ONCE UPON A TIME IN ENGLAND VOLUME 1

I am always seriously doubtful about records like this one. When a band releases all his "lost jewels", most of the time they should have remained so. Of course, I am a bit biased about Pendragon but nevertheless, let's have an honest ear to this one.

"The Pleasure Of Hope" mixes true symph prog and candid / naive moments. Very pleasant anyway and a good start (this number will pursue its career on a later Pendragon release). The second version, only with piano, does not hold the same promise IMO.

With the first notes from the according "Insomnia", I'm afraid that I come back to earth. Although it features Genesis-like keys and guitar, the vocal part of this rockier number is truely terrible. It should have remained an instrumental.

Same problem with the vocals in "Armageddon". He sounds like he wants to emulate Gregg Lake on the hard side (while he is almost screaming). Not brilliant to say the least. The general mood of this song is rather ELP-esque I should say. Sound on this one is below average. The contrast with "Dawn In Vienna" is complete : a spacey and instrumental number featuring a nice acoustic guitar solo, played on a very quite background keyboards.

"Catch Me If You Can" also holds some Pendragon flavour but sound is again rather poor (but these were demo tapes of some sort, so I guess that it was as good as we could get them). Great keys but globally great middle instrumental part. Vocal being again, below par. "Melody" the well named is a nice song with a strong rock beat. Extremely poppish but featuring great keys. I have the impression so far that more place is left for the keys than for the guitar which will be the opposite in more traditional and later Pendragon releases.

The long live song "Stan & Ollie" is not too bad either. A very good intro, a bit hard. This track again offers some similarities with ELP. The last part (over three minutes), will be dedicated to the band presentation.

Let's face the truth, this is Pendragon's prehistory. Vocals are rather poor almost all the way through. The emotion that we'll get in later releases (especially starting with "The World") is not there yet. Nick's guitar is more rhythmic than leading. Some poor moments as well like : "Dead Stop", "Déjà Vue" and "Is This Life".

The jazzy "Dream Of Tomorrow" is more sophisticated, with more complex structure than even a later Pendragon song which, we know that, are rather straight-forward. One of the good discoveries on "Once Upon, Volume One". "Eye For an Eye" also holds a lot of the later Pendragon. A prog/pop song with a catchy chorus.

This album is for fans only who are willing how could the ancestor of Pendragon sound like, but you should not start with this Pendragon release if you would like to discover this nice band (their wonderful trilogy "The World", "The Window Of Life" and of course "The Masquerade Overture" are all there to please you).