A TEB press release distributed by Dutch EMI-Harvest in 1969.

Here's the press release circulating in the first half of  1969 for promoting TEB's music, just before Paul Buckmaster left and Ursula Smith joined the band.

Quite interestingly, the text is based on Glen Sweeney's manifesto written in 1968.

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The Al Stewart and Third Ear Band's 1970 tour programme.

 

 

Among the Third Ear Band memorabilia in my archive, this tour program has a special place because it was given to me years ago by Steve Pank, the band's first manager (and driver). As 'lived-in' as it is, when I leaf through it for me it is always a pleasure to look at.

It is interesting to note the band's introductory note with the famous motto “art form or con?” devised by Blackhill and the comments to the individual tracks in the set. These include the apparently unreleased Druid 11(almost ironic, since we know Druid and Druid One exist in the repertoire) and Labyrinth, with that laconic “Find the end.”
 

Truly jarring the iconography and writing of the Band and the following promos for Al Stewart, 'authentic star' of the tour. Can you imagine what Paul Minns might have thought of this unlikely encounter?

 

The tour, almost certainly the longest ever undertaken by the Third Ear Band, began on January 3, 1970, at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall and touched 16 English cities from the south to the north of England, ending on February 27 with an appearance at the Dome in Brighton.

 

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Remembering Glen Sweeney: 19 years ago, the farewell ceremony.

Glen in Greece in the '70's. (photo: C. Looker)

 

19 years ago today, on August 17, 2005, after five years in the Royal Star & Garter Home in Richmond (London), GLEN SWEENEY went into the Duat.

As Carolyn kindly wrote me on a postcard two weeks later, on 3 September, "(...) It was a beautiful ceremony rather than a conventional funeral, Steve Pank read from the "Egyptian Book of the Dead" and tracks from "Alchemy" were played, incense was burning, Glen was in a raffia coffin with sunflowers on top. Everyone said what a wonderful experience it was and some were reminded of being at an early Third Ear Band concert. I'm sure Glen would have approved."

Glen smoking pipe at the Isle Of Wight festival, August 26, 1990.  (photo: C. Looker) 

Months later Steve sent me the full text he read at the ceremony, which I recently found in my archive. In agreement with Carolyn, I like now to share it in memory of Glen (to commemorate him as you read, light an incense and put on your favorite track of "Alchemy"):

The names of the Gods of the Great Company:

1. Ra Harmakhis, the Great God in his boat.
2. Temu.
3. Shu.
4. Tefnut.
5. Keb.
6. Nut, the Lady of Heaven.
7. Isis.
8. Nephthys.
9. Horus, the Great God.
10. Hathor, Lady of Amentet.
11. Hu.
12. Sa.

The Prayer of the Osiris Spirit Soul Glen Sweeney.

My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My heart Whereby l came into being! May naught stand up to oppose me at my judgment, may there be no opposition to me in the presence of the Tchatchau Chiefs. May there be no parting of thee from me in the presence of him that keepeth the Balance. The God Khnemu who knitteth together and strengtheneth my limbs. Thou art my KA, which dwelleth in my body.

Mayest thou come forth into the place of happiness whither we go and may no lies be spoken against me in the presence of the God. Let the Listener god be favourable unto us, and let there be joy of heart at the weighing of Words.

Let not that which is false be uttered against me before the Great God, the Lord of Amentet. Verily, how great shalt thou be when thou risest up in Triumph.

The speech of Thoth, The judge of right and truth, of the great company of the Gods who are in the presence of Osiris saith:
Hear ye this judgment. The heart of the osiris Glen Sweeney has been in very truth been weighed, and his Heart-soul hath borne testimony on his behalf. His heart hath been found right by the trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him; he has not wasted (or stolen) the offerings which have been made in the temples; he hath not committed any evil act; and he hath not set his mouth in motion with words of evil whilst he was upon earth.

The speech of the Dweller in the Embalment Chamber (Anubis).

Pay good heed, O righteous Judge to the balance, and support the testimony thereof. Turn thy face to the weighing in the balance the heart of the osiris Glen Sweeney, whose word is truth, his heart in the seat of truth in the presence of the Great God.

The speech of the Gods.
 

The Great Company of the Gods say to Thoth who dwelleth in Khemenu,That which cometh forth from thy mouth shall be declared true.

The Osiris the spirit soul Glen Sweeney whose word is true is holy and righteous. He has not committed any sin and he has done no evil against us. The devourer Ammit shall not be permitted to prevail over him.

