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(from scrapbook 1, page 35)

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VARIOUS ARTISTS: "Reading Festival 73" (G.M.)

THE READING Festival was pleasant but dull.

By the same token, so is this album. In order of appearance, Rory Gallagher, Strider, Greenslade, Status Quo, the Faces, Andy Bown, Lesley Duncan and Tim Hardin conspire to produce an album which, while not sinking to any particularly loathesome depths (Greenslade and Strider excepted) doesn't really rise to any extraordinary heights.

Rory's "Hands Off" has a nice riff and rocks out quite convincingly, but the vocal is strained and overblown and the guitar runs out of ideas rather too soon for comfort. Strider's track is ostensibly the old Bo Diddley tune "Road Runner" but since they've almost entirely rewritten the song and ditched the riff, it seems rather specious to keep the title, particularly as it's a singularly tedious piece of cement-mixer heaviness.

Greenslade's "Feathered Friends" is a rather laboured piece with painful falsetto warblings and some extraneous keyboard noodlings, which only serves to make Status Quo's monolithically blasting "Don't Waste My Time" sound considerably better than it actually is. Mike Rossi's bland, characterless vocal is swallowed up in the inevitable goose-stepping power-chords, but in this context it's a rousing enough slab of boogie.

Over on side two we find the Faces' "Losing You", which is a great deal better than most of the material on their live album and slides nicely enough into Andy Bown's "Long Legged Linda". Incidentally, Bown is misspelled here as "Andy Brown"', which is a bit mortifying as GM is Bown's home-base label. Still, "Long Legged Linda" is a sharp, clever little tune which moves quite slinkily, and it's possibly the best cut on the entire album.

Lesley Duncan is next up with "Earth Mother", which sounds fine and proves that you can get a good live sound on strings if you mix 'em right. Finally, Tim Hardin weighs in "Hang On To A Dream" and "Person To Person", which sound a little overwrought, but make it nevertheless.

Like I said, I can't really get too enthusiastic about this album, but there's a few good performances in widely differing styles included here, and if you dig any three of the acts concerned, then you might as well pick up on it and get into a few of the others.

Okay for a wet afternoon.

Charles Shaar Murray