Biography
Galliard were formed in Birmingham, in the summer of 1968. They cut two albums, “Strange Pleasure” and “New Dawn”, both of which were produced by Phil Wainman, drummer and future Bay City Rollers manager. In my humble opinion these are two of the best, most powerful, most vibrant albums of the era.
Much of Galliard’s albums are like a Happening. A pop band who’ve gone progressive are performing at the same time as a brass section who were soul but have now got into free-style jazz; or like listening to two radios, one tuned to pop, one tuned to jazz (but without the discordance). It’s a great mix. A friend of mine once summed them up with the following words after seeing them live for the first time: “Like Blood Sweat & Tears meets the Soft Machine.” I hear no reason to change this.
Galliard have very much remained a prog-rock collectors preserve, although they are much loved by real music lovers: knowledgeable jazz freaks, and sampling DJs, but truly open minded fans of psychedelia will also find much to admire and enjoy. This is not formulaic psychedelia, that’s not what Galliard were about, but if you appreciate horns whilst not taking your eye off the ball marked Nirvana then you’ll dig them. And be warned: if you’ve been listening to too much lite-pop then these will hit you like a ten ton truck doing 80mph.
– Dave Thubron, Sweet Floral Albion Issue 36. –
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
