Discogs corner, you’ll find the first (official) vinyl reissue of Cold Cuts, recorded in 1970 by former Crazy World bassist Nicholas Greenwood and barely released in late 1972. Thankfully, the album is still wrapped in its man-madeout-of-meat cover art, and the innards are just as enticing. The feast was assembled in Los Angeles with a cast of characters including Mothers Of Invention woodwind maestro Bunk Gardner and keyboard player Dick Heninghem, who plays like Dave Greenslade possessed throughout.

If Greenwood’s voice is occasionally theatrical (maybe he’d had lessons from Arthur), songs like the surprisingly sexy Melancholy and Big Machine – which sounds like an English take on The Doors at their smooth, stoned best – lift the album well above the ordinary. It’s an album that deserves its cult status, if not the eye-watering price tag.