One Year in 33 Minutes
Colin Blunstone's Debut LP
Back in 1971, Colin Blunstone released his first solo LP. One Year, for this magazine’s money, is one of the most remarkable albums of the period and it remains today – almost four decades later – a criminally neglected classic.
Blunstone had been lead singer with the wonderful Zombies who had split in the late sixties after releasing one of the decade’s great concept albums, Odyssey and Oracle.
According to the brief liner notes, One Year was just that: an audio diary of the past twelve months following the band’s demise. It was written and recorded in isolation, away from the road and this results in an introspective masterpiece.
Opening with the Zombies-sounding, She Loves The Way They Love Her, the album begins with one its few up-tempo tracks which seems to act as a cathartic purging of Blunstone’s rock past. New decade, new sound.
The second track is where the brilliance of the LP really hits you, to such an extent that it stops you dead. To say it is lovely is to say Sinatra could carry a tune. It comes as a total surprise, which it shouldn’t do bearing in mind the sound the Zombies achieved on their final LP. Yet there is something other-worldly about its five minutes. Written by the great Tim Hardin, Misty Roses remains one of the most elegant, wistful and down right perfect five minutes in pop/rock music.
The track begins with the guitar of Alan Crosthwaite, picking its way through Hardin’s inventive melody. Then Blunstone’s voice comes in, restrained, remote and yet fully engaged with the material, sounding like Nick Drake. Haunted and elegiac, Blunstone’s singing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
“You look to me like misty roses, so soft to touch, but too lovely not to try,” Blunstone sings.
The sheer weight of despair married to an acceptance of the inevitability of failure is heart-rendering. Again, there are similarities to Nick Drake and this magazine fully subscribes to the received wisdom of considering Drake a genius. However, we also accept that for some people his music is just too much stark beauty.
The difference with Blunstone’s reading of Misty Roses is that we have context. Blunstone has been successful so the listener is not weighed down by the sheer sadness of failure. The ex-Zombie singer brings a world-weary resignation to the song that lets us know that tomorrow will still come and life will go on.
“Flowers often cry, but too late to find that their beauty has been lost with their piece of mind,” is a line that never fails to bring you up short. The final line: “If I believed in love for ever, I’d forget the past, you’re too lovely not to try,” combines empty hope with the smallest hint of optimism.
From here a haunting cello comes in, as all other instrumentation vanishes like the song’s brief moment of hope. It is both melancholic and haunting, all the more so for its unexpected arrival. It gives the listener time to reflect on Hardin’s lyric and Blunstone’s matchless delivery. Like Scott Walker a few years earlier, Blunstone has delivered a definite reading of one of Tim Hardin’s great songs.
Misty Roses is one of the most startling entries in rock’s repertoire. Blunstone’s version is a meeting of the Metaphysical conceit poetry of John Donne with Elgar’s Cello Concerto, resulting in five minutes of music that is as breathtaking as it is unique in rock’s cannon.
From here on, most albums would struggle to maintain such a high standard, but One Year manages to keep surprising and moving the listener with its mixture of classical and rock accompaniments to songs by Blunstone, Rod Argent and Mike D’abo.
Track three, Smokey Day, functions as a coda to Misty Roses. It’s hypnotic vocal and Beatlesesque chamber arrangement act as a plaintive balm after the emotional intensity of the previous song.
Caroline Goodbye is another gem. A kind of non-identical British twin to Brian Wilson’s Caroline, No it is a perfect vehicle for Blunstone’s wistful delivery and reintroduces drums to bring the album back towards Brunstone’s roots.
Side two on the original album begins with D’abo’s Mary Won’t You Warm My Bed, possibly the most Zombie sounding track on the album. Its pulsating rhythm is a welcome, if brief respite from the emotional intensity of side one.
The next three songs act as a (probably) unintentional mini-suite of perfectly pitched tone poems. Lovely, brittle and moving.
The album closes with its best known track. Written by Denny Laine, Say You Don’t Mind is like little else in pop/rock music. Its shifting tempi, rhythmic cellos and swirling vocal delivery created an unlikely hit and act as the perfect encapsulation of a classic album.
One Year is the single greatest example of Baroque pop music ever produced. It is also an album thats individuality remains as startling today as it did on its original release.
