Epitaph - Epitaph (1971/2005 Remastered & Expanded Edition)
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Album: Epitaph - Epitaph (Remastered Expanded Edition)
Released: 1971 (2005)
Genre: Heavy Krautrock
Gnosis Rating: 9.93
Universal/Polydor 06024 982753-7
1971 Debut by this early '70s German band with all the right '70's heavy progressive moves. Heavy acid rock with progressive flourishes, good harmonies, tasty guitar and strong songs. Pretty much an excellent album and this re-issue is long goneHoused in a digi. - Freak Emporium
Brand new digipak reissue of a rarity originally issued on German Polydor in 1971 .Original release is augmented with 5 bonus tracks.
" In the early-mid seventies, this German and English Rock band was one of the “big one’s” in the German Rock Business. Their feeling for good and irresistible melodies paired with powerful Rock, soon made them a name to be reckoned with. Comparisons to their Anglo-Saxon idols like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep soon vanished with their own style and panache delivering their music on this Debut album. Of particular note is the impressive ability and musicianship of the individual band members, giving this record a memorable and lasting presence. ". - ProgNews
British progressive heavy rock bands like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep and Led Zeppelin inspired many young bands in Germany. The Germans usually preferred to use English lyrics, and several bands, like Blackwater Park, 2066 & Then and Epitaph, had British vocalists! Epitaph were founded in Dortmund in 1969. The first sessions for their debut album, released 1971 on Polydor, were recorded in an Essex studio in England. For reasons unknown to me, it was however finished in Windrose Studios, Hamburg, where a fourth member was added to the group: Klaus Walz. The five resulting tracks sounded similar to the groups mentioned above, and particularly the earliest incarnation of Uriah Heep. Epitaph's Cliff Jackson didn't attempt to copy Byron's operatic vocal style, though. There were both fast rock'n'roll numbers and slow ballads with mellotron textures, usually in the 'heavy progressive standard song length' - from 5 to 7 minutes. In 1972, Epitaph recorded their second album Stop, Look And Listen in Audio Tonstudio, Berlin. This album also contained five tracks, stylistically similar to their first offering. Both albums are recommended for fans of the heavy progressive genre. In early 1973, Epitaph released two non-LP singles on the Polydor subsidiary Zebra: "Autumn '71" coupled with "Are You Ready" (2047 003) and "We Love You Alice" coupled with "Paradise For Sale" (2047 005). After this promising start, it seems as if the band was promised a bright future by the newly founded American record company Billingsgate, that they eventually signed to. The band invested much time and money into their third album Outside The Law (1974), and aimed at an international break-through. On this album, McGillivray was replaced with Achim Wielert. The music sounded more polished this time, as the band abandoned progressive elements for a more straight forward heavy rock style. Sadly all their dreams of success were brutally shattered, as Billingsgate soon went bankrupt and all their money was lost. Epitaph had laid out on an extensive (and expensive) USA promotional tour (with ex-Karthago member Norbert Lehmann on drums) in October 1974 - on their return they had to sell their gear to survive! Their new album was part of the bankrupt estate of Billingsgate, and Epitaph were forced to disband in 1975. The band secretly reformed later the same year, but didn't record any further albums until 1979. - "Cosmic Dreams At Play"
Staying in Germany after serving in the British army, Cliff Jackson got together with Scotsman Jim McGillivray and Dortmund bassist Bernd Kolbe, and formed Fagin's Epitaph in 1969, regularly practising in the cellar rooms of Dortmund's Fantasio Club, and playing concerts of pop hits at British army bases in the area.
Two years on, after relocating to Hannover, and with a second guitarist, they developed an original progressive repertoire, and were fortunate to be promptly signed up by Polydor.
Both of their early Polydor albums have been acclaimed as classics of guitar led progressive hard-rock by fans of the genre. The debut, however, was a patchy affair with a couple of excellent progressive numbers, but largely closer to someone like Wishbone Ash than true Krautrock. Much better, their second STOP, LOOK & LISTEN had lengthy tracks with extended instrumental breaks, more akin to Vertigo progressives, with a touch of Man and a little rub-off from other local bands like Jane and Eloy. This was their finest moment.
They obviously caught a bit of international attention, as OUTSIDE THE LAW was recorded during a USA tour, gaining release on the chiefly German rock label Billingsgate. In many ways this saw a return to the style of the debut, but with a more Americanised hard-rock sound. And, whilst it's not bad, with some good strong song-writing, it's of little merit in the scheme of Krautrock.
Heralded by the sampler HANDICAP, subsequent albums, by a reformed band in the late-1970's, offered a lighter rock with symphonic touches, notably due to Eloy connections. Latterly they moved onto Heavy Metal realms. Epitaph were the commercial face of 1970's German rock, though, at least in their early day's, they did have their moments!
