Salisbury: original liner notes
Original liner notes by Ken Hensley.
Uriah Heep — Salisbury
Side one, band one is always important to an album and has to be chosen carefully. We chose Bird Of Prey partly because we open with it on live gigs and because it represents the heavier side of the band. Written in Richmond last summer.
From a contrast point of view, The Park follows well. It began as a poem I wrote in Stanwell Villiage, Middlesex, last August. The music was composed on a Harmonium we found in a beautiful house in Hamburg a little while later. The lyric takes us into the drifting, essentially reflective instrumental section and the final verse. Here the band interprets a sadly incessant life-trend.
Time To Live was put together at rehearsal in Chiswick, London in August and tells of a guy getting back to the world and his woman after a long time in prison (a maternal form of captivity). David, whilst nicely into his own lyric, isn’t singing from experience!
Lady In Black, written early November in Bradford, was inspired by the vision of an unknown girl and is unusually constructed using four acoustic guitars as the basic and a heavy vocal chant arrangement. Looking back, it could be based around a nice time in Munich.
Side two and High Priestess, which speaks simply of the happiness that can be created by “together” people. Written in Germany early September and nice and heavy — perhaps.
That brings us to Salisbury, title track, and our first trip into large-scale composing. Complimented so excellently and unusually by John Fiddy’s arrangement for brass and woodwind. There are floods of spaced-out sound and then almost baroque movement by cor-anglais and flutes around David’s vocal. Organ and orchestra begin together to get into the basic context of the piece. The opening vocal leads into the organ solo driven hard by Paul’s bass and the orchestra grooving incredibly! The whole thing comes together finally before an abrupt mood change lays it down for more vocal and Mick’s beautifully constructed guitar solo. There are so many different sounds going on it’s easy to pick up something new each time around! The opening comes back briefly before the climax and the gentle bass clarinets in “fifths” which put us all slowly back on the ground. This track was a complete gas to record, it really was!
This, our second album, is a sincere exposure of our progression and we await your judgement. Thanks again to everyone and more for the chance to make this record and we are already looking ahead to the next one.
Ken Hensley, 1970
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