When was National Healthformed? When did it split up?
National Health was formed in the Summer of 1975. It split up in March 1980. It briefly re-formed during 1981 to perform at the Alan Gowen memorial concert in June, then record the "D.S. Al Coda" album the following Autumn, and in the Summer of 1983 to play two final concerts in Edinburgh.
What were the main line-upchanges in the band's history?
The band's original line-up consisted of Dave Stewart and Alan Gowen on keyboards, Phil Miller and PhilLee on guitars, Amanda Parsons on vocals and MontCampbell on bass. A fulltime drummer, Bill Bruford, wasn'tfound until a couple of months later. In the meantime, Pip Pylehelped out, until finally replacing Bruford in 1977. The finalregular line-up included original members Phil Miller andAlan Gowen, with John Greaves on bass and vocals andPip Pyle on drums. When the band briefly re-formed in 1981 and1983, the late Gowen was replaced by the returning Dave Stewart.
How did the original membersmeet? Had they worked together previously?
National Health was founded by keyboard players DaveStewart and Alan Gowen (who was an old acquaintance of PhilMiller's), following the split of their respective bands, Hatfieldand the North and Gilgamesh. Both bands had played double quartetgigs in November 1973 - the resulting 8-piece band then included noless than six future National Health members : Stewart, Gowen,Phil Miller, Phil Lee, Neil Murray and Pip Pyle; Gowen had guested onthree Hatfield gigs with an augmented line-up in April/May 1974;Stewart later co-produced the first (eponymous) Gilgamesh album, onwhich yet another future NH member, Amanda Parsons, guested,and played one gig with the band, doubling on keyboards with Gowen,in September 1975, while National Health was startingrehearsals.
Why did they choose this bandname ?
Dave Stewart : "I remember clearly that the band was named aftermy spectacles (cheap 'National Health' round frames, now wildlypopular in Japan for some reason) in that cheery way musicians haveof celebrating physical defects. God knows what the band would havebeen called if I'd had a hernia or worn an artificial limb...".
[Note : The National Health Service is the name of the socialsecurity system in Britain]
How many albums did the bandrelease? On which labels?
National Health released three studio albums : NationalHealth (1978), Of Queues And Cures (1979) and D.S. AlCoda (1982).
Demos and radio sessions from the early years of the band(1975-76) were compiled to form a fourth album, Missing Pieces(released in 1996), which also included snippets from 1979 liveperformances and a new recording of a previously unreleased NH composition, "Starlight On Seaweed" (by Mont Campbell).
Live recordings from 1979 by the final gigging line-up of National Health (Phil Miller, Alan Gowen, John Greaves and PipPyle), were released in 2001 as the CD Play Time, on theCuneiform label.
Have these albums been reissuedon CD? On which labels?
In 1990, all three albums were reissued by American label EastSide Digital as a superb 2-CD package named The Complete NationalHealth. It included two additional tracks, an excerpt from "Paracelsus" (recorded in 1976, now available in its entirety on"Missing Pieces") and a new version of "The Collapso" from OfQueues And Cures, entitled "The Apocalypso" and recorded in 1990by original members Phil Miller and Dave Stewart.
The albums have also been reissued separately : NationalHealth and Of Queues And Cures were reissued byDecal/Charly Records, and more recently by Spalax (in digipakpackaging). D.S. Al Coda was re-released by Voiceprint in1996.
Why were particular titleschosen for albums and compositions?
Songs :
- "Lethargy Shuffle" - Dave Stewart : "It was actually named after a stupid dance Pip Pyle and I had devised in a Belgian disco one evening, after a weird Hatfield gig... It parodied Glenn Miller and rock'n'roll while maintaining Stravinskyan overtones".
- "Paracelsus" - named after the Swiss alchemist and doctor (b. ca.1493, d. 1541)
- "Agrippa" - named after the Roman general and politician (b. ca.63 BC, d. ca.12 BC)
- "Tenemos Roads" - Dave Stewart : "An epic about ancient civilizations on the planet Mercury inspired by The Worm Ouroborous..." [a book by E.R. Eddison published in 1926]
- "Brujo" - Before National Health's performance of this piece on BBC Top Gear in 1976, John Peel makes the following announcement : "'Brujo'- and there's a note here saying that this is Spanish for...it's either 'sorcerer' or 'soccer.' I suppose the romantics among you would prefer it to be 'sorcerer' - personally, I'd rather it was 'soccer'. Doesn't make a great deal of difference, I guess...". [of course, the correct translation is 'sorcerer']
- "Borogoves" - a name taken from "Alice In Wonderland"
- "The Collapso" - Dave Stewart : "A Carribbean cacophony for limbo-lovers".
