GREENSLADE

Expanded double CD version of the group’s final album from 1975.

on their first three albums Greenslade had established a signature style of intricate songs and instrumentals with an expansive, open sound based on the empathetic lines of the group’s two keyboard players, Dave Greenslade and Dave Lawson. For Time And Tide original bass guitarist Tony Reeves had left and been replaced by Martin Briley, who also played some lead guitar. But the actual structure of the music was also changing.

While the instrumental Catalan could have appeared on an earlier album, the three-and-a-half-minute Animal Farm is a punchy R&B-inflected track with synthesised brass, which, although written by Lawson, reminds of Greenslade’s former group, Colosseum. The equally concise Waltz For A Fallen Idol has a feel of Todd Rundgren about it, in the chorus vocal arrangements.

Both Lawson and Greenslade had already recorded some tracks on which they played all the keyboards on 1974’s Spyglass Guest. Greenslade has noted that there was no schism in the group or any ego issues in working this way, and both keyboard players would participate if they were performed live.

But the solo pieces on Time And Tide are further departures: the instrumental Doldrums was recorded by

Lawson at home on reel-to-reel, while Tide is a Greenslade keyboard piece that anticipates his 1979 solo album The Pentateuch Of The Cosmogony. Another of his compositions, Time, is just over a minute of choral vocals and keyboards.

As Time And Tide is only 31 minutes long all this only adds to the feeling of it being more of a sketchbook for new ideas that the band were set to explore further, rather than an album with a strong identity in its own right.

But what could well lure in the floating voter is CD two, a previously unreleased, hour-long live broadcast recorded on Swedish Radio in March 1975, which showcases the band’s subtle power, particularly on Joie De Vivre, and Drum Folk, a lengthy instrumental punctuated by Andy McCulloch’s eyebrow-raising solo drum cameos.