Atomic Rooster - Resurrection (3CD Box Set) (2001)

The Resurrection of Atomic Rooster? A doomed project, in the literal sense. Founder member Vincent Crane (aka Vincent Cheesman) swallowed four hundred Anadin tablets on a stormy St Valentine's Day in 1989 while long-time drummer Paul Hammond overdosed on methadone in a London bedsit a couple of years later.
Surviving sidemen are still active, rolling or tumbling as the shifting foundations of the music business dictate, and from time to time there are rumbles of proposed Rooster revivals or tribute bands. But Rooster without Vincent Crane is Hamlet without the Prince, the Pack without the Joker.
"Now you see him , now you don't." Vincent's trickster fingerwork has just made the Ace of Diamonds vanish before the blinking gaze of adolescent Brother P, already impressed with his friend's remake of King Kong as a 9.5 mm b&w dynanimation short, using a plasticine ape and a wrecked toy train.
Now this mercurial prankster starts to show off on the parlour piano. Thundering two-fisted music rolls over everything else they've ever heard, hooking them with its all-night drive, that relentless bass and underlying minor-key menace. Soon VC will find practicing boogie more compulsive than rehearsing the Disappearing Rabbit caper. It's 1962 and London is about to be hit by the Blues Boom...
Your reporter was on the Crane case very early, caught both the radiance and the fall-out. By '63 VC was moonlighting from music college, to hang around the London R&B scene, looking for support gigs at the Marquee or the Flamingo. Graham Bond, that Crowleyite arch-druid of the Hammond organ, introduced him to the grooves of Jimmy Smith and John Patton, and gave him a template for his early jazz-blues bands. I tried to fit my poetry into his jazz via the Word Engine with Pete Brown and others, and promoted various long forgotten Crane operations - the Big Sound, the Freedom Riders, the Vincent Crane Combo.
Then we hit the cross-roads. I left the UK in 1968 for a four year spell in Canada. The Combo had rapidly evolved into the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. In a matter of months, Vincent had co-written the incendiary number one hit Fire, had embarked on a hyperactive tour of the US and then plummeted down into the first of many chasmic depressions. In 1969, after another eventful American tour, he founded his first Atomic Rooster, with former Crazy World inmate Carl Palmer.
Between 1968 and 1972 we only met once, when Rooster supported Savoy Brown at Vancouver's Kerrisdale Arena. ( Culture Court's Ojo remembers the gig, vividly if not favourably) Then, as his first marriage collapsed in the early seventies, Vincent started to rediscover old friends, and our lives overlapped once more, in a collage of grandiose projects and desperate stratagems.
Torquay, Christmas 1977. Vincent has just released Firefighter, a self-pressed Atomic Records single satirising the first UK firemen's strike. He's convinced that the Callaghan government has conspired with the BBC to keep it off the radio, because if everybody heard it, its dynamic vibes would end the dispute. That's why we had to give it away in pubs.
We also have to be silent while the Queen's Speech is on TV, because she has an important message especially for us. "We gotta sort things out in Northern Ireland. I'm going to take a band over, set up a huge tour, entertain all the armies - troops, RUC, Provos, the whole fucking lot...that'll keep 'em quiet "
Jean, his new wife/muse/roadie/minder/chief electrician catches my eye. Vin's ramping up to another big one. Like 1975, when he started bricking up the front door to keep the bailliffs out. Yet last night , sitting in with my local punk/blooze band, he was in total control, aware of everything happening on the stand, playing the audience as easily as he ravished the keyboard of the C3.
So this case-history of his best-known work abandons any pretences to objectivity. But a few time-capsule fragments might place these de luxe Akarma/Comet re-issues in a wider context.