Annie HASLAM annotated discography

Rare recordings from the singer's personal archives with the title meaning "beyond the expected" and the subtitle being "Musical Journey".

A companion piece to the DVD, sonically this performance is less intimate but arguably more engaging.

A church concert taking the lady on a journey through the songs which shaped her as an artist - and none that she helped shape.

A winter song for all seasons, a wordly message full of light, an earthly ode to soulful living.

It's a longtime trend putting out a Christmas album once the Yuletide is in sight, but mostly that's a sign of creative well running dry. It takes a true master to take the well-known seasonal fodder way up high where the songs belong yet keep them firmly rooted emotionally for all to relate. And that is exactly what Annie Haslam achieves with this record which can be enjoyed at any time of the year.

Accompanied by Rave Tesar's piano, the singer delicately pulls the heart-strings from the opening "O Holy Night" to the closing "White Christmas", filling the space between the jazzy and the traditional with rich stylistic spectrum while retaining her own musical indentity and adding a titular ballad to the canon. Annie feels equally free here in the chorale of "Away In A Manger", rendered a cappella, the majestic children's ditty that is "Walking In The Air", re-christened "The Snowman" after the animated movie it was written for, or the swing of Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song" - though sometimes she multi-tracks the vocals for a greater effect. But it's in the Hollywood drama of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and the folksy domain of "We Three Kings" that Haslam sounds impeccably natural. A diverse yet whole work which grows on and on with every new spin.

Annie's comments: This is one of my favourite CDs I have recorded. To work with Rave Tesar is always an honour and a joy! A very gifted musician, he arranged the Christmas songs perfectly for my voice, no one could have done this better.

Annie's fave tracks: ALL OF THEM...

****1/3

Out of the vision the songstress had, come inspirational angels whose wings spread the happy creative maturity.

You may or may not believe in heaven high but for an artist humble enough the winged creatures sent down to earth are a great metaphor. Annie Haslam's angels, or the one she designed for her fan club and called Ananda which means "bliss" in Hindu, signalled a new beginning. The singer launched a label of her own, White Dove, and matured as a solid writer penning the lyrics for the nine out of ten tracks on the album where, again, all cuts bar one mention the angels. There's a genuine spirituality on display, dissolving one's self in the sea of love.

Emotionally naked and musically stripped, the angels fly high in the sun.

The illness's defeated, Annie re-emerges as a wonderful firebird glittering in the hands of glamorous master.

Allowing a five-year gap between the records is not the best way to launch a career, yet for Ms Haslam it was down to suffering from which she re-appeared on the scene stronger than ever before - at least, from creative point of view. A reason good enough for the singer to call her new project RENAISSANCE, although that might be done in order to distinguish it from Annie's former bandmate, Michael Dunford's endeavor under the same name. The two obviously missed their old ensemble, as both decided to revive its then-unreleased ballad "Dreamaker", given new lyrics and re-christened "Love Lies, Love Dies". But Haslam's new foil became no other than Tony Visconti; mostly known for his production work with David Bowie and Marc Bolan, Visconti's a fine composer in his own right and his music serves the singer the best on this fantastic, if a bit too long record.

Time to come into her own, the songstress makes a low start to the wuthering heights.

By the end of the '80s it was clear RENAISSANCE were no more, and Annie Haslam had to figure out her own futher way which hadn't been so much mapped out by her two previous albums. If she planned a sort of a creative family situation, Haslam did it right: gathering a tight circle of friends such as Larry Fast and Raphael Rudd around her and fledging as a songwriter, Annie came up with a solid collection of original tunes sprinkled with a smattering of covers - perhaps, to beckon the listening bees to her blossoming flower.

This might be an explanation for kicking in with "Moonlight Shadow" which hardly improves on the Mike Oldfield original, especially with a four-to-the-floor beat and an unexpected fade-out, but there's no denying the song suits the voice perfectly. Just like "Wishin' On A Star", a Rose Royce soul classic stripped here of its sexual tones and thrown back into romantic skies - the place where the singer feels in her element. Annie shoots high with majestic, if upbeat, "The Angels Cry" that THE MOODY BLUES' Justin Hayward brought in and helps singing, but Haslam almost loses the celestial streak in bleak pop of "Further From Fantasy" and the synthetic sound of "When A Heart Finds Another" saved not by the harmonies but by the short burst of top-notch vocalise. There is good FM fare, such as "One More Arrow", and soulful she can be too, like "Let It Be Me", bronzed with Mel Collins' sax, and "Wildest Dreams" show. Still, Annie's too humble handling her own little creations, and quiet "Celestine" isn't what solemn vignette "She's The Light" promises to grow into. But it's the closing "One Love" where the light really shines showing the singer her bright future.

Annie's comments: My friend Larry Fast was chosen by Epic Records to produce this album, and I think he did a great job. The highlight of this album was singing backing vocals with Justin Heywood on "The Angels Cry"...

