2002-12-13T13:24:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Kenneth John Parsons: I am a long standing and devoted
fan of The Enid, ...a humble foot soldier for these masters of Symphonic Rock,
who has taken it upon himself to create an unofficial and
hopefully informative domain, (of which this page is but a sample of the full site soon to come),
for all those interested in the group.

I feel there is a need for these pages, as apart from The Enids own web
base, there is a distinct lack of independant material on the net devoted to
these most inventive and creative musicians.

The Enid are a progressive rock group, (though they dislike the prog rock
classification), now based in Northampton, England.

Overlooking their toungue-in-cheek but highly enjoyable encores of Land
of Hope and Glory, (and sometimes even Wild Thing), the band's more
complex music, composed by their classically-trained leader Robert John
Godfrey, successfully fuses a number of inflences.

It's different for everyone I suppose, but to this listener, I detect flirtations
with certain classical composers, (notably Elgar and Liszt), and
medievalisms punctuated by synth & guitar lines.
Kenneth John Parsons

The Enid Story ...in their own words.

The music press once described them as "Britain's best kept secret" .

Radio One dubbed them "The biggest cult band in Europe". Not because
they were, but because the main radio station in the UK assumed they
must be! Record companies feared them; Glastonbury banned them. The
band was even investigated by MI5. Everybody in the UK has heard of
The Enid; and the amount of misinformation which surrounds them is
staggering. They've been called "fascists" (by people who had been told
of, but obviously had never actually experienced at first hand, their
sacrilegious on-stage renditions of "Land of Hope and Glory"), "leftists"
(because of RJG's vociferous insistence that "all people are
interdependent whether they know it or not and that individuality has no
fundamental meaning"), and "anarchists" (some truth in that). Many
people assumed that they were some sort of insane punk band. That
particular assumption could scarcely have been further from the mark. In
fact they are probably the most enigmatic and intellectually challenging of
any band to have emerged in the UK.

IN THE BEGINNING

The Enid were formed in 1974 by keyboard player Robert John Godfrey.
A possible career as a concert pianist had been thrown out of the window
in the late sixties in favour of London's rapidly flowering hippie music
scene. He had stopped hanging about the Royal Festival Hall and started
hanging about the Roundhouse, where he met and joined the young
Barclay James Harvest, living and working with them over a three-year
period in a farmhouse on the Yorkshire Moors. These three years saw the
release of the debut BJH album and the follow-up, "Once Again". It was
Godfrey who, at the head of (believe it or not) the Barclay James Harvest
Symphony Orchestra, was responsible for co-writing and developing most
of their large-scale pieces - When the World was Woken, Dark Now My
Sky, Mockingbird etc.

Godfrey left the band in 1971, already looking for a more custom-made
vehicle for his own rapidly crystallising musical ideas. The following year
he recorded a solo album, The Fall of Hyperion, for Tony
Stratton-Smith's Charisma label. Long-deleted now, this album was really
the first flexing of Godfrey's own musical muscles, and formed something
of a blueprint for his approach to future projects.

From the outset The Enid always promised to be different. The spiritual
home of the band was a weird experimental school for gifted but
problematical children, which Godfrey and his fellow founder-members,
guitarists Stephen Stewart and Francis Lickerish, had attended. Other
pupils included Alexis Korner, Tom Robinson. The school, Finchden
Manor, fell apart in 1973 and over the next few years various casualties
crawled from the wreckage to join the already-established Godfrey. The
result was The Enid.

Given the climate of the times they should never have lasted. At a time
when punk rock was exploding all around them, The Enid were writing
and performing large-scale, wholly instrumental pieces which took as their
inspiration myth and fantasy, and which eschewed the simplicity and
cynicism of punk in favour of a broad, almost orchestral dynamic range
and a rich canvas of emotions and atmospheres. Yet such was the power
of their live performances and recorded work that they rapidly gained a
large, fanatically dedicated following that have stayed with them
throughout their career and that took in the most unlikely bedfellows -
everyone from hippies to bikers to - you guessed it - punks.