- "Squarer For Maud" - "Maud is a computer programmed to measure numinosity. She appears in 'Amateur' n°1 - a pamphlet published by Amateur Enterprises in N.Y.C. Peter Blegvad's narrative is an extract from the same. An alternative title is 'Claret and Etiquette for J'".
- "Binoculars" - Dave Stewart : "Originally named "A Legend In His Own Lunchtime", retitled to avoid some obscure copyright problem... A song about T.V. boredom".
Albums :
- "National Health" - Dave Stewart : "A cunning pun on our name" (!)
Who were the band's maincomposers ?
The original plan for National Health was for it to be thevehicle for Dave Stewart and Alan Gowen's compositions. When MontCampbell, a prolific writer, was recruited on bass, he became a majorcontributor, as exemplified by the Missing Pieces CD. AfterGowen's departure in 1977, it was decided that the writing would besplit equally between members; the result being Of Queues AndCures which contains one track each by Phil Miller, John Greavesand Pip Pyle. This policy was carried on after Stewart's departureand replacement with the returning Gowen. When National Healthre-formed in 1981 to record D.S. Al Coda, the aim was torecord unreleased compositions by the late Alan Gowen; as a result,the album includes only material written by him.
How much, and where, did theband tour ?
A chronology of National Health's tours is available on this site.
Gigs were even harder to find for National Health thanHatfield, although the band still had a following on the continentand toured quite regularly in France and Northern Europe. A shortAmerican tour was undertaken in November 1979, thanks to contactsprovided by Dave Stewart from his tour there with Bruford theprevious summer. National Health's last gigs were in 1983, atthe Edinburgh Festival, performing the compositions by the late AlanGowen from the D.S. Al Coda album.
The booklet in "The CompleteNational Health" mentions many compositions not on the three studioalbums. Are they available elsewhere?
- "The Lethargy Shuffle", "Clocks And Clouds", "Agrippa", "Zabaglione" were recorded in demo form by the original line-up in 1975-76. These versions were included on the Missing Pieces CD, as is the complete version of "Paracelsus".
- "Starlight On Seaweed" by Mont Campbell was apparently performed live just once at the Louveciennes festival in France (June 1976) just before Campbell left the band. The concert was bootlegged, but the sound quality was insufficient to allow its inclusion on Missing Pieces. A new version was consequently re-recorded in 1995 by Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin.
- "Trident Asleep", an Alan Gowen piece, can be heard on a couple of bootleg recordings, but no good enough version was unearthed for Missing Pieces.
- "Borogoves" remains unreleased in its complete form. Part One and the second half of Part Two are on the eponymous album, but the first half of Part Two (about five minutes long, including a vocal section) hasn't appeared anywhere.
- "Mostly Twins & Trios", a John Greaves composition intended as a sequel to the Kew.Rhône project, was first performed for a BBC radio session in 1977 by Greaves and Peter Blegvad, then included in National Health's stage repertoire when he joined in 1978 (it featured the rare treat of Phil Miller's backup vocals), but it was never recorded by the band. Greaves later recorded the opening section under the new title "Jaloozy" for his album Parrot Fashions; a version of the closing section, "Would You Prefer Us To Lie?" (also known as "A Separate Function") appears on the Henry Cow live boxed set, released late 2008 - but interestingly the song was only performed after Greaves' departure from the band.
- "Half The Sky", contrary to what is stated in Dave Stewart's liner notes, was not an Art Bears piece. A Lindsay Cooper-Tim Hodgkinson composition, it was recorded by Henry Cow on their final album Western Culture.
- The last performing line-up of National Health - the quartet of Phil Miller, Alan Gowen, John Greaves and Pip Pyle - never recorded a studio album, but played live a lot in 1979-80. Its repertoire included a Gowen piece, "Toad Of Toad Hall" (later re-worked into two separate pieces, one of which came to be known as "Flanagan's People") which later appeared on the D.S. Al Coda album (as did another one, "Shining Water", which was only performed live twice); several Greaves-Blegvad songs, "For Bearings / Silence", which Greaves recorded on his debut solo album Accident; and "The Rose Sob" which appeared on his following album Parrot Fashions; two instrumentals by Pip Pyle : "Foetal Fandango", which appeared on the first Equip'Out album, and "Seven Sisters", which was performed by Equip'Out but not recorded; a new arrangement with added vocal parts was included on Pyle's solo album 7 Year Itch; Phil Miller's compositions "Nowadays A Silhouette", "Fourfold" and "A Fleeting Glance", were all recorded for the Before A Word Is Said project in 1981 by Phil Miller, Alan Gowen, Richard Sinclair and Trevor Tomkins. Of the pieces previously unreleased as performed by National Health, "Seven Sisters", "The Rose Sob" and "Nowadays A Silhouette", as well as Gilgamesh's "Play Time", all appeared on the Play Time CD, released in 2001.
