LIFEBLUD
Find Your Wings
Saturn Eye Records
History is a fickle force. Sometimes, in its storytelling, it might praise or condemn us or, at other times, in its great hurry to create new stories by which it exists, simply not notice us.
Going back to the 1970s, history barely noticed Hemel Hempstead band Lifeblud, missing out, I think, on so many gifted songs from the co-founder of the band, Roger Knott. But history has strange ways of returning to the past in its impulse to seek out yet another story. We, its audience, are therefore fortunate to be able to hear, in a new story from the past, the songs of Lifeblud, now re-energised on several recently-released albums (of note are Songs 1973-78 and Be Thou My Very Armour). However, the latest issue, Find Your Wings, featuring the two cofounders Roger Knott (voice, keyboards and guitar) and Rob Burns (bass guitar), reaches a pinnacle in their albums to date.
The addition of talented session musicians to this album showcases Roger’s songs at their finest with recordings from 1984 to 2024, and compositions dating back to the band’s inception in the early 1970s. It is therefore a collection from the archive, the producer of which is the aforementioned Rob Burns, now an Honorary Associate Professor of Music, assisted by colleagues at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he now lives.
There’s a wide variety of songs ranging from the band’s 70s classic, Oakenshade, arranged on this occasion with a sitar, adding a sense of mystery; through to the exciting rock songs, Another Lover At Home (undoubtedly single material), and the eerily moving Strange Powers, complete with a stellar haunting guitar solo. And then there are two honky-tonk keyboards and kazoo songs, Younger Days and Fruit of the Vine. Also included are three folky ballads: If Love Can Be Saved, What We Do To Survive and The House Where We Lived, featuring harmonium, mandolin and violin, blending with the ubiquitous acoustic and electric guitars.
If that wasn’t enough, then there are two beautiful country-music influenced songs, the Cajunf lavoured All For The Lady and the pedal steel-driven title track. The record concludes with an instrumental, Journey’s End, with its softly melodic guitars, bass and programmed keyboards.
This album presents a rich mix of songs but with a theme and style that holds them all together, melodies that are immediately memorable, ear-worms you’ll be pleased to listen to long after f irst hearing the songs (great on headphones).
So, if music really is one of the most potent constituents in the lifeblood we need to live, then this aptly named band with their perennially tuneful songs will, with some exposure, perhaps ‘make it’ this time to be recounted among the stories that history tells.
John Sivyer
veteran British music journalist,
contributor to Melody Maker, Sounds and Music Week. September 2025
Roger Knott - PULL THE PLOUGH THAT FURROWS DEEPEST
From the back catalogue of singer, musician and composer, Roger Knott and his UK band, Lifeblud, this is an exciting and very well conceived album.
Tracks on it were recorded between 2017-2021 in Nashville, TN, but date back to a tremendously creative time in Britain, now revisited and revised to great effect. They showcase Roger’s always poetic and melodic songs, and in their lyrics, such well observed hymns to our loves, our lives and those confusing, painful and contrary times of great romance.
The opening track, Pathway, with lyrics from which the album title originates, sets the course for this adventurous journey through his songs of glorious yesterdays. Tender songs such as Summer Flower and Waterside; and then the love addiction to ‘another’ is well described in Strange Powers with its haunting acoustic guitar melody. Quite different from the following, heart denied love of The Great Lost Love. But then there are also punchy social commentary songs such as City Wheels with Thomm Jutz on organ, reminiscent of Procol Harum’s iconic sound.
This album features some very talented session musicians who in the Nashville tradition ‘serve the song’. Most prominent amongst these is Thomm Jutz on acoustic, electric and bass guitars, who also engineered, mixed and produced this album. Catch him on the song Rescue to hear his inspiring guitar work that resurfaces throughout the album, and to the closing track Man Of War with its delicious guitar solo. But also his acoustic guitar with Jeff Taylor’s occasional accordion and Kevin McKendree’s Hammond B3 behind. The drumming of Lynn Williams and Pat McInerney is always tight and solid, to move the music along with no excessive frills from any of the backing musicians to detract from the always sensitive songs.
In the UK sixties and much of the seventies, the music scene then teemed with so many innovative and exciting bands to marvel at, that the recorded world of music missed out on Roger Knott and his enthusiastic band, Lifeblud. But here are newly minted tracks, reminiscent of that era, fresh and vibrant as if we all were still alive in those halcyon times of love and hope, of optimism and a genuine sensitivity. Highly original songs that, while in the genre of the melodies and riffs from those times past, are yet contemporary and so avoid the memories and nostalgia experienced when listening to the albums of that time.
This surely then is a refreshing treasure in these rappingly harsh and always complaining times. Those who resonate with such comment will be delighted with these newly released songs from the pen of Roger Knott.
John Sivyer
Former music journalist,
Contributor to Melody Maker, Sounds and Music Week
ROGER KNOTT
****
Pull The Plough That Furrows Deepest
Because my pre-adolescent self was very much a fan of Frank Ifield, I couldn't help but find 'Swallows Are Leaving' the most immediately alluring of the fourteen tracks presented here, because it reiterated in more subjective fashion the overall thrust of the late Australian's 1964 single, 'Summer Is Over'.
Furthermore it prompted the seeking out of the 'Swallows Are Leaving' on Knott's Echoes In Time, recorded seven years ago; that release contained, too, 'So Be It' and 'Strange Powers' which are also among reworkings here of tracks that, like 'Man Of War' and, characterised by a lengthy introit, 'Waxing Of The Moon', stretch as far back as his membership of Lifeblud, a 'poetry-rock' trio from Hertfordshire, which remained active until the early 70s.
However, just beyond the turn of the century, Roger began recording in Nashville, visitations affecting both his vocal delivery and musical approach, as demonstrated on autumn 2023's Nashville Sessions retrospective. Yet, if you've been hitherto unaware of this and the rest of Knott's previous output, then Pull The Plough...'s enchanting overhauls may stand as the only versions, deserving to exist in a self-contained orbit from where backtracking can begin.
Alan Clayson
Rock'n'Reel Magazine
Jan/Feb 2025