SPOOKY TOOTH & PIERRE HENRY: CEREMONY

This is often one of the most maligned album in the Spooky Tooth discography, probably because the combination of avant garde composer Pierre Henry with Spooky Tooth is regarded as a mismatch, much like Lou Red and Metallica decades later and the maligned Lulu in 2011. One listen to Ceremony and you get the impression that a.) Neither Pierre Henry nor Spooky Tooth listened to each others work, and so it sounds as if Pierre Henry did his thing, then Spooky Tooth their thing, and then have them combined, and voila! or b.) you get the impression that neither Pierre Henry had an understanding of rock music nor Spooky Tooth had an understanding of avant garde. So I can understand why people might run at the thought of this album, even I admit that some of Pierre Henry's part threatens to drown out Spooky Tooth's music. Thanks to the Electric Prunes releasing Mass in F Minor, I imagined this was the reason for Spooky Tooth to do their own rock Mass, but unlike the Prunes, they didn't use Gregorian chanting in a rock context. Now let me tell you that Spooky Tooth's end of things is nothing short of amazing. They really rock like there's no tomorrow. I can't believe this is that same Gary Wright later of Dream Weaver fame, because he really rips it on organ here! The problem comes with Pierre Henry. It's like he never even heard what the band put down before he did his part, as mentioned earlier, so it sounds like a bunch of random sounds that rarely seem to go appropriately with the music. One could say it sounds like a bad Krautrock album, because the best Krautrock out there the musicians involved had a full understanding of both rock and avant garde (in fact several Can members were Stockhausen disciples) and took that knowledge to their full advantage. There's a couple parts of this album that annoys me, particularly "Jubilation". Although the band puts on some killer bluesy guitar riffs on that song, you keep hearing this "bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi bi" voices that NEVER stops. Despite the obvious flaws, there are some really brilliant and amazing moments put by the band, and if they did this by themselves without Pierre Henry, this could probably felt as one of Spooky Tooth's defining moments. Yet I still want to give it a four star rating (it would be five if Pierre Henry took his approach better) because I was blown away by what the band were doing.

The first time that I listened to this album was in the late seventies in an AM Radio station's broadcast . That AM radio station from my city was called "Radio Capital" (I don't know if it still exists) and it had a then famous radio programme called "Vibraciones", which some days of the week broadcasted some albums by some bands at night.

For this album, the original bassist of the band Greg Ridley (who went to form HUMBLE PIE) was replaced by Andy Leigh. The album's full title is "Ceremony - An Electronic Mass", and it was released as a collaboration by SPOOKY TOOTH / PIERRE HENRY, but in France it was credited as being an album by "PIERRE HENRY AVEC SPOOKY TOOTH".

This is an Experimental / Avant Garde / Rock Music collaboration between French Electronic Music composer PIERRE HENRY and the English Rock band SPOOKY TOOTH. I don't know how this collaboration was agreed and done, but it really sounds more like HENRY recorded his electronic music parts after the band recorded their musical parts. It really gives the impression that both parts were recorded separatedly and later mixed together song by song, which each song credited to be composed by HENRY with GARY WRIGHT (the main composer in the band). The sound mixing in my opinion is not very good, because HENRY's parts are more at the front of the mixing, and the music of the band is more in the background, with HENRY's parts sometimes sounding more like "interferences" to the band's music. This album has very good musical parts played by the band with the added electronic effects, noises and voices by HENRY. But, as a whole, it really wasn't a very successful collaboration. It has some interesting musical parts, but, as WRIGHT said in one interview, it really wasn't an album done in SPOOKY TOOTH's typical musical style, and it wasn't considered by him and the band as a SPOOKY TOOTH album, but the record label anyway wanted to release it as an album by SPOOKY TOOTH with PIERRE HENRY, against the band's wishes

Considered by Wright as a "failure" that "ended our career then", I think that this album has some interesting moments, even if I am not very much a fan of Experimental / Avant Garde music. Wright and Leigh left the band after this album was released, and the remianing members of the band (Grosvenor, Harrison and Kellie) remained together for a short time to record their next album titled "The Last Puff" (1970).