Meat offerings and admittance into the presence of the god Osiris shall be granted unto him, together with an abiding habitation in the Field of Offerings (Sekhet-hetepet), as unto the Followers of Horus.

The speech of Horus to Osiris in introducing the spirit of Glen Sweeney to him.

Horus, the son of Isis, saith: I have come to thee, O Un-Nefer, and I have brought unto thee the osiris Glen Sweeney. His heart is righteous, and it hath come forth from the Balance.

It hath not sinned against any god or any goddess. Thoth hath Weighed it according to the decree pronounced unto him by the Company of the Gods, and it is most true and righteous. Grant thou that cakes and ale may be offered unto him, and let him appear in the presence of the god Osiris, and let him be liken to the Followers of Horus for ever and ever.

The speech of spirit soul Glen Sweeney, who saith:

Behold. I am in thy presence, O Lord of Amentet. There is no sin in my body. I have not spoken that which is not true knowingly, nor have I done anything with as false heart.

Grant thou that l may be like unto those favoured ones who are in thy following, and that I may be an Osiris, greatly favoured of the Beautiful God, and beloved of the Lord of the Two Lands (Pharaoh of Egypt), I who am a veritable royal scribe who loveth thee, the osiris Glen Sweeney whose word is true before the God Osiris.
 

Amen. 

 

Glen playing at the Cambodian Embassy, London August 1987. (photo: C. Looker)

After the ceremony, Glen was cremated and Carolyn took the ashes to her flat. When I told her this year I intended to celebrate Glen, in June 2024 she wrote me: "He always believed (I think I do too) that the body is just a shell and when we die its our spirit/soul that is important. So over the years I've thought of many places for them but somehow couldn't do it. Now I think maybe the right time though so l'm thinking of discreetly setting them free in the streets of Soho near Ronnie Scotts and Soho Square. Alternative would be a druid monument on the south downs but far more complicated to get to... and very isolated lonely. I will let you know the day. Linda Kattan will share the experience with me..."

 

On August 13th, Carolyn made her choice...

 

"Dear Luca, today I scattered Glens ashes in the wild flower gardens at Poets Corner in Richmond park. Its a beautiful place encouraging nature, butterflies, bees etc... I hope the photos can be of interest. The ashes were so heavy l had to put them in a shopping trolley! No way l could have discreetly distributed them in Soho! Anyway this place is far more suitable."

 

So she sent me the following photos, which I now like to share with you.  

Ciao Glen!  

I love you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The bench "Reasons to be cheerful" you may recognise... it was a memory for Ian Dury. Actually, he and Glen knew each other..." (Carolyn Looker)

 no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

A good review on the Third Ear Band record released by M.I.G. Music.

 

 

A very good review about the record is on the  Web at the link https://rythmes-croises.org/third-ear-band-back-to-1970/                                                                    

Rythmes Croises is a French webzine devoted to alternative and avant-garde music,  often interested to the Third Ear Band.

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The last years of Glen Sweeney's life.

Before he "pacefully died" (Carolyn Looker's words) on 17 August, 2005, Glen Sweeney lived his last years at the Royal Star & Garter Home in Richmond (London), a place founded in 1916 "devoted to the care of disabled sailors and soldiers". As we know, Glen was an airman of the RAF and he was involved in WWII as a fighter in Egypt, where it seems he had been fascinated by the view of pyramids.(1)

After two heart attacks and a stroke, in Spring 1999 Carolyn admitted Glen to the very expensive Garter Home where he lived until his death and where I got to visit him in 2004. In his single room, in bed, he listened mainly to Indian music, as one would expect. 

What follows is the House's official flyer outlining the services and activities also followed by Glen.

 

Notes

(1) Manager Andrew King's amusing recollection, published by "Uncut" magazine in 2019 (#261, February 2019), concerning the possibility that Glen defected after parachuting into the swimming pool of an Egyptian bourgeois home, where he was to be host until the end of the war, has never been confirmed by Carolyn or others, and appears to be one of Glen's many mythomaniacal tales.

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A CD edition of Essen Festival is scheduled for the Autumn.

Bernd Ramien, A&R catalog and marketing manager of M.I.G. Music, wrote me that a CD edition of the live gig at Essen Festival is planned for the Autumn. In fact, this limited vinyl edition was thought for the TEB collectors and vinyl lovers.

