Clive John - You Always Know Where You Stand With A Buzzard (Reissue) (1975/2004)

In the liner notes to a CD reissue of his solo 1975 album, even Clive John himself concedes that "I had no continuity of musical direction," adding, "I was trying out different things all the time." On You Always Know Where You Stand With a Buzzard, those things include lumpen blues-rock ("Visitin' the Duke"), slightly Quicksilver Messenger Service-Grateful Dead-Frank Zappa-influenced squiggly guitar lines ("Overflow," "Swansea Town"), an impenetrably absurdist spoken word track ("Ferret Interview"), and Zappa-influenced vocal fusion rock ("Hold Your Ferret Aloft"). The remnants of his Man days are heard in occasional careening guitar and keyboard lines. Like many solo albums from members of mid-level bands such as Man, it has a "getting all of these ideas I've built up out of my system" air. And like many solo albums of that ilk, it was unfortunately pretty forgettable, the weirder items lined up uncomfortably against a mix of more standard-issue mid-'70s British album rock and singer/songwriterisms. It's never a good sign, for instance, when a song starts with the lyric "I ride up to London, just to see what I can see" (as "Visitin' the Duke" does). [The 2004 CD reissue on Eclectic includes historical liner notes, and adds a brief coda that didn't make the original album.]