'Mariner': a CD from Nostromo

integrally featuring a Procol Harum cover

A Salty Dog, Procol Harum's album about the sea ... was that ever really true?

Here, on the other hand, is a CD album that is genuinely about the sea, in that it sets out to dramatise, in music, Coleridge's poem The Ancient Mariner. And its Procol Harum connections do not stop there, as 'Nostromo' himself (aka Sev Lewkowicz) explained in various mails to BtP:

Sev's website tells how he first had the idea to record a musical interpretation of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in early 1996 and how three tracks were demoed by Gracious! in mid 1996. Creative difficulties led to the shelving of this project, which resumed early in 1997 when he started work on Mariner on his own, in the re-equipped studio, now called The Music Loft.

Oceanic effects, and The Bright-Eyed Mariner leads us off on this voyage with some ambient arpeggionics, a warm sound that's not especially distinctive except for a tinge of dissonance at the end; after which a big 'hit' reminiscent of the start of Something Magic heralds the sprightly medieval synth-dance of The Feast Is Set; a nice tune, though it alternates with a make-weight motif somewhat akin to the middle of Backgammon.

The Harbour Cleared is more atmospheric again, with wind effects over a breathy ostinato introducing drums and then a lyrical melody, a girl's voice played from a synth keyboard. Then the vocal starts, dry, bodiless: and the listener senses the influence of Islands-period King Crimson, both in terms of the melody, and of the words, by Nostromo collaborator Richard Ashworth: 'Steersman ... sirens ... winds to freeze the blood ... fanned by the gods ... hearth and home ... light-house ... harbour ... sacred liquor stills ...' It's the same sort of territory as Give Me Something to Remember you By, but the music doesn't allow as much space to the words as Brooker did to Sinfield there. I enjoyed this verbal piece and wish, I think, that there had been more Ashworth on the record. Sev writes,

The Storm-blast is a dramatic piece of music, chord-led rather than richly melodic. You can hear the Hesperus going under during the opening bars! One senses that the drama would be greatly enhanced by live performance, where a bit of gritty guitar would do wonders: here a guitar-voiced synth takes a long solo eventually, but a doodling quality remains. A sudden chilling adumbration of A Salty Dog now emerges in Ice Mast-high, in which the familiar four-to-a-bar chording hints at, but never copies, the famous opening of Brooker's Swiss-train masterpiece.

Nostromo paints an attractive synthscape in The Albatross, harmonically bright and restless; an ominous riff, near the end, uses Thin End of the Wedge effects to evoke the doom brought on the ship by the bird's destruction. Idle As A Painted Ship Upon A Painted Ocean again uses Salty chords to depict the spiritual doldrums into which the ship is plunged: this Wagnerian treatment of Brooker's Swiss-train leitmotiv promises well for the end of the suite, when, we imagine, the joy of the full Dog will allow the anguish to thaw and resolve. But how will the bodiless voice we have heard before cope with the final soarings of the title-phrase?

The Ghost-Ship is perhaps the most modern-sounding track on the album, with a little brain-niggling scratchy rhythm itching away behind fatter synth sounds, and a loosely funky drum loop. Not that I'm a great fan of the Portishead school, but this is a track that I think works exceptionally well. To my shame I didn't unaidedly spot the horn motif from another maritime epic, Britten's Peter Grimes, which actually pervades the track: all to Sev's credit that it's so seamlessly integrated!

A much more believable guitar-sound announces the apocalyptic Their Souls from their Bodies fly which, at 2:24, is among the shorter tracks on the album. The Spell is Snapt, on the other hand, is a long 'un, revisiting much of the material in the suite during its seven-minute development. The Salty chord comes in and out of focus. Harsh sounds, bone-like Danse Macabre echoes, sprangling harps, triumphal trumpetings ... it's not unlike some of the mellower moments on A Salty Dog Returns. I wonder if Q magazine's Tom Hibbert would damn Mariner (as he did ASD returns) as 'footling about in the potting shed of sound' ... it would be ill-deserved, since Nostromo's intentions are sweepingly emotional. It must be said, though, that it is hard to imagine a synth album that would stand up, long-term, beside the magic, haunting grandeur of Coleridge's icy masterpiece.

