Amazing Blondel

One of England's more unusual rock outfits of the 1970s, Amazing Blondel were a trio whose members played instruments dating from medieval to Elizabethan times, and songs styled to those periods. The group consisted of three musicians from Scunthorpe, England: John David Gladwin (lute, oboe, cittern, double bass), Terry Wincott (pipe organ, harmonium, cittern, recorders, flute, crumhorn, tabor pipe, ocarina, guitar), and Edward Baird (guitar, guitern, percussion). Gladwin and Wincott had been born in Scunthorpe and attended school together, where they crossed paths with Hampshire-born, Scunthorpe-raised Baird. Gladwin and Wincott had been in a couple of rock & roll bands in school together, and afterward formed a group called the Dimples. In 1966, they formed Gospel Garden, with Craig Austin, Steve Cox, and Jeff Tindall, who managed to leave behind a few demo tracks that reveal them as a pop-psychedelic outfit, and Gospel Garden evolved into Methuselah. This was a hard-rocking band with both a progressive bent and a folk bent, the latter attributes embodied in an acoustic interlude that Gladwin and Wincott used to play in the middle of the band's set. Methuselah had managed the neat trick of getting signed to a U.S. label (Elektra Records) without a recording contract in their native England, but they didn't last past the second of a three-album deal (and that second LP was not only never released, but disappeared without a trace, according to Wincott). Gladwin and Wincott wearied of Methuselah's high-wattage sound, and of playing shows where the instruments were so loud that it was impossible to hear themselves singing or what they were playing; they preferred the acoustic part of the group's sets, in which they'd briefly taken center stage, and since those acoustic...