THE FIRST RECORDINGS

The Enid signed first to BUK records, a tiny label which was then a part of
EMI, and in 1976 released their first album, "In the Region of the
Summer Stars". Based on the Tarot sequence and on the writings of
Charles Williams (yes - shock, horror! a concept album!), it made no
bones about where The Enid were at. The Epic Emotional Chariot Ride.
Comparisons were unhelpful. Progressive rock it wasn't, although in many
ways it was what prog rock should have been. But the energy was more
akin to punk, and the drama was pure Hollywood.

The second album, Aerie Faerie Nonsense, released in 1978, went yet
further down the same road. It told the story of Roland, the young knight
aspirant questing his way across the world. The tale was told with pathos
and humour; as Godfrey says "we had to take the piss out of ourselves a
bit to get the music across".

On the strength of these albums and their live reputation - Sounds readers
had voted them "The band most likely to succeed" - The Enid were able
to swing a major record deal. They signed to Pye Records - one of the
most expensive signings the company had ever made. Money was lavished
on the band. They were even provided with their own studio in which to
record their 1979 album, Touch Me. This album marked the onset of what
one reviewer called their "Electro-Edwardian" phase - a lively, uplifting
album with a surprisingly hard edge. The band - now a seven-piece - were
regularly playing several-thousand seater venues such as the
Hammersmith Odeon, and major success seemed just around the corner.

DISASTER STRIKES

What was really lurking around the corner, though, was a near-disastrous
setback. What Godfrey and his fellow musicians hadn't known was that
Pye was in trouble. Lew Grade had just made the mega-flop movie Raise
the Titanic, and his whole business empire was sinking majestically
beneath the waves. Staff were deserting in their droves and The Enid were
stuck in a top-notch deal with an essentially rudderless label. Panic was
setting in at Pye, who suddenly didn't know what to do with their newest,
costliest singing, and this led to the hasty release of a spate of singles,
among them The Enid's classic Dambusters' March/Land of Hope and
Glory showstopper. Rushed into the shops and not properly promoted,
none of the singles charted. It was a sad waste of a lot of good music.

The same fate awaited the band's second and last album for Pye, Six
Pieces. The album, released in 1980, contained a series of cameos of the
then band members; quirky, yet often incisive portraits. According to
Godfrey, it is one of The Enid's most personal albums, recorded in the
knowledge that their relationship with Pye was all but finished and that
the fruits of their labours would receive little or no promotion.
Paradoxically, this fact seems to have given the album a curious sense of
freedom. The pieces run riot with parody and a quirky energy which
almost touches on jazz-rock in places.

THE BREAK WITH THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Six Pieces marks the end of what Robert John Godfrey has called "the
first phase in the life of The Enid". It almost marked the end of The Enid.
Francis Lickerish and keyboard player Willie Gilmour left the band.
Drummer Chris North and bassist Martin Russell followed some time
afterwards. Godfrey and Stewart settled down in a Suffolk farmhouse to
become proprietors of The Lodge recording studio, working largely in the
pop field. They recorded such acts as Mari Wilson and Propaganda, and
both recorded and performed as the (uncredited) backing band on Kim
Wilde's first album.

But The Enid proved to have a life of its own. Back in 1979 Pye had
recorded The Enid playing live at the Hammersmith Odeon, intending to
release the recording, along with a compilation of tracks from previous
albums, as "Rhapsody in Rock". It was never released, but Tommy Vance
had acquired the live material and in 1982 he played Fand, a
twenty-minute piece originally recorded on Aerie Faerie Nonsense, on
Radio One's Friday Rock Show. Vance was a fan. He said, on air, "Robert
John Godfrey is to my mind one of the greatest composers this country
has ever had..."

A NEW CHAPTER

Suddenly Godfrey and Stewart were inundated with requests for more.
The following was still out there, and growing. Godfrey and Stewart closed
their studio and recorded what was to be their most successful album to
date, Something Wicked This Way Comes. A 156-date British tour in 1983
confirmed it - The Enid, now essentially a duo, were back.

