![]() Unfortunately, I don’t have a lyric sheet and can’t find the lyrics online anywhere, otherwise I would analyse the imagery in more detail. Gentle minor-key acoustic plucking introduces this complex yet beautiful song. With track three ‘The Sun Room’ following, it becomes clear that North Circular is going to be an album filled with light and shade. Magda and I even set about forming a Bevis Frond tribute band and Nick kindly gave us his blessing to perform his songs live (without fear of the PRS!) This band morphed into Karma Truffle as Magda and I honed our own songwriting skills and the rest, as they say… is not history. ![]() ![]() Perhaps it was the conveyance of pure feeling? Anyway, it would send me into a kind of ecstatic trance and I ended up nearly crashing the van on several occasions. Strangely, I used to feel some kind of connection between the landscape and the music – it seemed to be evocative of the environment somehow, which is ridiculous really as Nick is so associated with London. ![]() It wasn’t all nicely available on Bandcamp in those days! I was working as a self-employed bookseller in Gloucestershire at the time (you know like The Book People) and I would drive around the Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean with home-taped versions of Triptych, The Auntie Winnie Album and Bevis Through The Looking Glass blaring out of my Bedford midi van. I quickly began buying as much Bevis Frond as I could, which was actually quite difficult. I hadn’t really heard any music for a long time that had such an immediate impact – and certainly not by a record released after 1971! The lyrics, the songwriting, the musicianship – I loved everything about it – even Nick’s vocals (which a lot of people seem not to be able to get beyond). It really blew me away and connected on a very deep level. The first being The Bevis Frond Live: At The Great American Music Hall, San Francisco which my good friend Magda had picked up on CD from Vinyl Vault in Cheltenham and gave to me saying “you’ll like this.” Not only did I like it, it was actually an epiphanal moment. It was the second Bevis Frond record I heard – sometime early in 2003, I think. North Circular was recorded in the latter manner and released on 1st June 1997 on Woronzow. Miasma also hinted at Nick’s ability to write catchy hook-laden pop songs, something which would become a feature on his later albums and arguably find its strongest expression on North Circular. Playing all the instruments himself, Nick created a sound that drew heavily on his love for late sixties psychedelia and guitar pyrotechnics, but which also encompassed sixties beat and even elements of punk (having played in a new wave outfit called The Von Trap Family in the late seventies once featured on the John Peel radio show). Self-financed with the compensation he received following a motorcycle accident, and recorded in his bedroom, it became an instant underground classic. Nick formed a band called The Bevis Frond Museum at the suggestion of his friend (the now acclaimed film director) Julien Temple, but it wasn’t until 1987, after playing in various bands for two decades, that Nick released the first Bevis Frond LP, Miasma. (It is perhaps as a guitarist, as well as a songwriter, that Nick is best known.) Interestingly, being a young teenager at the time, Nick didn’t realise that a lot of the psychedelic sounds he loved were being inspired by mind expanding substances he just thought it was groovy music. He fell in love with psychedelic music, which he saw as a progression from the British beat scene, and Jimi Hendrix became a seminal influence. Born in 1953, he saw The Beatles at Hammersmith Odeon for his tenth birthday present and began going to gigs on his own in London in 1966, regularly attending The Marquee. Nick, so far as I have I’ve gleaned from the internet and elsewhere, has been writing songs since he was fourteen years old. For those of you who haven’t even heard of The Bevis Frond, let me introduce the band.
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