COOL WATER

Caravan's Cool Water is derived from two very different Caravan quartets. The first seven tracks were recorded back in 1977 by the lineup of Pye Hastings, Jan Schelhaas, Richard Coughlan, and a returning Richard Sinclair, with the intention of demoing material for the followup to Better By Far. A friendly tip-off warned them that they were about to be dropped from Arista, and so the band kept hold of the tape.

Fast forward to the early 1990s, when the HTD label became interested in releasing Caravan material - new or archival. Pye dusted off the tapes, gave them a polish-up, and then recorded the last four tracks on this release to fluff this up to full album length. These later tracks were performed by a lineup of Pye himself, plus Jimmy Hastings on sax (a logical call given that Jimmy was a regular guest on classic-era Caravan albums), Rod Edwards on keyboards, John Gustavson of Quatermass, Roxy Music, and Ian Gillian Band fame on bass, and Marillion's Ian Mosley on drums. (Notably, Pye's own son Julian Hastings handled the production desk.)

What do we get out of this patched-together package, then? Well, if you were hoping for some of Caravan's proggier material, you'll be sorely disappointed here, but then again Caravan themselves seemed to give up on trying to produce new longer-form pieces well before this (the "Grubby Little Oik" suite on Blind Dog At St Dunstans being the last gasp of that side of their songwriting).

Instead, what you get here for the most part is whimsical, sunny, quirky pop with a progressive sheen to it. That may bug some listeners, though it's worth noting that this sort of thing has been a component of Caravan's music from the start - think of their debut album, think of Golf Girl from In the Land of Grey and Pink, think most especially of the post- Blind Dog studio albums.

The thing is, mildly progressive art-pop with an air of gentle whimsy might have been all the rage in the 1960s, when Caravan had their roots, but by 1977 the appetite of the mass audience had shifted. In retrospect, it's no surprise that Arista passed on this material. It's not that it's bad - in fact, it's optimistic, sunny, and under the right circumstances I find it a real mood-lifter - it's just that, even with that dirty, funky bassline on Ansaphone or the disco atmosphere on Cold Fright, it still was deeply unfashionable at the time.

One might speculate about this being a reaction to punk, though to be honest I'm more inclined to see it the natural continuation of the path the band were taking on Better By Far. In principle, shutting these tapes in a safe and then pulling them out after enough time had passed to give them the air of nostalgia and a "lost album" was probably the right call, because I can't imagine this would have fared any better in 1977 had it been released then.

That said, Cool Water dropped right in the middle of the grunge era, so it wasn't exactly going to find an enthusiastic mainstream audience then either. Of course, you're looking at the early days of Internet prog fandom coalescing at around this time, and that audience might have been very excited about a lost Caravan album - had the music on it been something like Nine Feet Underground. As it is, the prog fandom of the time doesn't seem to have embraced the lost 1977 tapes all that much either.

What of the new songs? Well, they're in more or less the same vein in terms of being jaunty pop numbers with Canterbury inflections; Ian Mosely seems to enjoy adding a bit more of a jazzy vibe to his playing than is typical of his work with Marillion, for instance. Unfortunately, the production takes a notable hit - clearly, these tracks were knocked out in a hurry in a less-than-stellar studio setup, but when your 1990s-era tracks don't sound as nice as some 15-year- old demos something has clearly gone rather wrong. You Won't Get Me Up In One of Those is probably the worst of these tracks; To the Land of My Fathers manages something of a course correction, announcing itself with a lagubrious instrumental section and mellow sax solo that establishes a nice, dreamy texture that's missing from much of the rest of the album and makes a nice change of pace.

In the end, then, Cool Water seems to have been destined to be appreciated only by the Caravan die-hards. If, like me, you're one of those freaks who thinks Better By Far is better than Cunning Stunts (because Cunning Stunts doesn't know whether it wants to be full-on prog or a prog-tinged art-pop album, whilst Better By Far at least knows what it wants to be and tackles that head on), and who loves the poppier side of Caravan as much as their prog side, then Cool Water might be interesting to take a dip in. It's far from essential, though, and may be best thought of as a solid 1978 EP with a short 1990s-era demo attached.