Liquorice John Death

The album cover is by Dave Mundy, who also named the band and wrote the words of one of the songs, which was performed live by Procol Harum on at least one BBC broadcast. Read Gary Brooker's memoir of Dave Mundy

Liner note by Chris Thomas:

In 1970 Gary Brooker asked me to produce Procol Harum's fourth album, Home. By now the line up consisted entirely of ex-members of the 60s R&B group The Paramounts. The most unsettling port of any recording session in those days was always achieving the best sound on each instrument – my aim was hopefully to make the instrument sound better in the control room than in the studio itself, as wished for by The Troggs on their legendary documentary recording of a recording – 'I've got a fucking sound in 'ere ...'

When you are about to cut a new track and you just want to get on with it, you don't really want the producer to ask the drummer to hit the snare drum for the next 15 minutes in order to analyse or correct what needs to be done, so copying what I'd seen at Beatles sessions where they would go through their old favourites, I asked Procol to play anything they liked while we did what we needed to do. Gary was and is totally in his element singing this kind of stuff and I was quite happy to listen and not interrupt, even once we were ready to start the song we had to cut that night. From this was born the idea of hiring a studio for one night to put their old repertoire down.

A few months after Home was released we booked Abbey Rood No 2 from 7 pm to 7am to record as much as we could and have a laugh in the process. We put Gary's vocals through a PA in the studio complete with Watkins copycat echo and invited Jack Lancaster from Blodwyn Pig to play sax and gave each song one take, including a new song that the boys had written specifically for the night. By 6.30 am they started Keep a Knocking – you can hear the results – time for bed.

Sometime later during the construction of Air Studios in Oxford Circus they were giving the Neve desk in No.1 a trial before the studio area was completed. I took the tapes in and mixed about a dozen of my favourites and took a seven and a half inch copy for myself.

A few years later Roger Scott at Capitol Radio heard of these tapes, and I lent them out for broadcast, never seeing them again until Gary phoned me a couple of weeks ago to tell me he had found some tapes and did I know anything about them. Well, they are my long-lost copies which you are listening to now.

If someone somewhere is holding on to the masters – you're too late!

Chris Thomas 1998