A little over a week ago, the cult debut of British heavy rock legends Uriah Heep, “Very ‘eavy … Very ‘umble”. hit its first 50 years. It came out at a time when three rock outfits, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, already ruled the map and, with their achievements, charted the course of heavy rock for the next ten years. When “Very ‘eavy … Very ‘umble” came out, music critics did the band a great injustice, comparing the album to Deep Purple almost pathologically. Uriah Heep became the main target of certain critics who couldn’t stomach their innovation, and least of all the notion of “heavy” in the name of this colorful studio debut. Unlike Deep Purple, who were still finding themselves over their first three albums, Uriah Heep walked into the debut sessions with a thoroughly polished, distinctly their own and well-defined musical character. The prize for the most ‘vivid imagination’ among the comments surely goes to the flash of reviewer brilliance from Rolling Stone journalist Melissa Mills, who wrote at the time, among other things: “If this band ever makes it, I’ll be forced to kill myself.” Uriah Heep made it, and Melissa, well, never kept her promise.
From the very start, Uriah Heep showed an artistic stamp all their own, one that no other band of the time came close to. With the debut they joined the league of bands that took the lion’s share in shaping the new face of rock, which was slowly sweeping the world, and so had a major influence on the later development of heavy metal too. Uriah Heep were one of the first bands to develop an incredibly heavy, chunky sound already on a debut, combined with multi-part vocal harmonies contributed by absolutely every member of the band. That “choir” singing became one of their core trademarks. An element that became a template for many bands that followed, and one that even Queen say influenced their songwriting.
It was 1969, and the band, still going by the name Spice, was winning plenty of attention on the local London scene, had landed Saturday-night gigs at the cult club Marquee, and had been taken under the managerial wing of the well-known magnate Gerry Bron, who was then running Hit Record Productions Ltd. The company had a deal with Philips Records covering music recording activities. By then the band was busily piling up original material, which they committed to tape at London’s Landsdowne studio. Bron managed to squeeze a deal out of the label for the band while they were still playing as Spice, with Philips Records’ subsidiary label, called Vertigo.
Spice rehearsed diligently at a place called Hanwell Community Centre. Bands rented its rooms a lot back then. It was cheap. This giant building in West London was far enough removed from any residential neighborhood to guarantee immunity from potential complaints about the deafening noise that was increasingly sought after in band sound at the time. Among others, rehearsing here were: The Who, Deep Purple, The Animals, Procul Harum, Led Zeppelin, as well as solo artists Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Then came Christmas 1969, and right around then the infamous Dickens character from his novel David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, kept popping up in public amid all kinds of Christmas ceremonies. Gerry Bron hinted to the band that it would be smart to change their name. Just like that, to Uriah Heep. The members went along with it. Soon after the new year, bassist Paul Newton offered a permanent spot in the band to his former The Gods comrade-in-arms Ken Hensley. Ken had just finished his work on an album by the band Toe Fat. Gerry Bron had come up with the idea of bringing a keyboardist into the Uriah Heep ranks. At first it was Colin Wood who played keys with the band, on material that was for the most part co-created by vocalist David Byron and guitarist Mick Box.
David Byron, whose real name was David Garrick (during his time with The Stalkers he picked up the nickname “Bobby”), and Mick Box, being fans of Vanila Fudge, knew full well the power a Hammond organ sound could have, and they were very much into the idea. Hensley joined Uriah Heep in January 1970 and, because of contractual restrictions, had to re-record all the Hammond lines Wood had already laid down with the band. He also played an important part in finalizing the arrangements of the songs that found a place on the studio debut. Hensley was a multi-instrumentalist. Besides the piano, Hammond organ and moog he brought into the Uriah Heep sound, he was also a very good guitar player. On top of all that, with Hensley in the lineup Uriah Heep gained yet another excellent vocalist, one who could hit incredible heights, which immediately showed in the enriched vocal harmonies. Hensley said he saw great potential in the band and didn’t hesitate much over the decision to join. His unsuspected songwriting talents hadn’t yet come to the same expression and significance at this stage as they did right on the band’s next album, “Salisbury”.
The band also had to swap drummers during this period. Al Napier, who replaced his predecessor Roger Penlington (it was Penlington who brought Byron to Spice), recorded all the tracks with the band except for Lucy Blues, an early version of Bird of Pray used on the American version of the album, and Dreammare. During the recording of the album he was replaced by Nigel “Olie” Olsson, who had previously played with Elton John. Olsson played drums on Lucy Blues and Dreammare, while for Bird Of Prey the band had already recorded drums with Keith Baker. Because that track was used on the version of the album released in the US market, where it came out in August 1970, the band had in the meantime taken Baker on as a member, and Olsson went back to Elton John.
