The story of Stackridge and The Man In The Bowler Hat is one of British rock’s great absurdist episodes: a Bristol band of waistcoat-wearing eccentrics talking their way into George Martin’s orbit, cutting a genuinely ambitious album at AIR Studios, and then finding out it had charted by reading Melody Maker while sitting with their feet up at a petrol station in Yeovil.
By 1973, Stackridge had already racked up a serious set of credentials for a band who treated music hall, classical, rock and Goon Show absurdism as equally valid source material. They had opened and closed the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, put out two albums on MCA, toured with Wishbone Ash and Renaissance, recorded a Radio 1 session for John Peel, and appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test. More than 300 shows deep, they had built a fanbase famous for bringing props to gigs: rhubarb for Marzo Plod, dustbin lids for Four Poster Bed (Let There Be Lids).
How Stackridge ended up in George Martin’s studio
The route to Martin was gloriously low-key. His sons Greg and Alexis kept showing up at Stackridge gigs and, by their own account, loved the band. Manager Mike Tobin had taken a role with Martin’s AIR Enterprises and, with Martin coming into the office regularly, built up a rapport. ‘One day he had the temerity to say, “Greg and Alexis have been coming to my band’s gigs and they absolutely love them. Would you be interested in listening to some demos?”‘ James Warren tells Prog. Martin agreed, liked what he heard, and signed on to produce the third album.
For a band of committed Beatles obsessives, this was surreal. ‘It just didn’t seem possible that we’d somehow join that sort of world,’ Warren says. Most of the band were relocated to Stansfield Road, Stockwell for pre-production, and spent a week or two going to Martin’s place in Paddington to map out arrangements, with Martin earmarking tracks he could build orchestral parts around.
According to Record Collector Magazine, the sessions ran from July to September 1973, with the band given ten days for recording and two for mixing at AIR Studios, then situated in the heart of the West End at Oxford Circus. The album was eventually released in February 1974, held back by the OPEC oil crisis, which caused the price of vinyl manufacturing materials to quadruple and brought the western record industry to a near-standstill.
What makes the George Martin connection slightly less outlandish when you know the full picture: founder member Andy Davis had already played on three tracks on John Lennon’s Imagine, as Record Collector Magazine notes, so the band were not entirely strangers to that world. Martin himself arrived at the sessions fresh from a varied run of work. According to JazzRockSoul.com, his then-recent credits included the Gun-spinoff Parrish & Gurvitz, the Paul Winter Consort’s 1972 release Icarus, and two albums by American roots rockers Seatrain, giving a sense of how broadly he was ranging as a producer at the time.
Recording The Man In The Bowler Hat: dynamics, Dangerous Bacon and a delayed release
Martin was frequently absent from the sessions, flying to New York or working with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff Beck, leaving engineers Geoff Emerick and Bill Price to hold the fort. But when he was present, his influence was felt immediately. Mutter Slater recalls starting The Galloping Gaucho by just bashing through from the first chord. ‘George said, “I think we can make this more interesting. Let’s have a Hammond organ and a triangle on the intro; we’ll build it from there.” He taught us about dynamics and properly using the range of instruments in the band.’
The album’s strangest credit is Dangerous Bacon, a Smegmakovitch composition (the pen name for Warren, Jim Walter and Slater collaborations, in contrast to the whole-group ‘Wabadaw Sleeve’ credit, an anagram of members’ names) that featured Andy Mackay on sax, a proximity thing rather than a planned cameo: Roxy Music were recording at AIR at the same time. God Speed The Plough, the group finale, received what Warren calls a ‘fabulous orchestration’ from Martin. ‘Watching George work with a group of string players, the mutual respect was tangible,’ Slater says. ‘It was done in two, three takes.’
Then the record sat in a drawer while the oil crisis played out. When it finally arrived, the band had already fractured. Slater had gone back to Yeovil and taken a job as a petrol pump attendant. Each week he read the Melody Maker cover to cover. ‘One day I’m sat in the station with my feet up ‘cos there’s not much to do, and I see The Man In The Bowler Hat is at No.23 in the chart. I was living at my parents, with no phone. The last I’d heard of it was at a playback in AIR studio.’
The band dissolved after 1976’s Mr Mick, revived briefly for 1999’s Something For The Weekend, and then reunited from 2006 to 2015. For Warren, the lessons of The Man In The Bowler Hat sessions fed directly into what came next. ‘We took that on board with the first self-titled album by The Korgis, formed by myself and Andy Davis in 1979,’ he says. ‘We thought, “Let’s follow Buggles’ example and be a really good studio band.” Part of that came from The Man In The Bowler Hat.’
