Terry Quick's Baroque & Roll'Memories of Gauguin' c/w 'Drop A Love Bomb On My Head'. Released 8th July 1967. DETONATE DT111
Terry Quick (vocals, harpsichord), Barnaby Fagin (harpsichord), Steve Maguire (harpsichord), Steve Newland (clavichord), Jimmy Pilgrim (virginal & maracas)
When it came to unusual line-ups, Terry Quick & Baroque & Roll certainly took the lysergic biscuit.
With three (count 'em) harpsichordists, a clavichord player and another member who doubled on marracas and virginal, their sound was once described by Anthony Hepburn of The Tinkerbells as "ten thousand escaped lunatics attacking the inside of a piano with sledgehammers", and it would be hard to disagree.
Add to this bizarre musical cocktail the high-pitched, manic vocals of Terry Quick and you have a unique, exciting sound that, nevertheless, managed to avoid troubling the charts.
'Memories Of Gauguin' has the singer giving advice to the French post-impressionist as he lies dying in his gaily-painted hammock in Hawaii. This advice, to 'Get up, get a girl and start painting again', would probably not have been heeded by the artist, but the resultant sonic cacophony would certainly had made him spin in his grave, had he been dead at the time.
Quick and his cohorts were much in demand as session musicians, given the then vogue for harpsichords, but after several tragic episodes involving the group (see Susan McDaniels, Brigitte Stamp, Art Fry and Lucille), the music industry started to back away from them in fear and they split in the autumn of 1967.
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