Something Wicked This Way Comes was a radical departure from
previous Enid albums. For the first time it featured vocals. It took as its
theme the prospect of nuclear war - The Enid's first foray into
contemporary politics. But so typical of Godfrey's approach, he avoided
contributing to the arguments of justification and instead asked his
audience the allegorical question: "If the holocaust comes will it be the
burning fires of Hell here to punish us all for our wickedness or will be a
the purifying fire of the last judgement sweeping everything clean and
anew?" It was also the first time The Enid had operated without the
backing of a record label. The album came out on their own "Enid" label.
A band which had, on the face of it, seemed the very antithesis of punk
had now established its radical credentials indelibly. The most "indie" of
the "indie bands", The Enid took direct control of all aspects of their
career, from recording to mastering, artwork to distribution.

There was still a "long road back" for The Enid. Much of 1983 was spent
fighting to re-acquire the rights to their deleted back catalogue. They
released the 1979 live recordings as the two-volume "Live at
Hammersmith" set, no less potent for being four years overdue, and
re-released the two Pye albums on the Enid label. EMI, who owned BUK,
proved more difficult.

Godfrey, never a man to let a small thing like EMI Records stand in his
way, applied the Gordian Knot principle - "I went ahead and did it
anyway." Aerie Faerie Nonsense was re-mixed and issued independently at
the end of 1983 (behind the thin camouflage of changing the titles of the
pieces), and In the Region of the Summer Stars, much of it re-recorded
and again with titles changed, followed in 1984.

THE STAND

Godfrey and Stewart's approach to the problems presented by the music
business was never anything if not imaginative. Now, to consolidate their
independence, they turned to their fans. Enid fans had always been
ultra-loyal and, inspired by Godfrey's somewhat Messianic propaganda,
The Stand was formed, with the aim of supporting and publicising The
Enid and other selected acts. They became, in effect, the financial patrons
of, and the promotional wing of, The Enid. It was this, combined with the
nuclear thing, that attracted the interest of MI5, who, says Godfrey "were
expecting to find some kind of private army".

Godfrey and Stewart gave the Stand membership unprecedented access to
the band, and their own record label, which would feature "specialist"
limited-edition Enid albums and recordings by other selected artists. Over
the next few years five projects were realised via the Stand label. Stand 1
was a live recording of The Enid performing at Manchester's tiny
Band-on-the-Wall Club, featuring the best of old and new Enid material,
and their classic encore "Wild Thing"; Stand 2 (now very rare) was a
fascinating collection of old, by now unavailable singles, out-takes from
earlier albums, pieces from Godfrey's now-distant Fall of Hyperion and
other curios and rarities.

The first "outsider" to feature was Glen Baker, (who sadly has
subsequently died), a guitarist and composer who released the intricate,
delightful Brief Encounter album via The Stand. A year or so later an
album simply entitled The Music of William Arkle appeared. Arkle was a
painter, philosopher and composer. One of his pictures forms the cover to
the re-released In the Region of the Summer Stars album. It fell to Robert
John Godfrey to arrange and perform his haunting, ambient soundscapes.
The final Stand album was another Enid offering - a special edition
collection entitled Liverpool, and intended originally for distribution at a
single charity gig in that city. This is the only studio album to feature The
Enid's classic version of Elgar's Nimrod.

Operating alongside The Stand, the Enid label continued to release
contemporary Enid albums for international distribution. The band spent
the remainder of 1984 recording The Spell, their sixth studio album, and,
due to the demands of the music, a double album playing at 45 rpm. The
Spell, released in 1985, and the first Enid album to appear on CD, is a
complex and quite entrancing musical allegory based on seasons and
cycles - the seasons of the year, the life and death of man, the life cycle of
the cosmos. It was followed by a re-recorded, extended version of the
mega-epic Fand. 1986 saw the bulk of the back catalogue re-issued on CD,
and the ushering in of what might be described as "the end of the
beginning" for The Enid. It also saw the release of what looked to be the
last Enid studio album as such. This was Salome, a startling musical
interpretation of the John the Baptist story which managed to, at one
stroke, "offend both feminists and the God squad". The album was The
Enid's most challenging to date; all dense rhythm and sexual angst. It lent
itself brilliantly to radical live interpretation, and was performed at the
end of the year as a piece of contemporary dance/drama.

