Another release from the Voiceprint stable, this one is rather a thornier issue than the more-than-acceptable Man DVD 'Tapes of the Unexpected'.
I say 'thornier' because this is one of those regrettable situations where you really want to praise the protagonists for their diligence in finishing up a project involving the retrieval of rare archival footage. The trouble is, when you see the finished product, you wonder why they'd bothered in the first place.
Let's start at the beginning. RENAISSANCE were, in effect, what Keith Relf and drummer Jim McCarty did after the long-running saga that was The Yardbirds finally petered out. From the footage here, it seems Relf thought mixing and matching Elizabethan madrigals with Prog-gy sounds was the way forward. Disappointingly, the two tracks here dating to the original line-up of the band (also featuring a very virginal, Marianne Faithfull-style turn from vocalist Jane Relf) peddle an awkward folky fusion, not helped by the fact Jane was clearly no Sandy Denny.
Unfortunately, Renaissance Mk.1 were inspired compared to the short-lived line-up that reconvened in 1971. Despite the band having been basically Relf and McCarty's baby, both of them were long gone, not to mention the rest of the original members. The line-up captured by Belgian television for a special in November 1970 featured only two of the personnel (keyboard player John Tout and guitarist Mike Dunsford) who would stay around for the band's commercial purple patch in the mid-70s.
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This brief 'second coming' of Renaissance included vocalists Binky Cullom and Terry Crowe and my antenna was already quivering when the latter admits to their inspiration being drawn “from Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky” in a quick interview segment. Sadly, the end results are even scarier. Yes, there's an underlying Chamber/ Classical influence, but that doesn't stop the band committing the worst kind of weirdy-beardy Prog excess. By the time they're all donning headbands and tolerating the sound of tweeting birds on 'Mr. Ping', my patience has been exhausted. I hear this and I know exactly how necessary the Sex Pistols were.
I really dislike writing a review of this nature. My head is rushing to congratulate those involved for their love and belief in the restoration of grainy, long-forgotten footage, yet my heart wants to shoot them for making me endure a DVD where the best bit is the footage of the band wandering around in a cabbage field passing around bottles and smokes. Let's beg to differ on this one and say it's really not my bag. Maaaan.
Voiceprint online
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