Twelfth Night

The recent rerelease of two of their long out of print albums on CD promted me to dig out and update this retrospective.

This is not the Shakespeare play, but the neglected progressive rock band from the early 80s. While contemporaries Marillion went on (at one stage in their career) to play enormo-domes like Wembley Arena, and lesser bands like IQ and even the derivative Pendragon went on to lengthy careers, both commercial success and critical acclaim were to elude Twelfth Night.

I first encountered Twelfth Night as a four-piece instrumental band when I was a student at Reading University, in 1980. The band were students themselves at the time, and played the student's union and local clubs in the Reading area. The band's sound revolved around guitarist Andy Revell's extensive use of an echoplex. With song titles like "Fur Helene part 1" and "Afghan Red", they were either loved or hated by the student fraternity. Old-school rock fans loved them, punk and new-wave fans hated them with a vengeance.

This lineup recorded a live album, "Live at the Target", which gives a good impression of what the band sounded like at the time. I was in the audience for this recording, in a underground pub with the band's equipment crammed in a tiny stage at one end of the long, narrow room. The music, described by the band as a "timeless kaleidoscope of sound", climaxed with the 20-minute epic "Sequences", which condensed all the best bits of their sound; spacey echoplexed guitar in the early sections, atmospheric keyboard sections, and fluid guitar soloing.

The band sensed they needed to add a vocalist to move forward. After a unsuccessful start with a woman named Electra Macloed, and an awful, awful single called "The Cunning Man", they chose fellow Reading fine art student Geoff Mann. Then they gave him a baptism of fire; to debut as singer in front of the biggest crowd Twelfth Night had ever played to; the 1981 Reading Festival. Adding vocals to "Sequences", he transformed the former instrumental epic into the story of an idealistic recruit swallowed up in the horrors of World War One.

A year later, they recorded what was probably their best studio album, "Fact and Fiction". This established Geoff Mann as a lyrical force to be reckoned with. The two highlights of the album, the lengthy "We Are Sane" and "Creepshow" were both drawn from his experiences with art therapy at a psychiatric hospital. While one critic described "We Are Sane" as 'Pink Floyd's "The Wall" summarised in ten minutes', it came over to me as a statement of how people are brainwashed by the media. For example, this spoken section:

"If the thought processes of an individual can be permenantly limited to the point of strict conformity to an outside source of thought, that said individual need no longer be considered as such. The enforcement of order becomes possible for anyone with enough power to control what is projected"

The overall tone of the album was dark and gloomy, reflecting the times - the early 80s were dark and gloomy, the feeling Thatcher and Reagan had declared war on the young and the poor, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Mann's voice was an acquired taste; more Peter Hamill than Jon Anderson, but there was a passion and humanity in his lyrics, reflecting his strong Christian faith. The albums biggest weakness is the production, a thin sound that didn't really do the material justice. It's only recently appeared on CD, with a number of bonus tracks including the single "East of Eden/Eleanor Rigby".

Article Author: Tim Hall

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