Here Comes The Flood

When I was an angry young teenage rebel (or so I thought) and the chair of the local youth CND, I hung out with a group of faux hippies a few years older than myself. This bunch were into pre "And Then There Were Three" Genesis, Marillion, Peter Gabriel and all things proggy,  ie it was either a quadruple vinyl concept album or the vinyl consisted of 2 tracks both taking up the side of an album and dealing with dwarves, faeries,  evil kings and the like. Most of this I thought was absolute pish. Have you ever heard of Golden Avatar? No. I wouldn't even bother spending 5 minutes seeking them out,  they were gash.

Every so often I would be subjected to something which was not too awful and on rarer occasions I would hear something that I actually liked, like the 20 minute version of The Pusher found on the Early Steppenwolf album or Zero The Hero and The Magic Spell from the Gong Live etc lp, the latter standing me in good stead  when I got into The Orb and System 7.

Another album that I first heard when sitting on a bean bag or on a mattress on the floor while gagging from inhaling the awful combination of patchouli oil and burning incense was Robert Fripp's Exposure. Fripp had been a member of King Crimson and contributed to Bowie's Heroes which spurred him into recording Exposure with a load of others such as Peters,  Gabriel and Hammill, Brian Eno and others who would have been termed as "dinosaurs" in 1979.

One track in particular caught my attention and it was a rather stark and beautiful version of Peter Gabriel's Here Comes The Flood which can be found on Gabriel's first eponymous album alternately known as "Car".

I hadn't thought about this album in years until a few months ago when someone posted a Gabriel track and from then on I couldn't get the track or more correctly the slight remembrance of the track out of my head. So as usual the first stop was Amazon but I wasn't sure that I wanted to spend 17 quid on the Special Edition or twelve for the normal one. So then,  as it really was bugging me I searched the net to try to get a snidey download of the album but every time I found it the subsequent link turned out to be dead.

So,  a fortnight ago while picking up a mint, picture sleeve 12" of Geek Love for a quid in my favourite Oxfam Music on Byres Rd, I also spied a vinyl copy of Exposure at the very reasonable price of £3 which I duly purchased. I think that I went temporarily mad as I also paid a fiver for a copy of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis which I was never fond of in the first place.

After getting the album home and playing it, I have to admit that it hasn't aged well, maybe it just wasn't that good to begin with. However there is something foreboding and eerily beautiful about the sparse arrangement on Here Comes The Flood.

Robert Fripp - Here Comes The Flood

There will be no activity from the kitchen table until Friday as I have to go to bloody Budapest with work for three days and I haven't been arsed to do any posts