HATTITUDE

Ladies and Gentlemen! Another UNMISSABLE Hatfield and the North release. Please do not worry: scraping the barrel this definitely ain't! Just like its predecessor, HATWISE CHOICE, HATTITUDE is a highly entertaining mixture of live recordings of Hatfields classics (in excellent sound) and expert improvisations, during which all four members of the band are given plenty of chances to shine.

It would be a mistake to say nobody plays music like the Hatfields anymore. Bands like Kenso, Discus and even the Tangent have been trying to do it for years. But any prog freak who cares for the Hatfields' magisterial studio albums will regret the fact there are no more than TWO. So if you can't get enough of those classic Canterbury sounds and would like to hear your favourite tunes (and lyrics) undergoing surprising transformations - look no further!

HATTITUDE may not be available through your usual channels. You'll probably need to order it from burningshed.com, which is run by the musicians themselves. The album is also pricier than your average greatest hits CD, but your purchase will directly benefit the musicians involved. And believe me, the music is worth the asking price. As an extra incentive, HATTITUDE comes with an entertaining 20- page booklet full of anecdotes about the band's wild life on the road. (HAMMER OF THE GODS is nothing compared to this!) The sleevenotes also contain fascinating information from Barbara Gaskin. She points out that, for the studio albums, the Northettes never sang together in the studio. They all learned and recorded their parts separately. Now who'd have thought it?

This is something of a companion piece to Hatwise Choice, with a similar ethos - offering the cream of the Hatfield and the North vaults, helping to fill out the missing pieces in the story of a band who were crucial to the mid-1970s development of the Canterbury scene (containing former members of the likes of Caravan, Khan, Arzachel/Egg, and Matching Mole, and acting as a forerunner to National Health) but whose studio output only consisted of two albums.

Derived from live recordings, radio sessions, and demos, you might expect this to have fairly patchy sound quality, but actually it's much more consistent than you'd expect from such a diversely-sourced collection. As with Hatwise Choice, some of the compositions here may have new titles but prove to be different takes or interpretations on familiar tunes, but there's also enough improvisation and whatnot and sufficient variations from the studio renditions that this doesn't feel redundant.

There may well be more in the vaults than this - but the fact that the Hatfield camp has been satisfied to leave this archival series at two releases suggests that the cream of the crop is already represented here. As with its predecessor, this is in no way as essential as the band's original albums, but once you've digested those it makes an excellent next stop.