The first of the debut’s original songs to reach its final form was Gypsy. It’s the track that opens the studio debut and right away, in the ideal way, lays out in one place the essential elements that personify the music of Uriah Heep. Not just of the early era, but of the later one too. The creeping Hammond sound, Box’s wrecking-ball wah-wah phrasing, Byron’s signature vocal character, the creator of elusive magic, and, as mentioned, the masterful integration of multi-part vocal harmonies. At the same time, the song catches a whiff of the psychedelic era, which was slowly letting go of its trends at the turn of the sixties into the seventies, while Uriah Heep, with shameless innovation, also trade in the implantation of new sonic trends here. First and foremost, that was the band’s unbridled hunger to develop a ferocious noise in their sound. Even today, with the band going strong for 51 years, Gypsy remains an absolute favorite at their live shows and a great Uriah Heep classic, known even to those rock fans who aren’t all that interested in the name Uriah Heep in the first place.
At that time, in the room next door at Hanwell Community Centre, Deep Purple were rehearsing their own material, which was later released on the album “Deep Purple In Rock”. It came out exactly one week before Uriah Heep’s debut. Box recalls that a real fire was blazing between the two rooms at the time. Deep Purple, who witnessed the evolution of the band next door as it grew from a quartet into a quintet and changed its name, liked to maliciously insinuate that a few of their phrases had “strayed” into Uriah Heep’s songwriting.
But Uriah Heep weren’t all about chasing raw power and bombast. This is the band that recorded one of the very first hard rock ballads on the planet on its debut. It’s actually the only song on the debut not written by the band, but it’s a textbook ballad that introduces yet another new trend into rock music. It’s the anti-war song Come Away Melinda, written by Fred Hellerman and Fran Minkoff and first recorded in 1963 by Harry Belafonte, then popularized later by other artists too (among them Tim Rose, and also UFO). This very ballad shows off the striking fragility and softness the band was able to set in contrast to the rawness of Gypsy, already on the debut. In general, all the songs on the debut are wildly diverse and extremely skillfully arranged compositions, which means Uriah Heep had found their unique musical character quickly, by the time of the debut sessions, and nurtured it with great skill throughout the seventies, and from here on it rode the giant wave of Hensley’s songwriting talents. But that’s a whole other story.
Roots planted deep in the rhetoric of blues music and the “British blues boom” of the sixties (Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Ten Years After, Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac) come to the surface in Lucy Blues, Walking in Your Shadow, Dreammare, written entirely by Paul Newton, and Real Turned On, in which Hensley slipped in a slide guitar part at the last moment. There’s a flirtation with progressive rock in I’ll Keep On Trying, while sophisticated, structure-weaving moves that even smell a bit jazzy can be spotted in Wake Up (Set Your Sights).
Of course, the Uriah Heep debut was also subject to adapting to different markets. On American soil the band’s debut came out on Mercury Records under the title “Uriah Heep”. Instead of the bluesy, tickling Lucy Blues, the album for the American market featured the proto-metal Bird Of Prey mentioned a moment ago. The covers were completely different too. For the European market the band used a photo of David Byron, whom Mick Box had beforehand sprayed up very nicely with spray paint, evoking the idea of a closed-off human cocoon, while the American market got a black-and-white cover with a monstrous worm.
“Very ‘eavy … Very ‘umble” came out on June 13, 1970, and in the US two months later. While it didn’t make the best-selling albums chart on British soil, it reached number 186 on America’s Billboard chart. It did better in other European countries, hitting number 11 on the Italian chart, number 14 on the Finnish one and number 22 on the German one. It also did better in Australia, where it hit number 15, in Japan, where it reached number 41, and in Canada, where it crawled up to number 86.
When it was born 50 years ago, “Very ‘eavy … Very ‘umble” served up remarkable innovation, and with that very first record Uriah Heep proved they were a band with a finely honed musical pedigree, one they could boldly build on and push their musical vision forward from. In the years that followed, the album proved to be one of the cornerstones in defining the heavy metal genre. With Hensley’s arrival in the band, the creative nucleus of the Box-Byron partnership grew into an inexhaustible generator of magic, which in its evergreen and inimitable artistic essence still thrills and fascinates today.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
