The albums River and Seed of Memory are routinely and quite rightly regarded by many as “lost classics.” Recorded by the Cambridgeshire-born blues/soul singer and guitarist Terry Reid and released three years apart in the mid-70s, these sublime records formed an integral part of the soundtrack to my teenage years
By the time of River’s release in 1973, Terry Reid had relocated from England to California, where he still lives to this day. He was already nearly a decade into a career in music. Emerging out of the British beat boom of the ‘60s, as a teenager he had supported The Rolling Stones, Cream, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac on various tours on either side of the Atlantic. Reid played the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 and then the following year alongside the likes of David Bowie, Traffic, Hawkwind, and Melanie and with a cracking band featuring ace lap steel guitarist David Lindley and Linda Lewis on backing vocals he appeared at the very first Glastonbury Fayre.
Terry Reid would later and most famously turn down the lead vocalist gigs with first Led Zeppelin and then Deep Purple. Whilst it is regularly overused and often severely misplaced, this time the phrase is true – the man is the stuff of legend. So to be here in the heart of London’s Camden Town seeing him playing songs from River and Seed of Memory half a century after first hearing them back home in East Kilbride is a personal dream come true.
“We’ve got time for one more,” suggests Terry Reid. By now, he and his wonderful band have already been on stage for two and a quarter hours. “Maybe not the full 15 minute version, though,” he adds. But, thankfully, it is the extended reading of Seed of Memory’s imperious title track he plays, stretching out thanks to Dzal Martin’s tumultuous guitar break and the ensuing counterbalance of Chris Hillman’s plaintive pedal steel. In such globally conflict-strewn times, the song’s strident anti-war sentiments sound even more relevant today.
Long before then we get almost all of the rest of the Seed of Memory album. Reid opens with an incredibly loose and downright funky ‘The Frame’ from that record. It is joined later by ‘Faith to Arise’, a delightfully true delivery of ‘To Be Treated Rite’ – as featured, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, on the soundtrack to Rob Zombie’s 2005 horror film The Devil’s Rejects and appearing here as part of a two-song solo section in the middle of the set – and a suitably ramshackle and totally unexpected public outing for ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young).’
The latter was preceded by a highly emotionally-charged, spine-tingling ‘Brave Awakening.’ Written in the mid-70s for his grandmother back in Co. Durham when Reid had stepped temporarily out of the then madness of Los Angeles, the song is a paean to the coal mining industry in the northeast of England and the devastating impact its decline was having upon his friends and family in the area. The song’s chorus is sung back to Reid vigorously and with suitably inebriated enthusiasm by large sections of the capacity crowd. It feels like a defining moment in the evening.
In addition to huge swathes of Seed of Memory, we get a tight ‘Live Life’ from the River album and a large handful of carefully considered cover versions, of which The Band’s ‘It Makes No Difference’ and American country star Conway Twitty’s ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ are particularly memorable highlights. Terry Reid continues to be an incredible interpreter of other people’s songs.
We are also kept royally entertained by Terry Reid’s customary rambling reminiscences between songs where he name-checks many of the famous folks he has known over the years from Ahmet Ertegun, then president of Atlantic Records who in the early ’70s had bought Reid out of his restrictive contract with previous manager Mickie Most, to fellow English musician Graham Nash who had produced Seed of Memory and been instrumental in obtaining Reid what he euphemistically describes as “gardening expenses” during the recording of that album. Just like this evening itself, you sensed that they had had themselves a real good time.
Photos: Simon Godley
Setlist:
1. The Frame
2. Live Life
3. Things
4. Bend in the River
5. Time is a Virtue
6. It Makes No Difference
7. Night of the Raging Storm
8. Faith to Arise
9. To Be Treated Rite
10. Don’t Worry Baby
11. It’s Only Make Believe
12. Don’t Know Why (I’m Shy About You) / You Send Me
13. Brave Awakening
14. Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)
15. Seed of Memory
