Mirage and MoonMadness remasters by Camel (Cherry Red CDs)
The cover of Camel’s second album, Mirage, looks like the artist had a shake and needed a fix. Maybe it was hard to focus, or maybe it was the dope haze? Maybe he couldn’t get the ciggies from France. Either way, a fix of full-on progrock psychosis with Tolkienesque lyrics would have quickly straightened him out back in 1974.
Andy Latimer’s guitar and flute cut through the hyper-busy drumming and PeteBardens’ at-times-excessive keyboards to accentuate the pomp and circumstance, then everyone reins it in so we can hear mystical love songs (‘Saw you sitting on a sunbeam’! Really?) and fantastical episodes by Hobbits, wizards and Elven hordes. It’s all rather of its time… It was always a clunky album in the main, and didn’t show much of the promise that the band would make good on with their second album, The Snow Goose, which also gets the reissue treatment later this Spring.
Moonmadness built on the compositional skills of the Snow Goose album, had a much slicker production, held back on OTT keyboards and dropped the orchestration. It had a vague concept feeling that didn’t really exist and didn’t make the most of a brilliant drawing of a camel in a spacesuit, preferring to use an ethereal landscape painting for its cover. But the album hit the charts, and still sounds enticing – if again, dated – today, particularly the tail-chasing ‘Song Within a Song’ and the evocative ‘Lunar Sea’ (Geddit?).
Honesty forces me to say that whilst it’s great to have crystal clear new versions of the album, I don’t need new mixes, nor most of the demo tracks added on as bonus material, although some of the tracks from Mirage have a certain raw edge to them that would have been good to retain for the album. Camel always felt like a second-tier band, and they never quite scaled the heights of the charts let alone gained across-the-board critical success, but I am not alone in having a soft spot for some of their music, and fond memories of them in concert.
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Rupert Loydell