![]() “Mark jumped ship because he couldn’t deal with the stresses of the touring we were doing, which were excessive, I have to say,” Box says. On January 31, upon completing the final date of the Deep Purple tour, bassist Mark Clarke quit the band, having joined only four months previously. But such a lifestyle wasn’t for everyone. “You’d tell the bird you were in Uriah Heep, and next minute the hotel was full of women,” Box recalled cheerfully. Their gregarious guitarist, meanwhile, was taking advantage of his group’s burgeoning reputation by thumbing through local phone directories and placing calls to random young ladies, inviting them along to gigs and parties. When the group returned to the US for the second time, in January 1972, they were booked to open for Deep Purple, their noisy neighbours from Hanwell Community Centre. Believe me, lots of champagne was cracked open on that first night.” The American audience loved us from the first minute onwards. ![]() “We all felt that this is where we should be. “There was never a feeling of being overawed by it all,” Box insisted to Heep biographer Dave Ling. “When we got there, and saw all the limos and groupies, it was mind-boggling for us,” Hensley said later. For the Londoners it was a first glimpse of the infinite possibilities of rock stardom. In between the two releases, on March 26, ’71 Uriah Heep played their first show in the US, supporting Three Dog Night, in front of 16,000 people at the State Fairground’s Coliseum in Indianapolis, Indiana. Their unfairly maligned Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble album, mixing folk, blues, jazz and hard rock, was followed by two studio albums in 1971: the progressive rock-inclined Salisbury – on which multi-talented keyboard player Ken Hensley began to eclipse Box and frontman David Byron as the band’s main songwriter – and Look At Yourself, the first release on Gerry Bron’s new record label Bronze Records. Through the facility’s walls they could hear the Mk II line-up of Deep Purple prepping for what would be their In Rock album.īy their own admission, on their first three albums the young Uriah Heep were “just thrashing about trying to find a direction”. It was at Bron’s insistence that the youngsters changed their name once more, to Uriah Heep, an ’umble, obsequious character in Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel David Copperfield.īron then installed the group in Hanwell Community Centre in West London to assemble songs for their debut album. By the time Bobby Moore hoisted the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft at Wembley Stadium on the evening of Jwhen England won the World Cup, The Stalkers had become Spice.Īt some point late in 1969 the band caught the attention of influential manager/producer/publisher Gerry Bron. Inspired by a love of The Kinks, the Small Faces, The Who and Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Walthamstow-born Box formed his first band, The Stalkers, in the mid-60s while still a teenager. “It’s difficult to care about criticism about what your band is lacking when you’re being called back on stage for five encores every night,” he points out with a hearty chuckle. A candidate for the most chipper man in rock’n’roll, the 73-year-old cheerfully admits that he’s “never been one to listen to critics too much”. Today Uriah Heep guitarist Mick Box can afford to look back and laugh. Rolling Stone’s most scathing notice, however, was about Uriah Heep’s debut album, 1970’s Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble: “If this group makes it,” wrote one Melissa Mills, “I’ll have to commit suicide.” The “clubfooted” riffs on Deep Purple In Rock were seen as evidence that these “quiet nonentities” lacked “both expertise and intuition”. Black Sabbath’s first album was labelled “inane”, “wooden” and “plodding”, the band that became the most influential in the history of heavy metal written off as “Just like Cream! But worse.” In it, Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album was dismissed as “dull”, “redundant” and “prissy”. Inspired by mystical dreams, a hectic rock’n’roll lifestyle and a f**ked-up séance, Uriah Heep’s 1972 album Demons And Wizards turned them into global superstarsįor British rock bands in the early 1970s, a sneering, patronising review in US magazine Rolling Stone was considered something of a badge of honour. Uriah Heep: Whacked-out occultists, scary séances, and the saga of Uriah Heep’s Demons And Wizards (1972)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |