1 January : Stone the Crows

Released 1 January 1970 and featuring Maryhill’s finest Maggie Bell, was the first album by Stone the Crows.

Listening after 50 years, it is a fascinating mix of influences. Maggie Bell had a raucous blues voice, and that’s the context I first heard her name mentioned, but the music is more varied. Sure there’s blues and what is recognisably proto-heavy rock, but there’s decent acoustic playing in there, old style R and B, and residual stylistic flourishes from psychedelia. In the terminology of the day it is progressive without the trappings of what a later generation of critics would sneer at as Prog.

The full profile from which the sexist extract to the right comes, compared them to Soft Machine in some respects, which seems odd to me now, but there we are.

Some of the critics quoted on Wikipedia were sniffy, and preferred their second album, but I like it.