The 2000 reformation regained the spirit of the original band remarkably well, drafting in Jim McGillivray especially for the one gig documented on CD, which contains a lot of the old classics. The band that has continued since, however, contains only two original members. No new studio album has appeared as yet. - "The Crack In The Cosmic Egg"
Life for any starving artist is never easy, and nor was it for Epitaph. But like so many early seventies German rock groups, the myths surrounding this legendary kraut-rock band have more to say about the storytellers than about what really happened. Over the years the myths have been repeated and so compounded that we tend to lose sight of what was really happening back then, and what the musicians were all about. So let's just stick to the facts:
In 1970, the Fantasio in Dortmund was Germany's premier progressive rock and jazz venue, and the house band was a group of three young men going by the name of Fagin's Epitaph. Guitarist Cliff Jackson was creating his special synthesis of rock, blues and classical music. Drummer Jim McGillivray was influenced by heavy jazz giants like Buddy Rich, Tony Williams and Miles Davis. He created the unique dramatic drum patterns inside the Epitaph rock format. Although only seventeen years old, singer and bass-player Bernd Kolbe was already introducing the elements of sixties rock, soul and Motown that would round off their sound.
After a spontaneous gig with German blues legend G?nter Boas at Fantasio they backed him on his next tour. During a recording session for G?nter's new album at the Aister Studios in Hamburg, the trio were playing their own music to warm up. The owner of the studio was so impressed that he invited them back to do their own session. This led to a record deal with Poiydor for their 1971 debut album Epitaph.
At the invitation of Werner Kuhls, owner and manager of North Germany's largest prog-rock venue, M?lltonne (Trash Can), the band had moved to Hannover. They literally played every weeknight, honing and polishing the characteristic Epitaph style. On weekends they were opening for bands like Atomic Rooster, Hardin and York, Curved Air and Uriah Heep.
The band started to record Epitaph at the Wessex Studios in London, but technical problems thwarted the session. On their return to Germany, Klaus Walz joined as second guitarist. Visions was the only Wessex track they could really use, and they recorded the rest of the album in three days at the Windrose Studio in Hamburg, supervised by producer Gerd Müller. The opening track, Moving to the Country, introduced a style the record company flamboyantly praised as "mind-blowing fantasy rock". - "The long and highly delicate pieces are finely nuanced, sounding transparent even in their most dense passages. Epitaph's rock music is subtle and complex." was how Pop magazine expressed its liking of the album in December 1971.The Wessex recording of Visions is one of the highlights of the album even though the use of a Mellotron makes it quite untypical for Epitaph. " Visions and Little Maggie are strongly influenced by their experiences in the Dortmund drug scene" was how the press release explained the atmospheric character of the music. Klaus Walz puts this into perspective, "There were no heavy drug problems, just experiments with LSD and Cannabis. The lyrics came from what happened to some friends who were doing hard drugs. John and Maggie overdosed on heroin and that's what Little Maggie is really about". The iast track on the original album is the ten-minute psychedelic opus Early Morning, which they also played live on Beat Club, the legendary German TV rock music show. This gives a true impression of what Epitaph sounded like live on stage at the time.
The band's next albums, Stop, Look & Listen (1972) and their US production Outside the Law (1973) established Epitaph as one of the most important German rock bands of the seventies and earned them two appearances on Rockpalast. Epitaph supported many of the leading US and British rock bands of the era on their German tours before returning to the USA for gigs in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit. The strain of years of touring led to the internal stress that was finally responsible for the band's break-up in 1976. Jackson continued Epitaph with a new line-up that included today's guitarist Heinz Glass. This line-up produced another three successful albums, Return to Reality, See You in Alaska and the widely acclaimed Epitaph Live before breaking up in 1982. In 1986 Cliff Jackson and Bernd Kolbe reformed Epitaph with local Dortmund musicians. Demos recorded at Frank Bornemann's Horus Sound Studio in Hannover got them a deal with Teidec, but because the new sound was now much heavier and more keyboards oriented, the band changed its name to Kingdom and later to Domain. The project was highly successful, selling more than 1 50,000 albums worldwide. Tours and TV appearances followed until the band split up in 1991.
At a release party in Hannover, Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions suggested Epitaph should reform. Jim phoned Cliff, who then contacted Bernie and Heinz. That was in 2000. After only five days rehearsal they played their first gig in seventeen years at the Lindenbrauerei in Unna. The concert was completely sold out. They also released a live CD and DVD of the reunion concert. In December 2004 the German WDR TV channel recorded an Epitaph gig for the krautrock special they ran as part of their Rockpalast series also to be released on DVD. The new line-up included Jackson, Koibe, Heinz Glass and drummer Achim Wielert-Poret.
The bonus tracks included here are Epitaph's first single London Town Girl, Autumn 71 and Are You Ready, the A & B sides of a 1973 single that had actually been recorded during the first sessions in 1971, and finally I'm Trying and Changing World, early demos in surprisingly good audio quality considering they were just two-track recordings. - "Fresh and aggressive" by Alistair A. Tarwid and Matthias Mineur
1 Moving To The Country 05:14
2 Visions 05:26
3 Hopelessly 08:16
4 Little Maggie 08:35
5 Early Morning 10:04
Bonus Tracks:
6 London Town Girl 03:28
7 Autumn 71 04:29
8 Are You Ready 04:28
9 I'm Trying 05:33
10 Changing World 05:50
Cliff Jackson - vocal/guitar
Klaus Walz - guitar/vocal
Bernd Kolbe - bass/mellotron/vocal
Jim McGillivary - drums
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