SILENT DANCE

Those who remember those days tell me that back when the new wave of British prog was in full swing in the early- to-mid 1980s, the top of the hierarchy was generally considered to be Marillion, Pallas, Twelfth Night, and Solstice. (Now-legendary names like IQ or Pendragon occupied a more secondary tier - perhaps headlining sometimes, but stepping back to take a support role when one of the bigger names was playing.)

Of these four, three would go on to sign major label contracts and make a shot for the big time. Marillion, out of all the pack, can be said to have truly made the most of this opportunity - most prog fans already know their history. Pallas and Twelfth Night's major label releases, on the other hand, sank like a stone - and the accepted wisdom is that this was due in part to attempts to make their sound more poppy and commercial. Certainly, Twelfth Night's self-titled album on Virgin is regarded as a bit simplistic compared to the dark depths of Fact and Fiction, whilst the original release of Pallas' The Sentinel was fumbled due to scrambling the intended running order of the Atlantis Suite, carving out great chunks of it and replacing them with poppier standalone tracks.

Solstice, on the other hand, stood apart from all this, being the only one of the Big Four of the era who never signed to a major label - and never intended to. This, perhaps, arises in part from their different ethos; while they were Marquee regulars and warmly embraced by the audience there, their hearts were really in the free festival scene of the era which also formed a home for the likes of Hawkwind and Ozric Tentacles.

The original lineup of Solstice would break up in 1985 and the band would go on hiatus for some years after that, and whilst by all reports this was entirely down to internal tensions within the group, at the same time there's a certain aptness to this: under assault from a government hostile to it, the free festival scene would find its activities increasingly curtailed as the 1980s ground on, with the 1985 "Battle of the Beanfield" at Stonehenge proving an ugly turning point.

We can be glad, then, that before they split the good-natured hippies of Solstice produced this lone album, in which band leader Andy Glass' subtle guitar, Marc Elton's soaring violin, and the Jon Anderson-meets-Annie Haslam vocals of Sandy Leigh combine to present an intriguingly unique sound in the early neo-prog scene. True to Leigh's singing style, I sense strong hints of Renaissance's folk-classical blend and Yes' spirituality in this music, with perhaps a little influence from other folk-prog bands like Jethro Tull (especially from the Songs From the Wood period).

Previous editions of Silent Dance have suffered a little from a production job which, to my ears, isn't quite suited to teasing out the prog complexities of the material, but the Definitive Edition (which includes a number of bonus tracks offering a real feast of 1980s Solstice) does a good job of cleaning things up. It's not a perfect album - Cheyenne, whilst it unquestionably has good intentions, seems awfully keen on taking up the cause of Native Americans without showing much evidence that the band had actually consulted with representatives of the community or really looked into the issue beyond typical New Age "let's cosplay as Native Americans and borrow their culture" stuff of the sort which was rife at the time, but despite these aspects it's still a very pretty number. And when the album really works there's a sense of majesty to it which is uniquely Solstice.