Peter Janes - Emperors and Armies/ Go Home Ulla

Ex-Cat Stevens partner on an epic psychedelic folk trip

Label: CBS

Year of Release: 1967

Peter Janes may not seem like an immediately familiar folk name, but it could all have been so different. His career began in a duo with Cat Stevens, and had fate wriggled a different way, there's every possibility his harmonies could have intertwined with Stevens' melodies, propelling both of them to stardom as some kind of British answer to Simon and Garfunkel.

Sadly, for every person who has success there's usually a long list of could-have-beens left behind, who might have also become millionaires had they only stuck with the project - well, kinda. Naturally, it's never quite as simple as that. Winning formulas sometimes only emerge when elements have been removed from, rather than added to, the equation. We can speculate all we want, but Cat Stevens did more than many artists do for their ex-associates and continued to support his friend and ex-partner's career producing his records and playing on them, and presumably giving them the mightiest promotional push he could.

Janes (along with and independently of Stevens) played numerous gigs on the British sixties folk circuit, playing on the same bills and in the company of Paul Simon, Al Stewart and Sandy Denny, and "Emperors and Armies" gives an impression of just how powerful his work could be. Moody, despondent but still somehow strident and distinctly 1967 flavoured, it's a towering tune which sounds like a hit. Sadly, the era was littered with powerful songs, and this one seems to have become ignored despite CBS's obvious push - that picture sleeve, rare in the sixties, is proof that they were spending extra money on him.

The track was recorded at Olympic Studio in Barnes and featured a large menagerie of session musicians who, Janes felt, made the track feel somewhat over-produced, and the sessions were also poorly timed to coincide with a bout of tonsillitis; but whatever his original vision or his vocal weaknesses on the day, you'd have to be extraordinarily picky to find an awful lot of fault with this. If anything, the slightly chocolate box arrangements make it sound like a mid-winter anthem.

A second Stevens produced single, the mellotron-drenched "Do You Believe (Love Is Built On A Dream)", was released on CBS in February 1968 but is much scarcer, and following its failure Janes continued to perform live but didn't release any further records. There are rumours of other material in the can, but until that materialises, these two 45s are our lot.

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