Sweet Chariot - Angelina/ Young At Heart/ America

Extraordinarily high quality vanity pressed Salford progressive rock 

Label: TOG

Year of Release: 1977

Back when I first started writing this blog fifteen years ago, I quickly became suspicious of seventies vanity pressings. While they have a reputation for being bottomless gifts of both glorious tack and untapped potential, the reality is they're usually just some pedestrian cabaret band singing tepid covers of show tunes. 

Once every so often, though, you chance upon something so professionally produced, confidently written and arranged and punchily performed that you find yourself wondering why no proper record label wanted to go anywhere near it. This is one such example which is starting to get a little bit of attention in record collector's circles, though this is mainly for the flipside, a glorious mash-up of Paul Simon's song "America" (channeled through Yes's cover of it), Bernstein's song of the same name (channeled through The Nice) and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, "Land Of Hope and Glory". All six minutes are as simultaneously daring and preposterous as you'd expect, and the group come across not necessarily as original thinkers - this is pretty much undiluted prog rock which owes a debt to the performances and interpretations of others - but certainly a powerful group. By the time "Land Of Hope and Glory" bleeds into the final moments, you're both laughing at the sheer audacity and applauding them. What daft, brilliant sods. 

The original material on the A-side is also noteworthy, though, with "Angelina" in particular sounding like an FM rock hit. In another dimension, those drum fills, fruity keyboard lines and impassioned, woebegone vocals would be heard regularly on late night local FM stations, interrupting everyone's cab journey home. Besides the more proggish elements, the group are clearly dining at the same messy bistros as Sad Cafe and having the same tough heartaches as Foreigner. 

This wasn't Sweet Chariot's only effort to grace vinyl; the group had a long history, starting as Dave Barron and The Chariots in 1962, before becoming Jackie Richmond and The Chariots in 1967, then morphing into Sweet Chariot by 1970. 

Their first recorded effort under that name was, somewhat bizarrely, a library music LP for the De Wolfe label in 1972 which consisted of vocal originals on Side A and instrumental versions of the same songs on side B. One of the tracks "What Would Your Momma Say" has worked its way on to YouTube and shows that all the components were neatly in place by then, though it seems unlikely their tracks got picked up for commercial use.

Following that, the single "When I'm A Kid" was given a proper release through EMI on Columbia Records, but did zip all, and they retreated into vanity press land. 1975's "Memoir" is a collection of covers of big hits, and perhaps more unexpectedly, 1981's "Come On The Blues" single is just a football song with a Status Quo feel. 

The group consisted of drummer Pete Oliver, bassist Ronnie Grundy, guitarist Mike Amatt, and keyboard player John Turner. Turner also toured as a session player with The Walker Brothers and Demis Roussos, but it's good old Mike Amatt who had the most varied, "Left and to the Back" friendly career, both inventing the concept, delivering the narration and composing the tunes to the BBC children's show Mop and Smiff. Can Steve Howe lay claim to that? No he bloody can't. He's too busy fannying about with his guitar to buy an Old English Sheepdog for a start off, and thus he loses. 

If the previews below aren't working properly, which let's face it is very likely as Box have been fannying about with their settings and sodding everything up again, please go right the source.