Updates on the M.I.G. Music web site at  http://www.mig-music.de/en/ or https://www.facebook.com/migmusic.de/

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

Found by accident the original 1989 live recording of TEB's gig at Teatro Impavidi!

Some weeks ago I was with my friend musician and filmaker Francesco Paolo Paladino at his home chatting and planning new mad adventures for the future, when I asked him to check his TEB collection in his fabulous chamber of sounds. My intention was to mock him because I was sure he didn't have much of the band...

Incredibly enough, I had the surprise to found, between many CDs and some few cassettes, also the original tape recorded at Teatro Impavidi (Sarzana, Italy) on January 11th, 1989 from which, few months later the gig, I  released a 200 copies limited edition cassette only for the fans!

Titled "New Age Music", this was quite a great surprise because I had totally forgot it. Checking the tape, inside the poor photocopied cover there is my old visiting card with two simple indications written on it: 

limited edition: 200 copies

copy number: 002

The thing even more strange is that I have no copies in my personal archive... but the really amazing surprise is that this is the full concert with ALL the tracks played that evening and not simply the edition released by ADN in 1990 as "New Forecasts from the Third Ear Almanac" and later reissued by Gonzo Multimedia (as HST312CD, 2015). 

The tape shows also the right sequence with the original titles selected by Sweeney and then partially changed for the A.D.N. tape:

1. "More Mosaic"

2. "Egyptian Book Of The Dead"

3. "Third Ear Raga"

4. "Ghosts" (a.k.a. Live Ghosts)

5. "Lark Rise"

6. "The Sun Trolley Raga" (a.k.a.Witches Dance)

I can only guess that ADN decided to reduce the recording for technical reasons (the lenght of the tape at that time related to a standard LP), and it's a pity that we couldn't listen to the full set with the rare Dave Tomlin's "Lark Rise".

Maybe a new edition in the future?

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

My liner notes for the recording at Essen Festival.

"Despite not being at least initially among the scheduled groups (in fact, the band’s name does not appear on the poster or the official program for the event), Third Ear Band played at the Zweites Essener Pop & Blues Festival on April 24, 1970. 

The evening’s packed program included, among others, The Flock, Ekseption, Rhinocerous, The Groundhogs, It’s A Beautiful Day, and the still-unknown Black Sabbath, who had recently debuted their self-titled album. 

Coming to Essen (Germany), Third Ear Band stayed overnight at the Rheinischer Hof hotel at Edwig Strass 11 (four band members, manager Steve Pank, and two sound engineers), and on the evening of the 24th, between 9 and 10 p.m., they played their set on the main stage. 

On that first evening, in the long afternoon that began at 4 p.m. with bands taking turns on two stages, the Groundhogs had played just before them, and the Oscar Benton Band would play after them. The first of the festival’s two days ended at 2 a.m. with a performance by The Flock. 

Other times, one would say, considering the sad homogenisation of today. Times when progressive, blues rock, hard rock and folk music could be played in the same festival. 

It was thanks to an enlightened young man, Konrad Mallison, who in 1969 had emptied the intuition to invent the most famous alternative music festival ever held in Germany, only after attending the Bath Festival of Blues the year before, while on holiday in England. 

The 49 minutes of Third Ear Band’s live set, recorded by NDR TV, ending with what appears to be the tuning of the instruments, suggests that the length of the gig was longer and that at least one or two tunes are missing from the roll call. But the extraordinariness of this find, the quality of the sound, and the choice of music performed, make this set worthy of going down in history among the few other great bargains available in the catalogue (e.g., along with the wonderful concert filmed by French TV on May 28, 1970 and available on the Web) in one of the most interesting phases of the band’s history. 

In fact, the concert in Essen, played by the quartet line-up with Sweeney on hand drums, Minns on oboe, Coff on violin and Smith on cello, falls just a few weeks before the release of the second album, known among fans as “Elements” despite being titled simply “Third Ear Band” (released in June 1970), and the recording, also in Germany (on July 2 and 3), of the stunning soundtrack for NDR TV animation short movie “Aebelard” by film maker George Morse with overexposed psychedelic illustrations by painter Herbert Fuchs. 

Entitled “Abelard & Heloise,” it is one of Third Ear Band’s most significant works, which remained unpublished for almost thirty years (it only come out in 1997 with my first book on the band) and which would have deserved to be released even then. 

