Spooky Tooth's 1969 album 'Ceremony: An Electronic Mass' must be one of the most divisive records ever released. Despite the project being instigated by Gary Wright, it is considered by him to have ended the band's career, and has been described by others as being "one of the great screw-ups in rock history". Spooky Tooth wrote and recorded six tracks, and then sent them over to Pierre Henry to add his music concrete contributions to them, which generally involved him hitting anvils with pipes, grunting over the music, or adding three minutes of cacophonous bells to the end of 'Prayer'. As Wright describes it, "...we did a project that wasn't our album. It was with this French electronic music composer named Pierre Henry. We just told the label, 'You know this is his album, not our album. We'll play on it just like musicians.' And then when the album was finished, they said, 'Oh no no — it's great. We're gonna release this as your next album.' We said, 'You can't do that. It doesn't have anything to do with the direction of 'Spooky Two' and it will ruin our career.' And that's exactly what happened". Wright was so unhappy with this decision that he left the band following the release of the album. Following a comment by Unknown on the 'Atom Heart Mother' post, I looked into removing Pierre Henry's contributions from the album, and although some of them were too deeply embedded to remove completely, you can now hear some really fine music from the band coming through, with great guitar work and strong arrangements. This could have been a great Christian rock album if it had been released as a purely Spooky Tooth record, and at the moment this is the closest that we'll get to hearing that concept.
Track listing
01 Have Mercy
02 Jubilation
03 Confession
03 Prayer
05 Offering
06 Hosanna
The Album I wish would exist was the one were there was More Pierre Henry and lee Spooky Tooth. Could you not do that, please.
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