The Enid were beginning to outgrow their "rock band" roots and to
become an increasingly diverse, umbrella entity for a range of projects.
This was a mixed blessing, for while the duo's new-found freedom to
explore different areas of work undoubtedly fuelled their creativity, it also
led to the break-up, or perhaps drifting apart, of the band.

Stephen Stewart was to concentrate more and more on his work in the
studio, recording acts such as Katrina and the Waves, New Model Army
and The Specials' Terry Hall. Meanwhile, Robert John Godfrey was
working on his solo Reverberations album for Matthew Manning's Cloud
Nine Music. Reverberations is surely one of Godfrey's finest compositions
- a brooding, melancholy, infinitely graceful piece infused with an almost
East-European air of declining empires and lost grandeur (now included
on the re-issued Seed and the Sower - see below). The two of them came
together again to write and record Joined by the Heart - a unique part of
the Enid portfolio. Joined by the Heart is nothing if not demanding. It
was an attempt to delve into the soul of Enid music - a raw look at the
very source of their creativity. Each takes one side of the album to express
himself to the hilt - Stephen Stewart's side is intense, insistent
subterranean; Robert John Godfrey's side then breaks out in an ethereal,
airborne release.

The annual Hammersmith Odeon concert reflected The Enid's new-found
diversity, with a wide and unexpected range of musicians, Tai Chi
performers and students of the London School of Contemporary Dance
coming together to produce something that was about as far from the
traditional idea of an Enid show as it was possible to get. It was a brave
and controversial experiment, but Enid fans had long ago learned to
expect the unexpected.

THE END?

By 1988 the changes of the last couple of years had worked right through
the Enid organisation to their logical conclusion. Neither Godfrey nor
Stewart felt that they needed The Enid any longer as a vehicle for their
creativity. As Godfrey says "We didn't want to become one of those tired
old bands, treading the boards year after year simply for the sake of it."
When the album which they had spent much of the previous year
recording was released, it came out not as an Enid album, but under the
name Godfrey and Stewart.

The album was The Seed and the Sower. It was based on the book of the
same name by Laurens van der Post, which recounts his experiences as a
Japanese prisoner of war (the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence was
based on the same book). Perhaps sensing that this was to be the end of
an era, Godfrey and Stewart poured everything into this one, to deliver
one of their finest ever recordings - over fifty minutes of power and
passion.

Godfrey and Stewart took their final bow over two nights at the Dominion
Theatre, London, at the end of the year. It was what the fans would have
wanted; a ballsy show which packed in all the highlights from the band's
twelve-year career. It even brought back Francis Lickerish. And it
furnished one last Enid album, the triumphant Final Noise.

A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY FOR RJG

And that, it seemed, was that. Stephen Stewart opted to concentrate on his
work as a recording engineer and producer, and Robert John Godfrey
began to move in new musical circles, working with young musicians,
assembling a number of short-lived bands, one of which - sacrilege! - took
the name "Enid". With hindsight, Godfrey now realises he was in the
throes of a kind of mid-life crisis, trying to rejuvenate a personal musical
youth. A lot of Enid fans didn't like it. Enid tee-shirts were burned at
several of the gigs. The projects foundered amid self-doubt, uncertain
goals and lack of direction.

Two years of silence followed. The Enid's back catalogue continued to sell,
but the prospect of any new music or of live performances seemed remote.
Godfrey devoted his time to recording other bands and to mastering the
complex world of quantum physics. Once again, the impetus which led to
the return of The Enid came unexpectedly, and from outside band circles.

With hindsight it seems as if, quite simply, a vacuum had been created.
Magazines had begun to ask what had become of The Enid. Interviews
with Godfrey followed. The possibility of a new Enid began to emerge. A
few trial line-ups were put together and some tentative gigs were
undertaken. Some of the early ones were pretty ropey. The idea was not so
much to recreate the past, but to tap into the strengths of the old Enid
and to see how the music could be developed in the nineties and beyond.

