Bachdenkel – Lemmings (1970)

dtfloyd says:

thank you very much!!
i’m listening this album, i think it’s a dark masterpiece of progressive rock
the singer have a great voice intensity and the songs have good melody

bzh555 says:

I saw them too gogole …

CBlack says:

This album improves with each listen. Nice choice–thanks!

grapho says:

Oh la la c’est vieux, ça… je ne m’en souvenais plus du tout !
Merci :•)

Anonymous says:

BACHDENKEL?

Surely the very best prog band of all times : an intimate world, outstanding musicians and great melodies!

There’s an interesting interview in French in Traverses :
http://traversesmag.org/articles/bachdenkel.htm

Armute

Pete Kimberley says:

Hi folks – first of all, thanks to everyone for the good reviews and kind comments. It’s great to know that people are still listening to our music today, and plenty of you seem to enjoy it pretty much. We’re delighted.

I’d like to set the record straight on the Bachdenkel albums Lemmings and Stalingrad, though – I have no problem at all with Colin getting good reviews for his vocals, because he always sang with a lot of soul. He didn’t sing all the songs, however. He sang ‘Translation’, ‘Long Time Living’ and ‘A Thousand Pages Before’ – very well too. We shared vocals (with help from Brian)on ‘The Settlement Song’ and ‘The Slightest Distance’. I sang the rest.

Bachdenkel had no leader – we were always a group – we comoposed most of the music together, even when the original ideas came from one or the other of us, the final version was always the work of the whole group in terms of arrangement, harmonies etc. That’s true for both albums. Karel wrote most of the lyrics, which we all always thought were very good indeed – Col wrote a few lines, and I wrote more than a few, particularly ‘Strangerstill’ and ‘Come All Ye Faceless”.

Karel found us the gigs, intelligently opening up the MJC circuit in France, which had never been toured before in the way we did it – we were followed on this circuit by plenty of French groups, amongst others, Magma.

Karel is credited as the producer of the albums, but this should be understood in the way that movies have Producers and Directors – Karel Produced in the sense that he put the recording package together and organised and in a sense supervised the sessions, but the musical Direction was again very much a group effort. That’s how it was.

We took pride in the fact that we stayed away, as Gil Keitch notes, from the ‘contemporary currents’ of the music that was around at the time – we were always very much our own counsel, for better and sometimes worse – we copied no-one.

In my humble opinion, our best work was never heard outside of the concert halls – over the years we became a very tight and free-style group of musicians, and improvised constantly. The only testimony to this that remains is the short piece on the ‘Stalingrad’ CD, the opening to that night’s reading of Melanie’s ‘Bobo’s Party’ – we were playing pretty well that night – Colin’s spacey trip into the stratosphere is typical of his inspirational playing. I believe we were strongly influenced by spending so many nights listening to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with whom we were pretty much in co-habitation at the American Center in Paris throughout much of 1969. Their approach to music was a revelation to us, and I for one have never forgotten some of what we learned.

Colin is presently remixing a cassette recording of a one-off gig we did in the early 1980’s – there’s some good playing on what I’ve heard so far, and I hope he gets it finished.

Karel now manages a very successful enterprise which brings English and American musicians and stand-up comics to Paris to perform at La Java – he built it up from nothing, and deserves all the kudos he gets for that. Colin composes, mostly on piano, Brian continues to improve as an excellent drummer and accomplished singer, and I spend a lot of time playing acoustic guitar and composing vocal music. Not much bass any more, though I enjoy it when I do.

Thanks again for the comments, and vive la musique.

Best wishes

Pete Kimberley

public relations disaster says:

thanks for the insight into the era and inner workings of your band, fascinating stuff.

like a lot of people i am wondering if you are planning a proper reissue of lemmings? i would buy it in a heartbeat.

Anonymous says:

masterpiece

Cliff says:

I love this stuff. Thanks, Cliff at cdwhy@yahoo.com

Anonymous says:

Thank you so much for this BEAUTIFUL piece! it actually made me cry…

Stef

Anonymous says:

Wow, what a great album, why is this relatively unknown?

Fructedor says:

References for Lemmings by Bachdenkel

http://www.cherryred.co.uk/newreleases.php

Anonymous says:

just read about this.