Sky

There aren’t many bands who produced two platinum selling albums and then virtually disappeared from both sight AND memory. Sky managed to sell albums by the bucket load but today they are just not one of the bands people talk about – daft really because this all sounds as fresh and lush and wonderful as it did in 1979.

Sky were a supergroup but not one of the bands made up from disparate members of similar Blues or rock bands – they combined Classical (John Williams & Tristan Fry) and rock (Herbie Flowers, Kevin Peek & Francis Monkman) and made music that brought the precision and depth of classical music into a pop/rock form or possibly brought rock stylings to classical music or maybe just mad a form of music that could appeal to a wide spectrum AND bring pleasure to the individual musicians. Just to look at the performances on the DVD that accompanies the first album – appearances on ‘Pebble Mill at One’ , ‘The Val Doonican music Show’, ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ and a Unicef concert from Wembley Arena.

Musically they are peerless. John Williams is a world renowned classical guitarist and matching him with Kevin Peek enables them both to develop skills and expand musical horizons. Tristan Fry is a percussionist and drummer who started with the London Philharmonic and then added sessions for The Beatles, Elton John, Frank Sinatra and David Essex to his CV, Francis Monkman was with Curved Air and then you have Herbie Flowers – bass, double bass and tuba and a CV that includes Elton John, Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, George Harrison – by the time Sky formed he had performances on 500 hits to his credit.

Both albums here have their own identity. The first definitely has the feel of bringing classical forms and structures into a rock format while ‘Sky2’ has the greater sense of bringing rock and classical forms together to form something that is more than either – sacrilege to many but all these musicians have the ability to play pretty well any form presented to them. ‘Sky’ is the more recognisable album, possibly because when it was released tracks like ‘Carillon’ and ‘Gymnopedie’ were being played everywhere but in many ways ‘Sky2’ is more satisfying simply because the music feels less constrained and both Fry and Flowers had more freedom in the making of it – ‘Hotta’ and ‘Sahara’ feel almost freeform but ‘Dance of the Little Fairies’ shows that they still have the will and the skills to play a fixed form piece. ‘Fifo’ almost sounds wild in comparison!

The remarkable thing about these two albums is not the quality of the musicians, it is the way that they work together and create such an emotionally satisfying sound and sound as though they are thoroughly enjoying the experience.
As ever with an Esoteric release there are a bunch of goodies including some previously unreleased DVD on both issues and the remastering is really excellent bringing real snap and drive to the music that was a little lost on the original vinyl release.

These are pretty well essential for music lovers who can appreciate something that stands very much on its own and definitely for anyone who still has (and cherishes) their original vinyls.