REBIRTH AND INTERRUPTION
The end of the 90's saw Godfrey actively trying out new Enid line-ups,
with the emphasis once again on touring. The entire back catalogue was
re-released on Newt Records, and two new albums were produced -
Tripping the Light Fantastic and Sundialer. The new music was typical of
Godfrey's composing style but the flavour had a acquired a more
contemporary feel. This was in part due to the resurgence in popularity of
ambient, instrumental music generally, and partly due to the creeping
influence of dance music into the band's work. The hugeness, the
complexity, the dynamic range of the old Enid was still very much there,
but rhythmically the music owed much more to the mid-nineties than to
previous decades. Creatively the decade ended with the release of White
Goddess, perhaps The Enid's most focused album in years, combining a
haunting ambience with an at-times driving 'folkish' feel.

Things were not to last, however. Godfrey, now in his fifties, began to fall
prey to ill-health, and with it, perhaps inevitable, self-doubt. It emerged
that he was suffering from, among other things, diabetes. This triggered
another essential rethink about his future. Touring was pretty much out of
the question, and composition was proving difficult for Godfrey. (Sleeper
Wakes) He turned his attention to the studio, still called The Lodge and
now firmly established in Northampton, which he was running with
musician and producer Max Read, who had also joined The Enid. They
had a lot of excess space on the premises, and came up with the idea of
opening a cafe. The Lodge Cafe had a brief but exciting lifespan,
inevitably attracting the weird and exotic, and provided an outlet for
Godfrey's (considerable) culinary skills. Unfortunately running a cafe
proved even more physically strenuous than touring - long hours cooking
and serving, seven days a week. Things didn't end in disaster, however.
One of Godfrey's neighbours, an publican expanding along the road,
absorbed the excess space in return for giving Godfrey the resources he
needed to refit and upgrade the studio and return once again to
composing.

FAROUT

And so we await the return of The Enid. Building on the limited success of
the Newt deal, Godfrey has sought out a more durable label, and has
licenced the back-catalogue to Inner Sanctum. The albums are starting to
appear, often newly-packaged, and a new album - FarOut - is in
preparation. Creatively Godfrey has taken stock, and, working with Max
Read, has come up with an approach which represents as big a
development for the band as Something Wicked This Way Comes did
twenty years before. That album caused a sensation among Enid fans with
its inclusion, for the first time, of songs among the instrumental pieces.
Far Out continues this synthesis, but in a more complex and sophisticated
way. There are songs once more, but they are set within an over-arching
orchestral piece which spans the whole album. The whole is like a rich,
changing tapestry, the songs grow out of the evolving larger piece then are
absorbed back into it. The result is an album that is both complex and
moving, and immediate and accessible. The band's line-up has been drawn
from the semi-regular line-up who performed on the Newt albums -
Godfrey on keyboards, of course, Read on bass and vocals (he
single-handedly provided the 'choir' on White Goddess!), the thunderous
Steve Hughes on drums, and psycho-virtuoso Grant Jamieson and
punk-meets-Zappa newbie Jason Ducker on guitars. It's a madly
adventurous, utterly audacious idea, and can be safely predicted to cause
as much debate among Enid fans as so many of the bands albums have
done before.

And just to throw in another curve, there's another album in preparation,
and one deliberately and radically different again from FarOut. Entitled
Virtuoso, it promises to be the most intensive instrumental workout The
Enid have ever produced, testing everyone's musicianship to the limit.
And for the first time in decades Robert will be joined on the album by a
second keyboard player, Duncan Rayson.

Godfrey has never been one for following any set formula when it comes
to album releases - no more now than in the past - and the creative
tension (and, hopefully, fan controversy) between these two hugely diverse
releases will hopefully have people talking for years.
We also have an Enid Appreciation Discussion Board,
why not leave your entry? by going to
http://theenid.proboards6.com/.
Look forward to hearing from other Enid fans soon.
Ken.

The Enid Appreciation Society