We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago….
The band Atomic Rooster was formed in 1969 when Vincent Crane & Carl Palmer left the Crazy World of Arthur Brown to form their own group.
They released a number of prog-rock LPs in the early 70’s but by 1972 they were a much different band. Palmer had left in 1970 to join Keith Emerson & Greg Lake. A number of other band members were gone by 1972 so Crane brought in some new guys to keep going.
Chris Farlowe was recruited from the band Colosseum to sing lead. With Steve Bolton on guitar and Ric Parnell on drums the band released “Made In England”.
The LP is a departure from the more progressive earlier efforts and sounds more like a blues-rock band although with Crane hammering his keyboards they could still bring the prog sound at times.
Here is an example of the band live at the time…
I’m not a big fan of Farlowe’s yowling vocals but he did have his followers who liked what he brought to the table. Crane is excellent and Bolton delivers some nice guitar on songs like “Never To Lose” and the unfortunatly named “All In Satan’s Name”. Other tunes that stand out are “Stand By Me” , “Breathless” and the sinister sounding “Little Bit Of Inner Air”.
Look at this as a snapshot of a changing time in music and a band that really didn’t know where they wanted to go.
 
