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.
…During the sixties and the seventies, several groups came out of there [Delivery], changing
completely the way of playing jazz and combining it with rock music: Soft Machine, Caravan, Henry
Cow, Gilgamesh were some of them. …
– Enrique Gomez, progVisions, March 200,
www.progvisions.net 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.