The Spell is Snapt is sustained throughout by a more-or-less jaunty beat that must, we feel sure, let up eventually in deference to the shade of BJ: A Salty Dog duly 'tunes in with a few tweet-tweets' as one would hope, tom-toms pan across a spacious stereo ... but then we're adrift in a world of loose chugging rhythms, miles from the original sound-world.

The chords take off on their own, and where is the vocal? The song's been restructured, perhaps reminding us of the way it starts in the 'Latin' version from Within our House: yet this time it's also been transposed up six semitones (into a key as far from the original as it's possible to get!). Surely the singing will start impossibly high?

No, despite the transposed backing, the vocal starts on the original Brooker note, and the effect is intensely surprising! In order to avoid discordance, it has to shift downwards in the second bar, whereas the Brooker version starts each of the first three bars at exactly the same pitch. This means that the 'no-one leave alive' phrase has to be re-contoured to fit the chords it's floating over, as follows:

And, whether one likes this iconoclasm or no, it certainly helps us to focus on what makes the original so effective: that vocal G# against the G natural in the chord, and the huge upward sweep of the whole phrase, whose compass is eight semitones (in this cover reduced to six). It must be Gary's most sophisticated melody, surely, and it's a brave soul who takes it on at all, let alone recasting it in this radical fashion.

Sev lets the chords and melody reunite conventionally after this, and the harmonic surprise is not so great when the same rewrite recurs in subsequent verses. The instrumental section is slightly reharmonised by a shifted bassline; yet he is mindful enough of the original to assign to his flutey sounds the original string interpolations from verse three, and to ensure that his voice does rise with portamento into the title phrase; it is quite quietly sung, however, and doesn't command the passion of the original.

Procol Harum tampered very little with this song, before Brooker came up with the Latinised version; but there was a time in the mid-70s when they doubled up the second instrumental section, with a luscious modulation, so that the final verse had to be sung a tone higher than the first and second. This extraordinary act of vocal bravado (most singers would be trying to bend the song so that it came out lower for the finale!) can be heard best on a fantastic version of the song from a set known to some fans as The British Biscuit, to others as Five and Dime.

Nostromo's Salty Dog also repeats the final instrumental, but without the luscious key-change, and the song fades over ninety seconds, nodding to Mars from The Planets, and perhaps to the Crimso version as well. It's hard to know how to respond to this conclusion to the Mariner suite: I have a feeling that it might work really well in the ears of someone who was less addicted to the Brooker / Reid original, and had less strong memories of having been stirred by it in concert so many times.

Sev's report above confirms that there is a enthusiastic market for intelligent, nicely-produced concept-albums like this one, and I have no doubt that it will introduce many new listeners to the original A Salty Dog as well as giving a lot of pleasure in its own right. Procol completists will need it, synthophobes probably won't. Next time I teach The Ancient Mariner this record will certainly come into the classroom, alongside the splendid Doré illustrations. And we'll also have a careful look at the liner-note by lyricist Ashworth, erudite, polemic and ingenious.

Powerful stuff, and worth reading in full when you get the album! It's not explicit about the place of A Salty Dog in the suite, but surely the Brooker / Reid song is intended, in this setting, to correspond to the mature voice of the Mariner, to the 'wisdom and taste of middle age'? Gary Brooker may now be turning into another 'ageing genius with all his marbles', yet the harrowing truth is that A Salty Dog was written when he was in his early twenties! Yet The Ancient Mariner would be a perfect jumping-off point, should the mature Harum ever fancy another excursion into the conceptual worlds of In Held, Whaling Stories, and The Worm and the Tree.

How about it, Keith and Gary? Something for the millennium?

Last word from Sev, 20 September 1999:
I think it's a very fair review, and I don't think I'd take issue with anything that you've written ... I'm just finishing Sarah Miles's album this week, and in two weeks' time we start a run of her one-woman show, The Widow Smiles, at the King's Head Theatre in Islington. As well as having recorded all the backing tracks and sound effects, I'm doing the sound. Have a look at her website ...