Of these two excellent works, in Essen the band premiered shortened versions of “Earth” and “Water” and one of the six-part soundtrack, the third, featuring a beautiful oboe theme by Paul Minns. It’s interesting to catch the group just during the Abbey Road recordings (held in a few sessions in April and May 1970) at a stage when these tracks still seem to be in progress: “Water,” whose earliest recordings dated months before, was here reprised in a version with a minor key and it is very short compared to the one later released, limited to a repetition of the main theme without the improvised studio variations. 

Even more surprising is the performance of “Earth,” only 3:00, much shorter than the album recording, with Ursula Smith engaged in pizzicato and Coff playing his violin with a plectrum. In between the two novelties and the excerpt from “Aebelard,” in Essen the band offered old “Alchemy”’s warhorses they had been playing for over a year in concert such as “Druid One,” with an unexpected vocal intro, “Ghetto Raga,” “Mosaic,” and “Area Three” (but without John Peel’s Jews Harp!), showing a incredibly brilliant interplay: the structure of the compositions, whether raga scales or free improvisation, is based on Sweeney’s hypnotic rhythms (however, not always precise) and Smith’s cello, with predominantly a rhythmic function, on which Minns’ oboe and Coff’’s violin phrasing are grafted – now rigorous, in chasing each other on the raga scales, now erratic, unpredictable. 

The final effect, caught in its slow, mesmerising unraveling, also renders the atmosphere of the festivals of these years, with a participating and attentive audience, eager to hear the music even when, between tunes, the musicians indulge in tuning their instruments or simply catching their breath. 

From this concert, filmed by German TV, only the performance of “Earth” has been circulating on the web for a few years now, and is part of a DVD documenting the festival (titled “Pop & Blues Festival 1969-1970,” it was not officially released in USA by RareRock DVDs)."  

Tracklist: 

Side A: 1. Water 03:50 2. Abelard & Heloise (Part 3) 06:08 3. Mosaic 05:41 4. Area Three 07:58 

Side B: 1. Druid One 05:47 2. Ghetto Raga 07:50 3. Earth 03:11 total: 40:25 min.

 

 

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

M.I.G. Music scheduled the TEB live album at Essen Festival for 31 May 2024.

The announced LP/CD TEB  live recording of Essen Festival (1970), titled "Druid One", will pubblish by M.I.G. on May 31th, 2024. 

The news is on line now at M.I.G. web site at http://www.mig-music.de/en/mig-music/

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

The wonderful 1970 Third Ear Band live concert soon out for M.I.G. Music - an update.

The fantastic unreleased 40 minutes live gig played by the Third Ear Band at the Essen festival in June 1970 will be released soon by M.I.G. Music in two different formats: a vinyl record limited edition and a CD standard edition (with a booklet edited by me including a short story of the event).

The album is engineered by  Manfred-Joachim Kaiser and mastered by Johannes Scheibenreif. The cover is a wonderful colorful drawing by Anna Vavatsis and based on this frame taken from a short video of the gig:

These are other frames taken from that great live event:

For further infos and updates go to the M.I.G. web site at http://www.mig-music.de/en/mig-music/

 no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

An obscure collaboration by Ursula Smith in 1969 with a disappeared band...

As you can read on this short article below, published in Wishaw Press and Advertiser on September, 19, 1969, that year Ursula Smith played cello in an obscure album recorded by a disappeared band called Lever; a band consisting of John Roy, Stuart McIntosh and Tom Morgan.

I asked Ursula and her husband Steve Pank to share with Ghettoraga Archive their memories about this unknown minor event in Third Ear Band story, but it seems they don't recall anything...

What happened to the Lever? What about that first album? Anyone has info or memories about?

 

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)

A 1970 Third Ear Band's unrealised live recording found in Germany!

Dear TEB aficionados, lovers of fine antiques, 

I was contacted a few days ago by Made In Germany (M.I.G. Music), a German label specializing in reissues and discoveries of 60s and 70s albums and recordings (http://www.mig-music.de/en/), to collaborate in the production of an extraordinary new live album by the Third Ear Band!

As announced months ago (read HERE), this is a recording of the performance that the band (in the quartet line-up: Sweeney, Minns, Smith and Coff) played on April 24, 1970 at the Essen festival, recorded and broadcasted by German radio. I am working  to analyze the seven tracks, partly taken from "Alchemy", partly from the upcoming "Elements" album, with some brilliant surprises.

An extraordinary new chapter in the band's history is therefore expected in the coming months. I am sure that it will amaze and captivate you as in the past. 

Keep in touch!

no©2024 LucaChinoFerrari (unless you intend to make a profit. In which case, ask first)