What were the reasons formembers departing?
- Phil Lee was the first to leave, in December 1975. Dave Stewart : "Phil, sensing perhaps my residual hostility to be-bop solos, pronounced himself unwilling to continue, and departed to undertake a tour backing French singer Charles Aznavour...".
- Mont Campbell left in June 1976, after a disastrous gig in Louveciennes (France). "My reason for leaving National Health was directly related to the enforced idleness of a year on the dole, capped by a depressing gig in France where the band and audience sat waiting for about three hours while somebody mended a lead. It was a powerful reinforcement of my deep-seated fear of purposelessness, and I couldn't rise above it".
- Bill Bruford left in December 1976, moving on to record his first solo album, Feels Good To Me (with Stewart guesting and co-writing tracks), and forming the progrock supergroup UK with Allan Holdsworth, John Wetton and Eddie Jobson. Dave Stewart : "Bill was planning his own band with the American bassist Jeff Berlin. Eventually Pip Pyle joined, by which time the band had established its own style. I was worried that it might slip in to sounding like Hatfield if Pip had joined at the outset".
- Amanda Parsons left in February 1977, in the middle of a European tour. She subsquently quit the music scene, although she guested on albums by Bruford, Laurent Thibault and Stewart-Gaskin.
- Alan Gowen left in March 1977. Stewart : "Alan was fed up with all the personnel changes and general lack of progress. The band had never really developed along the lines he planned for it, which in truth was probably something more steeped in jazz than the kind of rock orchestra I had envisaged".
- Neil Murray left in January 1978 to join Whitesnake. "I felt guilty about leaving National Health, but John Greaves was a much more suitable person for the band, both musically and personality-wise. I wanted to play with a band that had more in common with my blues-rock roots (though there are some jazz-rock influences on the first Whitesnake album) and that had the potential to attract a much bigger audience - though Whitesnake started off playing very small clubs".
- Dave Stewart left in November 1978. "A couple of weeks before a tour of France and Italy was due to begin, I heard from the agent that half the dates had fallen through... The financial effects were disastrous... Pissed off at the agent and the world in general for making it so bloody difficult to keep this band going, I voted to call off the remaining dates and find ourselves another agent... but I found myself a minority of one... So I quit. I just didn't think it would ever get any better".
Where are they now?
- Dave Stewart joined Bruford, then in 1980 the shortlived Rapid Eye Movement. In 1981, he started a solo career which evolved into a duo with his partner, former Northette Barbara Gaskin. In addition to working on the new Stewart-Gaskin album, Stewart is busy playing sessions for various artists.
- Phil Miller formed his own band In Cahoots in 1982, which is still going. He also played with Short Wave (1991-96), and in a duo with Fred Baker both since 1991. More recently, he was of course part of the reformed Hatfield and the North (2005-06).
- John Greaves started an acclaimed solo career, often collaborating with American lyricist Peter Blegvad and has released the albums Accident (1982), Parrot Fashions (1984), La Petite Bouteille De Linge (1991), Songs (1995), The Caretaker (2001), The Trouble With Happiness (2003) and Greaves/Verlaine (2008), as well as collaborations with the likes of Peter Blegvad and David Cunningham. He also played with Soft Heap from 1979 to 1988.
- Pip Pyle was a founding member of Soft Heap in 1978, a band which occasionally toured until 1988. For twenty years (1982-2002) he was a fixture in Phil Miller's band In Cahoots. In 1984 he formed his own jazz band, L'Equip'Out, which gigged occasionally until it ground to a halt in 1995. He moved to France in the mid-1980's and worked with Patrice Meyer, Emmanuel Bex, John Greaves and Gong. He was also a member of the occasional all-star band Short Wave (1991-96). In 1998 he finally released his long-awaited solo album Seven Year Itch, which featured most ex-National Health members. He then joined American band Absolute Zero, appearing on their Crashing Icons CD and touring the US twice. From 2002 he led another band, Bash, which released Belle Illusion in 2003. Before his untimely death in August 2006, he was involved in the reformation of Hatfield and the North, which toured worldwide in 2005-06.
Last updated : October 2008