Review of Barclay James Harvest's Everyone is Everybody Else

Released 1974

"I didn't ask to be born and I don't ask to die
I'm an endless dream, a gene machine
That cannot reason why".

I didn't actually purchase a copy of this album until a couple of years ago, but I have known every nuance of it for over twenty five years, as this was a favourite album of my Fathers. Why my Father, whose music collection was restricted to a handful of cassettes which were kept in the car, would have been attracted to a Barclay James Harvest album remains a mystery to me.

I had probably heard the album dozens of times before it clicked that it was by BJH. A constant musical reference point for me in the early eighties was a long lost copy of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll; an excellent compendium of band histories and discographies covering the period from the 1950's to the time at which it was published in 1983. I would often mentally refer back to entries in this book when thumbing through the bins in second hand record shops.

One day, whilst waiting for my Father to fill up the car, I absentmindedly dug into the passenger door recess to look at the cassette boxes contained therein. Seeing that one of the cassettes was by a band listed in the aforementioned book was a genuine surprise. I had seen the box many times, but couldn't get past the fact that it had (and has) one of the worst covers of all time, firmly rooted to its year of release: bum-fluff moustaches, stripey jumpers and orange bomber jackets rendering the band logo all but invisible in the cassette format.

When the engine was started the cassette started once more and I listened to it properly for the first time. Why had I not heard the clear and obvious similarity to Pink Floyd before? The plaintive keyboard sound and guitar in particular were very similar, as was the overall stoned melancholy that pervaded the whole album. I was stunned that this had passed me by me many, many time before.

However, I knew that my Father was a Moody Blues fan, and I had read that BJH were often referred to as a poor man's Moody Blues; indeed they embraced the label and released a song of that name. I still thought that they more closely resembled Pink Floyd.

That night I sneaked the tape into my bedroom and listened to it through my headphones.

While John Lees and Les Holroyd's lyrics were trying to be a 'deep' and 'significant' as Roger Waters, they weren't quite succeeding. However, in terms of the melancholy I mentioned earlier, they certainly gave him a run for his money. This was hardly uplifting music.

The lyrics may not have been particularly inspiring, but the musicianship was a joy to behold: the last third of the opening track, Child of The Universe has a wonderfully lush mellotron and Floydian slow dreamy doom laden guitar, equal to anything I heard up to that point.

With the benefit of the twenty something intervening years, I can now see that the production on this album is superlative, having been rarely equalled: the bridge of Paper Wings which starts 56 seconds in, is still revealing layers to me now after countless listens, and the piano at the beginning of The Great 1974 Mining Disaster is just gorgeously executed.

Huddled in a dark corner of my bedroom, with a red light bulb and the volume as loud as I could bear, I was delighted to have found another exquisite example of prog rock from the most unexpected source. Swathes of fluid guitar, throbbing keyboards, precise poised drumming and cleverly orchestrated harmonies washed though me, pulling deeper into the genre.

I listened to the final track, For No One, over and over that evening. The huge mellotron resounded around the headphones, beautifully interplayed with the joint lead vocals over the chorus, perfectly concluding with one of my favourite ever guitar solos. BJH; a guilty pleasure to this day.