23 January : A Song For Me

Released 50 years ago today, Family’s third album, A Song For Me.

I confess I haven’t listened to much Family over the years, in part part because of Roger Chapman’s voice which turned me off as a teenager, the memory of it discouraging me from reinvestigating.

Until today.

It’s an odd beast, this album. Although the roots of the band are in the Leicester R and B scene of the mid-sixties, this isn’t an R and B record and I’m not sure that it ever works out exactly what it wants to be, something that might be inferred from the knots that Wikipedia and the Progarchives contributors get themselves into trying to apply their ludicrous genre distinctions.

My first impression of it is that it is very British, even when it is pastiching American stylings. The title track, which is the closest they come to rocking out, albeit having obviously smoked a bag of Stevie Winwood beforehand, slides off into more avant garde territory with the treated violin. Likewise Love is a Sleeper, quite a busy track that reminds me in strange ways of The Monkees’s Pleasant Valley Sunday, features John Palmer’s vibraphone, giving it a qualitively different feel. This, by the way, is closer to what was meant at the time by ‘progressive’ music than retrospective ‘Prog’ characterisations.

As the Melody Maker review notes, it is a fluid and varied album, and that’s to its credit, but the flip side is a lack of stylistic consistency in approach. Maybe that’s a strength, it certainly can be, but in this case it feels more like a disparate collection of songs rather than a coherent collection; it sounds like talent in search of direction, and what it makes me want to do is the listen to their later work (when John Wetton took over on bass and shared vocals).

Having said that, one of the joys of this project is that it gives me a structured reason to re-assess things that I previously rejected and find their merits. I’ve warmed to A Song For Me in a way that I didn’t expect, and not just because I’m a sucker for any album like this that has the confidence to put acoustic guitar front and centre on several tracks. I could even get used to Chapman’s voice, which for the most part I find I like except for the vibrato passages. He reminds me somewhat of Kevin Coyne, whom I do like but who falls well outside my 1970 timeline.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if one result is that I go out and buy this and other Family records/cds for later enjoyment, and chastise my teenage self for having cloth ears.

Make up your own mind: the album, plus bonus tracks, is on Spotify.