Delivery - Fools Meeting (1999)

The roots of Canterbury lie in albums such as Fools Meeting… it’s the first album for Hatfield and the North/National Health core members Phil Miller and Pip Pyle as well as Nucleus and Soft Machine bassist Roy Babbington… This was the core of the line-up together with Phil’s brother, Steve… Rounding out the instrumentation was Lol Coxhill whose brash association with Kevin Ayers and the Whole World was only a short year earlier… Vocalist Carol Grimes reminds me of a jazzy Janis Joplin or Julie Driscoll with a Middle Eastern slant on her vibrato and even the bluesy elements of Maggie Bell… with a “soon-to-be-famous” crackshot backing band from the time period. But the real Delivery was the band you hear in its early phases on the Keith Jarret cover, “Is It Really the Same” and in the disc’s closing track, “One for You” with Richard Sinclair on bass. They were a young and gifted set of improvisers, innovative and communicative within a healthy gestation period. Album repackaging has been lovingly assembled by Bill Ellsworth. …the liner notes…detail…the beginnings of Steve and Pip entrenched in the British blues boom. Fools Meeting is an essential archive recording on par with Arzachel and Camembert Electrique.
– Jeff Melton, Expose, #18, Nov. 1999

Fools Meeting was the band’s only album released in 1970 and out of print for over 25 years. As well as the complete album, this Cuneiform release also includes great alternate take as well as two live tracks, all sounding unbelievably better than the vinyl… In addition, you get a 12 page booklet crammed with the band’s history – as well as their more well documented post-Delivery activity…
Of course this is always going to sound very dated, but…after a while that is lost in the lushness of the band’s sound and the power of Carol’s vocals. …the overriding constants are those vocals… somewhere between Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. …
But what about the rest of the band? …we have a quartet of the top English jazz rock musicians ever. Check out the Keith Jarrett-penned instrumental Is It Really The Same for any proof… Lol’s sax is superb, but when Phil comes in…we really start rockin’. And the culmination of sax and guitar is exquisite! ….Pip always has been one of my favourite drummers… And this is where it all started!
…The final track, One For You, is a superb seven minute instrumental recorded in 1971 with the line-up Steve, Phil and Pip along with…bass player Richard Sinclair. …this is my track of the album – if only because it falls so much into that Caravan-esque Hatfield genre, showing that even in a year, the band had already moved on.