We’ll see how long this will last but…. I’m going to try to write a post each day for the site. Some will be music related, like this one on Heron, and others will be about all kinds of fun, tech, and random things I’d like to share. I guess that’s why people started blogs, right?
I’m not sure how I discovered Heron. My guess is that my buddy Scott turned me onto some psych blogs and I got lucky there (below are a couple good ones to peruse). Twice as Nice & Half the Price is a folk album at it’s heart but there’s a bunch of other stuff going on that keeps it from being that simple. The beginning of the leadoff track, “Madman”, could be mistaken for something from a Trojan ska box set. The second track “Take Me Back Home” could easily have been a catchy, sing-along, radio track from the early ’70s. The rest of the 21 tracks on the album are a mix of covers, acoustic folk tracks and early ’70s pop-rock tracks from Scotland.
Their first album, simply titled Heron, lives in the same vein as the followup, leaning more on the folk side. It’s hard to believe that neither of these albums caught on or that they didn’t eventually get the recognition they deserved. There’s not much info out there and the links below to the few articles I found mainly point out that the albums were all recorded outside and that Mike Heron was also in The Incredible String Band. You can learn more about Heron, order CDs, and download some tracks here – http://www.relaxx.co.uk/heron.htm. You can also browse through the top two links below for some more tunes.
http://peppermintstore.blogspot.com/search/label/Heron
http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2008/11/18/heron-re-revisited-1970/
There’s some good psych stuff here too:
http://phrockblog3.blogspot.com/
Great album but I bet they would have done better if they had given it a real name rather than “Twice as nice..”