F ALL the bands who have dabbled with mediaeval instruments Gryphon, the latest band to appear on the Transatlantic label, have been the most successful. Their first album shows an acute application of the instruments to enhance traditional song with a nice tongue-in cheek approach that is often so necessary.
The band have culled most of their traditional songs from well used texts such as "Marrowbones" but they have spent a good deal of time updating the lyrics and re writing tunes with enormous success.
Currently the mediaeval music to which they had been subjected during formal musical training is showing through strongly but Richard Harvey, who plays wind instruments in Gryphon, anticipates conceptual changes in the near future.
He was one of the founder members of the band eighteen months ago, and inherited his musical talent from his father, also a recorder player.
"I learnt the instrument from an early age, and if you're playing recorder you're going to come into contact with early music eventually. This is what happened and it was after hearing David Monroe and John Renbourn's 'Sir John Alot' album that I really became interested. Our guitarist Graeme Taylor who has been a contemporary of mine right the way along turned me on to 'Sir John Alot' and he made me listen to the Early Music Consort."
It was at the Royal College of Music that Richard first met Brian, and both left a year early in order to get Gryphon on the road.
"We existed for about two months as a trio, working various things out for a straight three piece - mostly Elizabethan dances like 'Kemp's jig'. In fact we were fairly set on the idea of sticking to a three piece, but we knew there was something missing. Then David (Oberle), who was in a rock band, rang me up to say that the band had split and did we want a percussionist. So we had a jam and he seemed to be the missing link, and although at the time he was very much a rock drummer after a few weeks his style changed entirely: it was a great help because he's also the strongest vocally in the band."
The band initially played a lot of dance tunes that Richard had learnt whilst with Musica Reservata, the professional early music band with whom he'd played whilst at college. It was here that he met Adam Skeaping, who was also his viola teacher, and later co produced the first album.
"'The departure point from the straight Elizabethan tunes and Marrowbones type of song was 'Sir Gavin Grimbold'." Richard explained, "I'd always been looking for new songs and had bought the Faber Book of Ballads, and there was one in there called 'Bonny George Campbell' which Brian re-wrote."
This was really the starting point for Gryphon, and since then they have frequently changed words in the original text and come up with new tunes - 'Three Jolly Butchers' and 'The Devil And The Farmer's Wife' being prime examples.
"They all came from 'Marrowbones' but we're moving away from traditional music now. Richard went on. "There's not much you can do beyond a certain point and we've done what we felt we should do with folk music. We want to do more things, like we've done with 'Ploughboy's Dream' and we've also been writing instrumentals fairly prolifically for the last couple of months."
And now, it seems, Gryphon's music is already taking on new form. "Mediaeval music is the thing we do best and the influence will always be there but I'd eventually like to be in the situation where we are playing the music on electric guitars, and use crumhorns and recorders in the way that other bands use saxes and flutes because there's very few bands that use them to their full extent. Certainly it can all be done on recorder and crumhorn and right now we just want to move through as many different styles as possible."
Richard underlined the fact that what the band were doing, ostensibly, was playing Elizabethan pop. "The mediaeval renaissance pop has come over strongest because classical music is very much fashion, there's more fashion in that than in pop. 'Kemp's Jig' is a typical Elizabethan pop tune and it could so easily be a modern pop song.
Gryphon plan to start working on their next album in three months' time and as yet they have no idea of the content - or even the nature of the content. "At a guess I should say it'll be even stranger than the first album but hopefully by the third album people will have got used to Gryphon.
Jerry Gilber
(Sounds, June 23, 1973)
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