The Enid
Bio
The Enid were formed in 1974 by keyboard player Robert John Godfrey. A possible career as a concert pianist had been thrown out of the window in the late sixties in favour of London's rapidly flowering hippie music scene. He had stopped hanging about the Royal Festival Hall and started hanging about the Roundhouse, where he met and joined the young Barclay James Harvest, living and working with them over a three-year period in a farmhouse on the Yorkshire Moors. These three years saw the release of the debut BJH album and the follow-up, "Once Again". It was Godfrey who, at the head of (believe it or not) the Barclay James Harvest Symphony Orchestra, was responsible for co-writing and developing most of their large-scale pieces - When the World was Woken, Dark Now My Sky, Mockingbird etc.
From the outset The Enid always promised to be different. The spiritual home of the band was a weird experimental school for gifted but problematical children, which Godfrey and his fellow founder-members, guitarists Stephen Stewart and Francis Lickerish, had attended. Other pupils included Alexis Korner, Tom Robinson. The school, Finchden Manor, fell apart in 1973 and over the next few years various casualties crawled from the wreckage to join the already-established Godfrey. The result was The Enid.
Since then the band has gone through many changes - stylistically and in terms of line-up. Recently years Godfrey has taken stock, and, working with Max Read, has come up with an approach which represents as big a development for the band as Something Wicked This Way Comes did twenty years before. That album caused a sensation among Enid fans with its inclusion, for the first time, of songs among the instrumental pieces. Far Out continues this synthesis, but in a more complex and sophisticated way. There are songs once more, but they are set within an over-arching orchestral piece which spans the whole album. The whole is like a rich, changing tapestry, the songs grow out of the evolving larger piece then are absorbed back into it. The result is an album that is both complex and moving, and immediate and accessible. The band's line-up has been drawn from the semi-regular line-up who performed on the Newt albums - Godfrey on keyboards, of course, Read on bass and vocals (he single-handedly provided the 'choir' on White Goddess!), the thunderous Steve Hughes on drums, and psycho-virtuoso Grant Jamieson and punk-meets-Zappa newbie Jason Ducker on guitars. It's a madly adventurous, utterly audacious idea, and can be safely predicted to cause as much debate among Enid fans as so many of the bands albums have done before.
And just to throw in another curve, there's another album in preparation, and one deliberately and radically different again from FarOut. Entitled Virtuoso, it promises to be the most intensive instrumental workout The Enid have ever produced, testing everyone's musicianship to the limit.
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