Thursday 24 November 2011

Dave's 500 Bus Albums No 8 - Gillan "The Japanese Album" (1978)

This is one I'd never heard of until recently. The first album by the band Gillan, after Ian Gillan disbanded The Ian Gillan Band (hopefully that sentence all made sense!), and I'd always thought that "Mr Universe" was the first Gillan LP, but nope it was this.

Only released in Japan, Australia and New Zealand at first, the album was available on import in the UK. When the band recorded "Mr Universe" the following year later some of the tracks from this album were re-recorded for that one. From the sound of this, they kept the best ones.

Originally entitled simply "Gillan", "The Japanese Album" is very much an LP of two halves. Some of the tracks are sub-metal pub-rock, whilst others still stand out decades later as rightful classics (I'm looking at you, "Fighting Man"). The whole album does suffer from songs being stretched out beyond their legitimate length by simply repeating the chorus 3 or 4 times over different instrumental solos, but then that's more a symptom of late 70's Metal than a specific fault of the band.

At the time, Gillan's style of music fitted in perfectly with the burgeoning New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, but now 30 years down the line you can kind of hear that he's still dragging a lot of old Deep Purple musical themes along with him. Maybe that's not a bad thing, if you like those themes, but in 2010 it does sound a bit dated.

However, I'm very familiar with Gillan's work from 1979 onwards, and it's nice to hear what to me is a "lost" album from just before they hit the big time.

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