Fire - 1970 - The Magic Shoemaker

Fire

1970

The Magic Shoemaker

01. Children Of Imagination

02. Tell You A Story

03. Magic Shoes

04. Reason For Everything

05. Only A Dream

06. Flies Like A Bird

07. Like To Help You If I Can

08. I Can See The Sky

09. Shoemaker

10. Happy Man Am I

11. Children Of Imagination

Bass Guitar, Vocals – Dick Dufall

Drums, Percussion, Vocals – Bob Voice

Guitar, Piano, Organ, Vocals, Narrator – Dave Lambert

Only album by the short-lived British Prog band Fire, led by guitarist Dave Lambert, who also wrote all the music as well as played keyboards and sang, with bassist Dick Dufall and drummer Bob Voice. A typical concept album, based on a fairytale, this release is a wonderful example of early Prog, with elements of Psychedelia, Folk and Rock. For many years the album was a rare collectors' item and this new edition of this gem should delight many Prog fans, who waited to add it to their collection. Lambert would of course later join the legendary Strawbs, a band of which he is still a member today. Warmly recommended!

For me the most depressing thing about today’s rock music is that so much of it exhibits such a lack of creativity or originality. If something sells, clone it, quickly. What a contrast to the late sixties, when for a brief heady spell the artists rather than the bean-counters had the whip hand and the spirit of experimentation soared over everything. Of course this produced as many heroic failures as acknowledged triumphs; Fire’s The Magic Shoemaker bombed on release, and even such retrospective reviews as it has received have frequently been ambivalent. Ah, what have we got here, then? Former psychedelic outfit moves towards progressive rock with a song-cycle that’s too lightweight plot-wise to be a concept album, too naïve and inconsequential to be a rock opera . . . hmmmm. But what is true is that it certainly represents a brave attempt to be different.

London trio Dave Lambert (vcl, gtr, keys), Dick Dufall (bs, vcl) and Bob Voice (drs, vcl) had impressed the Beatles’ Apple label sufficiently to score a deal that resulted in the classic psych A-side Father’s Name Is Dad. The marriage was not a happy one, though, and Fire soon found themselves at odds with the music industry at large. Retiring to the suburbs, Lambert spent a year writing and demo-ing the songs for The Magic Shoemaker, based around a whimsical children’s bedtime story in which a shoemaker cobbles together a pair of shoes that unexpectedly allow the wearer to fly. These are loaned to a king whose country is threatened with war by a neighbouring state; when the king confronts his opposite number from the sky the latter’s army are spooked and a peace treaty is forthcoming. Admittedly, it’s a slender peg to hang your creative coat on, but in its own quirky homespun fashion it works.

The premise of the album is that the narrator (Lambert, in a homely Home Counties accent) tells the story to a group of kids on a coach trip (real kids’ voices, overdubbed travel noises). Short pieces of the narrative occur between and within the songs whose lyrics broadly parallel episodes in the tale, some closely, others in more abstract fashion. Musically the songs follow a basic guitar-driven pop-rock template, varying widely in style and tempo – Tommy would undoubtedly have been an influence – with frequent psychedelic studio enhancement, particularly on the opening Tell You A Story, Only A Dream and the long instrumental coda of Reason For Everything. Pick of the bunch for me is I Can See The Sky with its raw freakbeat vibe, but they’re all quite engaging. Lambert’s lead vocal, somewhere between Daltrey and Bowie, is sometimes somewhat over-affected, but the musicianship is excellent throughout with the basic guitar trio being complemented by Lambert’s modest keyboards and plenty of top-drawer lead guitar work from himself and Velvet Opera’s Paul Brett. Future Strawbs partner Dave Cousins makes a cameo appearance on banjo on the superfluous jugband ditty Happy Man Am I. The production by Pye’s Ray Hammond is unsophisticated but its contemporary favouring of stereo separation and reverb suits the project and the interleaving of songs and narration is seamless.

Predictably, The Magic Shoemaker tanked well and truly on its release on Pye in 1970, being too late for psych and too lightweight for prog, and subsequently became a much-sought-after rarity until its inevitable reissue on CD. The current Sanctuary edition tailgates the original album with the A’s and B’s of both of Fire’s earlier psych singles including the indispensable Father’s Name Is Dad and Treacle Toffee World. As an interesting epilogue, after a long and successful association with Cousins in the Strawbs Lambert reformed Fire for a one-off concert in 2007, performing Shoemaker in extended form including the earlier psych sides and other unreleased songs. The gig was recorded for sound and video and subsequently released on CD by Angel Air as The Magic Shoemaker Live, receiving wide acclaim . . . which is more than the original release achieved.

For months, Decca had sat on “Father’s Name Was Dad,” the debut single from Fire, at the time one of the brightest hopes of the U.K.’s late-’60s progressive/psychedelic underground.

With the agonizing patience of Job, Fire waited for its release, and finally, in March 1968, the track — with its cleverly constructed hooks, earnest melody and richly metaphorical, socially conscious lyrics — was out and getting radio play.

Even the Almighty himself couldn’t have persuaded the band to pull the song off the air and go back into the studio with it, though, perhaps, it needed some tweaking.

On the other hand, back then there was some question as to whether God, or rather Jesus, was as big as The Beatles, and nobody in their right minds would refuse a helping hand from Paul McCartney... if it was offered.

Having just recently signed a publishing deal with The Beatles’ pet label, Apple Records, Fire, was in no position to say “thanks, but no thanks” to whatever McCartney proposed.

“Singles were always released on a Friday in those days, and you would get radio play during the week leading up to that Friday,” recalls David Lambert. “I got a call from Apple over the weekend to say that Paul had heard the track on the radio and loved the song and the riffs but thought the recording could be improved and suggested some changes. So, by the Monday, we were back in the studios working on the track again.”

Among the changes, Lambert added “... a new lead vocal which had a more ‘in your face’ attitude” and an octave part to the riffs, with Lambert playing those riffs over the fade-out.

“(Bassist) Dick (Dufall), (drummer) Bob (Voice) and I added extra vocal harmonies, the whole thing was mixed and that was that,” says Lambert, probably best known for his work with the British progressive-folk institution The Strawbs. “I remember (Decca staff producer) Tony Clarke (of Moody Blues fame) being quite bemused by all this; he couldn’t understand what was wrong with the first version. By the end of that week, the new version was sent out to the radio stations and released. I’ve never heard of such a thing happening before or since; it shows the power that Apple could wield at that time.”

Even the McCartney magic couldn’t transform “Father’s Name Was Dad” into a hit. And yet, somehow, the song has endured, occasionally — as it did in 2004 when The Pet Shop Boys joined the legions of artists who’ve covered it over the years — emerging from the dark closet of mothballed pop music to peek its head out and say “Hello” in the form of a remake. Which is exactly what Fire did in 2007, returning after a 37-year hiatus, to play two triumphant reunion concerts.

Fire played, in its entirety, its fanciful 1970 concept album The Magic Shoemaker, and Lambert, taking liberties with the original script, was able to weave “Father’s Name Was Dad” — and other Fire standouts, including the marching, mind-melting, psych-pop confection “Treacle Toffee World,” not on the record — into the timeless tale of Mark the shoe cobbler. In October, the Angel Air label released Fire’s The Magic Shoemaker Live, further evidence that Fire — even after all these years — still burns.

“The two performances were magical for me; it was so good to be onstage with those guys again after such a long time,” says Lambert. “Since speaking to people who saw both, I get the impression there wasn’t much difference between a 1968 Fire performance and a 2007 one.”

And whatever went on before — from unwelcome delays to ridiculous record label interference — now seems like water under the bridge.