Annie's fave tracks: "The Angels Cry", "She's The Light", "Celestine" and "Wildest Dreams".

***

Rather ambitious project pulled off only by the purity of the intent and the voice.

1985 signalled the end of the RENAISSANCE, and where could the band's vocalist go to in the plastic age if not for the safe harbor of classical world. But Annie has never positioned herself as an operatic singer and pretending has never been the white horse for her to ride on. That's why Ms Haslam teamed up with Louis Clark, an experienced conductor who effectively helped out both her previous band and ELO, and Betty Thatcher, whose lyrics she'd been singing for decade and a half, to create a song cycle based on the classical pieces and deliver it with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and The Royal Choral Society. Quite a bold move: with the music well-established, the stress was on the reading. And here, all tentative signs of rock mannerism thrown away, Annie excels and exceeds all the wary expectations.

Where others would blow it all up, Haslam, once the bombastic introduction of "Forever Bound" abates, soars serenely in Tchaikovsky's melody amidst the clouds of choir counterpoint and then, in the sunrise delight, goes along with it. Elsewhere, she joins the other singers in Mozart's "Ave Verum", still in original Latin. Bach's "Air", transformed into the album's title track, borders in its simplicity and joyful baroque vocalising with radio-friendly pop music yet never crosses the line to the cheesy. Dangerously close to the Broadway come two Faure's ballads, but they also manage to stay on this side of banal - unlike "Bitter Sweet", that's Saint Saens' "The Swan", or "Glitter And Dust" from "The Swan Lake", supplied with Barry De Souza's drums.

As for "Shine", or Satie's "Gymnopedie No 2", Annie wasn't the first non-classical artist to tackle the piece - BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS were at it much earlier - but Haslam turns it, as well as Delius' "Skaila", into a delicate piece of operetta. Very fine, even though all the compositions hail from different genres and epochs anyway, yet turning instrumental passages or pure piano tune - such as Chopin's etude, for "Careless Love" - into vocal lines astounds. Not so with Albinoni's "Adagio", previously done by RENAISSANCE with Haslam's voice and organ only and as "So Cold" more expressive than here, as "Save Us All", not so much reworked from the composer's version and, therefore, a bit pointless. What makes sense is downscaling of Wagner's march for "Chains And Threads", a genuine, rousing woman's theme. Never the valkyrie, Annie Haslam emerges all valorous on her own.

Annie's comments: I would say this album is one of the major highlights of my singing career. I was made to feel at home working with the Royal Philharmonic and the Royal Chorale Society. It was very comfortable... felt so natural to me and was a dream come true...

Annie's fave tracks: "One Day", "Skaila" and "Chains And Threads".

****4/5

With her main band taken too serious, the RENAISSANCE lady follows the girlish desire to be frivolous.

It's hard to say as to what extent Annie Haslam was content with the way RENAISSANCE had been steered towards the grandiose concepts when the general public wanted something lighter. What with the self-respect, the changes were to come in the form of "Northern Lights", but one year before the ensemble's sole hit, Ms Haslam went solo - in order to let her hair down and be the real self, fairly-like yet down-to-earth. With her bandmate Jon Camp on bass and her then-fiance Roy Wood playing almost everything else, producing and submitting a great Carroll-goes-rock cover illustration, Annie re-invents herself as a faux vaudeville vocalist here, on the fine selection of originals and well-known songs.

The start is camp, with multi-tracked voice of "Introlise" breaking into a tremulous transparency of "If I Were Made Of Music", a tuneful calling card and an aromatic essence of the singer's nature, where drama may bring a smile and tears are brought by pure joy of the fantastic ability to make a sound. It's a world full of surprises, like in brass-sunny "Inside My Life" and the morning wide-eyed vision of "I Never Believed In Love", in which Annie's crystal-clear warble comes offset by Wood-sung choruses and underpinned with his sax solo. But in this world, another kind of acoustic romance is never far away, and Haslam scales the heights of sensuality in Rogers and Hammerstein's staple "If I Loved You" that is emotionally linked to the other side of the original LP which peaks with another perennial, "Nature Boy", delivered in an upbeat way that arguably makes this version a definitive one.

There's harmony in the album and there's a contrast, too, between pure ABBA-esque pop of "Hunioco" with its African chant and the closing solemn take on Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 that is "Going Home" - sure, the RENAISSANCE lady wouldn't be herself without an injection of classical music. Still, all of these facets come together in "Rockalise": pure wordless singing over gentle backdrop that gets speared by the rock beat to a great effect - very glam, with Louis Clark's string arrangement drawing in the Wonderworld sense of absurd. A masterpiece for all seasons and for all ages.

Annie's comments: This was a big departure for me away from my safety net with RENAISSANCE. Roy was instrumental in my exploring different singing techniques. He is a great musician to work with, very innovative and lots of laughing was heard from 'our' studio! Exciting time!

Annie's fave tracks: "Rockalise", "Nature Boy", "If I Were Made Of Music".

*****