Bob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present Occasional Rain

A great selection of tracks, most obscure, lots of winners, gets that mood.

I like these compilations but this is distinctly average. There are a couple of nice tracks towards the end but a lot of them have the same tone (often led by a flute) aren't particularly great songs and probably deserve not to be well known. As someone who lived through this period, I can attest to the fact that there were some great, obscure tracks, and I understand the problems of getting the companies to release them but there should be a better listing than this. Will I be playing this often? Probably not, and it's quite expensive.

Well researched and selected tracks, recommended.

everything great

The third in this series is possibly the strongest so far. ‘English Weather’ (2017) took its time to grow on me and next instalment, ‘Three Day Week’, didn’t quite hit the spot. But this new mix of obscure and often unorthodox (i.e. un-commercial) songs is a great listen.Collectively it’s a kind of road map to the fast-approaching juggernaut of British prog', with sixties beat and ‘pop’ bands growing their hair, donning kaftans and getting deep and meaningful. It features early recordings by heavyweights such as Argent, Moody Blues and Yes (a husky young JA singing lyrics you can actually understand – a million miles from the pretentious insanity of ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’!). Multi-instrumentation, elaborate arrangements and mushy over-production abound in this compilation. Flute seem to be everywhere - prominent on at least seven tracks - and it being the late sixties/early seventies there's lots of Hammond organ and mellotron. To provide contrast you'll also find seductive instrumentals [10] [19], a whimsical Michael Chapman folk song [15] and superb female performances, [20] by Catherine Howe and [7] Mandy More who was also featured on Bob & Pete’s wonderful debut compilation, ‘The Trip by St Etienne’, back in 2004. But my favourite of these tracks is currently [3] by Cressida.Inevitably there are a couple of duds here too but the overall feel of this set is very satisfying. Once again Bob provides another meticulously researched and illuminating booklet (20 pages) with extensive information about the artists – half a dozen of whom originate from Yorkshire. Bizarrely it would now appear that county was as important to the origin of prog’ rock as the Black Country was to the birth of heavy metal.An album which is well worth investigating.

Stanley and Wiggs's sequel to the deservedly legendary "English Weather" is pretty much a direct continuation of the earlier work and we can be grateful the formula is unchanged. So it's another 20 tracks of thoughtful, introspective rock (from the melodic end of the prog spectrum) and wistful singer-songwriters, aimed at capturing the mood of the nation, or at least of its musicians, as the '60s turned to the '70s and the utopian optimism of the earlier decade faded away to be replaced by uncertainty.The mix includes big hitters (Yes, Traffic, The Moody Blues), mid-level cult figures (Duncan Browne, Michael Chapman), reliable second-stringers (Skin Alley, Pete Brown) and a few figures so obscure even their parents don't recognise them. The standards are remarkably consistent: the previous Stanley/Wiggs compilations have all had obvious stand-out tracks which push the others into the shade, but this one is solid quality all the way through. If you pushed me REALLY hard, I might express a preference for Chapman's "Postcards of Scarborough" and Andrew Leigh's "Windy Baker Street", but you couldn't really get a Rizla paper between them and the others in terms of quality.The biggest surprise is the mood: it feels marginally more upbeat than the previous volume. If "English Weather" felt like a drizzly afternoon on early closing day in February 1970, this one is maybe a month later, a Thursday morning in March where it's still freezing and it might rain later, but the sun's out for now and the weekend isn't far off. The music here was originally produced between 1969 and 1974, but the soul of every song is eternally 1970."Occasional Rain", like "English Weather", captures something unique in the history of British pop. It's to the compilers' great credit that they spotted it in the first place, and to our great pleasure they've found enough of it to produce a second volume that's every bit as good as the original. If you liked the first one, you'll like this just as much. If you haven't heard either, but like the sound of what's going on in them, start with whichever one you fancy.