Atomic Rooster: Resurrection (3 CD Box Set) 2002

Resurrection is the Released February 12, 2002 compilation album from English progressive rock band Atomic Rooster. The album comes as a three-disc set, which features songs from Atomic Roooster (1970), Death Walks Behind You (1970) and In Hearing of Atomic Rooster (1971).                                                                                                                

The Resurrection of Atomic Rooster? A doomed project, in the literal sense. Founder member

Vincent Crane (aka Vincent Cheesman) swallowed four hundred Anadin tablets on a stormy St Valentine's Day
in 1989 while long-time drummer Paul Hammond overdosed on methadone in a London bedsit a couple of years later. Surviving sidemen are still active, rolling or tumbling as the shifting foundations of the music business dictate, and from time to time there are rumbles of proposed Rooster revivals or tribute bands. But Rooster without Vincent Crane is Hamlet without the Prince, the Pack without the Joker.
                                                                                           

"Now you see him , now you don't." Vincent's trickster fingerwork has just made the Ace of Diamonds

vanish before the blinking gaze of adolescent Brother P, already impressed with his friend's remake of King Kong as a 9.5 mm b&w dynanimation short, using a plasticine ape and a wrecked toy train.
Now this mercurial prankster starts to show off on the parlour piano. Thundering two-fisted music rolls over everything else they've ever heard, hooking them with its all-night drive, that relentless bass and underlying minor-key menace. Soon VC will find practicing boogie more compulsive than rehearsing the Disappearing Rabbit caper. It's 1962 and London is about to be hit by the Blues Boom...
                                                                            

Your reporter was on the Crane case very early, caught both the radiance and the fall-out. By '63 VC was moonlighting from music college, to hang around the London R&B scene, looking for support gigs

at the Marquee or the Flamingo. Graham Bond, that Crowleyite arch-druid of the Hammond organ, introduced him to the grooves of Jimmy Smith and John Patton, and gave him a template for his early jazz-blues bands. I tried to fit my poetry into his jazz via the Word Engine with Pete Brown and others, and promoted various long forgotten Crane operations - the Big Sound, the Freedom Riders, the Vincent Crane Combo.
                                                                                

Then we hit the cross-roads. I left the UK in 1968 for a four year spell in Canada. The Combo had

rapidly evolved into the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. In a matter of months, Vincent had co-written the incendiary number one hit Fire, had embarked on a hyperactive tour of the US and then plummeted down into the first of many chasmic depressions. In 1969, after another eventful American tour, he founded his first Atomic Rooster, with former Crazy World inmate Carl Palmer.
                                                                            

Between 1968 and 1972 we only met once, when Rooster supported Savoy Brown at Vancouver's

Kerrisdale Arena. ( Culture Court's Ojo remembers the gig, vividly if not favourably) Then, as his first marriage collapsed in the early seventies, Vincent started to rediscover old friends, and our lives overlapped once more, in a collage of grandiose projects and desperate stratagems.
                                                                              

Torquay, Christmas 1977. Vincent has just released Firefighter, a self-pressed Atomic Records single

satirising the first UK firemen's strike. He's convinced that the Callaghan government has conspired with the BBC to keep it off the radio, because if everybody heard it, its dynamic vibes would end the dispute. That's why we had to give it away in pubs.
                                                                                       

We also have to be silent while the Queen's Speech is on TV, because she has an important message especially for us. "We gotta sort things out in Northern Ireland. I'm going to take a band over, set up a

huge tour, entertain all the armies - troops, RUC, Provos, the whole fucking lot...that'll keep 'em quiet " Jean, his new wife/muse/roadie/minder/chief electrician catches my eye. Vin's ramping up to another big one. Like 1975, when he started bricking up the front door to keep the bailliffs out. Yet last night , sitting in with my local punk/blooze band, he was in total control, aware of everything happening on the stand, playing the audience as easily as he ravished the keyboard of the C3.
                                                                  

So this case-history of his best-known work abandons any pretences to objectivity. But a few time-capsule fragments might place these de luxe Akarma/Comet re-issues in a wider context.

 DISC 1 - ATOMIC ROOSTER  1970

 

1. Friday the 13th (Crane) - 3:31
2. And So to Bed (Crane) - 4:11
3. Broken Wings (Grun/Jerome) - 5:46
4. Before Tomorrow (Crane) - 5:50
5. Banstead (Crane/Graham/Palmer) - 3:33
6. S.L.Y. (Crane) - 4:56
7. Winter (Crane) - 6:59
8. Decline and Fall (Crane/Graham/Palmer) - 5:48

                                                                                        

Bonus Tracks

9. Play the Game (DuCann) - 4:46
10. VUG (Crane) – 4:34
11. Devil’s Answer – (DuCann) – 4:00

MP3 @ 320 Size: 128 MB
Flac  Size:  361 MB

 

 
DISC 2 - DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU 1970

 

1. Death Walks Behind You (Cann/Crane) - 7:23
2. Vug (Crane) - 5:01
3. Tomorrow Night (Crane) - 3:58
4. Seven Streets (Cann) - 6:42
5. Sleeping for Years (DuCann) - 5:27
6. I Can't Take No More (Cann) - 3:32
7. Nobody Else (Crane) - 5:00
8. Gershatzer (Crane) - 7:57

You can find the link HERE

 
DISC 3 - IN HEARING OF ...   1971

 

 

1. Breakthrough (Crane/Darnell) - 6:20
2. Break the Ice (Cann/DuCann) - 5:01
3. Decision/Indecision (Crane/Darnell) - 3:51
4. A Spoonful of Bromide Helps the Pulse Rate (Crane) - 4:41
5. Black Snake (Crane/Darnell) - 6:00
6. Head in the Sky (Cann) - 5:40
7. The Rock (Crane) - 4:33
8. The Price (Crane/Darnell) - 5:17

                                                                                       

Bonus Tracks

From B&C Single CB 157 p 1971
9. Devil's Answer - 3:27

Recorded Live At The Paris Theater, London July 27, 1972
10. Breakthrough (Crane/Parnell) - 6:10
11. Stand By Me (Crane) - 4:57
12. People You Can’t Trust (Crane) – 4:29
13. All In Satan’s Name (Crane/Parnell) –3:56
14. Devil’s Answer (DuCann) – 5:39

MP3 @ 320 Size: 165 MB
Flac  Size:  443 MB

                                                                                     

Nucleus: Vincent Crane - organ, piano, vocals
Fissile Elements: John Du Cann/Pete French/Chris Farlowe - lead vocals
John Du Cann/Steve Bolton/Johnny Mandala/John Mizarolli/Dave Gilmour/Bernie Torme - guitars
Carl Palmer/Paul Hammond/Rick Parnell - drums
Nick Graham -bass (first album only)
Plus occasional strings, brass, session singers