Sommor 2015
Flash
Stoner Age tribalism from Hull’s might-have-beens who didn’t want to move on with the times.
One can only imagine how wild was the evening when this band shared the stage with THE MOVE, but opening for popular acts of the day and touring U.S. airbases in Germany didn’t bring BARE SOLE a recording contract. Not a great loss on Decca’s part – who, having passed on the Fabs, followed fads by 1969 – the Hull quartet’s unwillingness to embrace progressive tendencies packed some charm, though. In Detroit, their raw edge could have found many a fan; in Northern England tracks such as “Let’s Communicate” fell on deaf ears.
That was quite strange, given the amount of noise coming from Richard Foster’s serrated guitar whose bluesy drive cuts Dave George’s hypnotic chant just fine, and the vigor with which Brian Harrison’s bass and Ron Newlove’s drums rumble through “Jungle Beat” – a solo that Keith Moon would have loved. Yet while the foursome’s six-track demo – and an additional, organ-enhanced version of the wah-wah-spiced “Woman-A-Come” – didn’t see a release until now, and today there’s more than a mere archival pull to their Neanderthal stomp, so menacing in the title piece’s harmonies. Heavy, if not metal, these numbers are hard to ignore… but they were, and the group stopped in 1970 to never return.
***1/2
