In 1971 the Strawbs went on Top of the Pops and played a song about a public hanging, in which the executioner pulls the blindfold aside and recognises his own brother. That song is the centre of From the Witchwood, and the organ surging underneath it belongs to Rick Wakeman, who left for Yes within weeks of the album’s release. Fifteen months, one live album and this: the whole of his time with the band. It is the only studio record he made with them, and the reason a great many people have heard of the Strawbs at all.

The short version

From the Witchwood is the Strawbs’ fourth album and their third in the studio, released by A&M in July 1971. It was cut at George Martin’s Air Studios in London across February and March 1971, produced by Tony Visconti with Bill Price engineering. The band is Dave Cousins on vocals, guitars, banjo, dulcimer and recorder; Tony Hooper on vocals, acoustic guitars and autoharp; Rick Wakeman on organ, piano, harpsichord, celeste, Mellotron and Moog; John Ford on bass and vocals; Richard Hudson on drums, sitar and vocals. Ten tracks, six of them Cousins’s, with Ford and Hudson contributing the rest. It reached number 39 in Britain. The sleeve is a gatefold with a pale silhouette of an eerie tree, and inside, a tapestry of the Vision of Saint Jerome printed alongside the lyrics.

Wakeman, with one foot out of the door

The sessions opened well — The Hangman and the Papist was captured live in the studio, essentially as you hear it — and then the arguments started. There were disagreements about what belonged on the record; the other members were writing in what they took to be the Strawbs style and Cousins did not always agree; and Wakeman was carrying a heavy load of outside session work at the same time, with the music press predicting his departure for months before it came. A couple of months after the album appeared it was announced that he was joining Yes to replace Tony Kaye. He had been a Strawb for a little over fifteen months, in which time the band went from folk clubs to concert halls. Blue Weaver came in that August, and Cousins — consulting the I Ching after Wakeman left — found the passage that became Benedictus, and the band walked straight into Grave New World.

The sound

The hinge of the whole catalogue. Everything acoustic is still here — banjo, dulcimer, autoharp, sitar, recorder, two voices in close harmony — but Wakeman’s keyboards now sit inside the arrangements rather than decorating them, and where he plays, the songs acquire scale. This is not the Wakeman of Yes; there are no cathedral solos, and he is mostly in the background, which several listeners regard as the best thing about it. What you get instead is an English pastoral record with real menace in it: pagan woodland, sacred imagery, war, executions, sheep. Some contemporary reviewers thought it disjointed, and they had a point, since five writers pulling in different directions is a recurring Strawbs problem and it starts here. But the material is strong enough to carry the seams.

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The songs

A Glimpse of Heaven opens with church organ and a choir — credited, in the band’s own joke, to the Choir and Congregation of Air Strawb — behind one of Cousins’s loveliest melodies, and it is a hymn to the English countryside. Witchwood follows and is its dark twin: dulcimer and banjo, brooding, mysterious, and still in the live set half a century on. Thirty Days is Ford’s, sung by him, an anti-war song played by only three of the band with Hudson’s sitar threaded through it. Flight is gentler. Then The Hangman and the Papist: four minutes on a man executed for his faith and the soldier who drew the lot to hang him, and it is the best song here, with Wakeman’s organ driving Cousins to a genuinely chilling finish. Sheep opens side two with a darker, rockier pulse. Canon Dale returns to Indian textures. The Shepherd’s Song sets Moog against pastoral folk, In Amongst the Roses is the acoustic breath, and I’ll Carry On Beside You closes like a hymn.

Reception and legacy

Number 39 and solid sales, with reviews cooler than the ones Just a Collection of Antiques and Curios had drawn, and for years it carried a reputation as the awkward middle step between the folk band and the rock band. That has been thoroughly revised. AllMusic gives it four stars and argues it has held up remarkably well; Prog Archives users rate it above four out of five across three hundred reviews; and A Glimpse of Heaven, Witchwood and The Hangman and the Papist have all outlived every line-up that played them. Its historical position is fixed and slightly unfair: it is the Rick Wakeman album. It is worth remembering that the band survived his leaving perfectly well, and that the record he is on was written almost entirely by somebody else.

The verdict

The best place to begin with the early Strawbs, and one of the finest English folk-prog records of its decade. Start with A Glimpse of Heaven and Witchwood back to back, which is the album’s real argument — heaven and the woods, three and a half minutes each. Then The Hangman and the Papist, and understand that this went out on Top of the Pops to an audience expecting Slade. Then go forward to Grave New World, which is where all of this was heading, and which they made without the famous keyboard player.

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