Three-fifths of the band had walked out. The hit single that made them famous had done it, and Hudson, Ford and Blue Weaver were gone within months of Bursting at the Seams going to number two. Cousins and Lambert held auditions, hired three strangers, took them to Copenhagen in November 1973 and made the hardest, darkest, best record of their career. Cousins had written the opening eight minutes on a tour of America and previewed it at Harvard. This is the album everything else in the catalogue is measured against.

The short version

Hero and Heroine is the Strawbs’ seventh album and their sixth in the studio, released by A&M in April 1974 and cut at Rosenberg Studios in Copenhagen in November 1973 — the same city where they had made Dragonfly four years earlier. Dave Cousins and Tom Allom produced; Allom and Freddy Hansson engineered. The line-up is Cousins on vocals and guitars, Dave Lambert on vocals and guitars, John Hawken — classically trained, previously with the first Renaissance and the Nashville Teens — on piano, organ, Mellotron and synthesiser, Chas Cronk on bass and synthesiser, Rod Coombes on drums. Clare Deniz guests on cello. Ten tracks, opening with an eight-and-a-half-minute suite in three parts. It is their first fully electric album.

Rebuilt from scratch

The split was ugly and the arithmetic was brutal: Cousins wanted long, ambitious pieces, Hudson and Ford wanted pop songs, and when Part of the Union settled the argument commercially they left to be Hudson-Ford. Weaver went off to session work and eventually the Bee Gees. That left Cousins, the only original member, and Dave Lambert, who had been in the band about a year. What they did next is the most impressive thing the Strawbs ever managed. Coombes came from Stealers Wheel, Cronk was a session bassist Rick Wakeman had recommended, and Hawken had all but left the business. Within months this band was in Denmark making an album that sounds nothing like the one before it, and within a year it would be regarded as their finest. Then they made Ghosts and Hawken left too.

The sound

Electric, muscular and considerably darker than anything they had done. The folk is not gone but it has been pushed several layers under the surface, and what sits on top is hard rock with a progressive architecture: Hawken’s Mellotron and organ building the weather, Lambert cutting through it with slashing electric lead, Cronk and Coombes hitting harder than any Strawbs rhythm section before them. Cousins’s writing is at its peak and at its bleakest — the romantic streak is intact, but it now shares the record with genuine menace. The tracks run into one another with a flow that only reveals itself on repeat listens. On this form they could have taken on any symphonic band in the world, which raises the question the fans have been asking for fifty years: why did it not break them?

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The songs

Autumn is the reason people love this band. Eight and a half minutes in three movements — Heroine’s Theme, written by Hawken and one of the finest things any Strawbs keyboard player contributed; Deep Summer’s Sleep; and The Winter Long, which builds on a thumping bass to Cousins singing with everything he has. He wrote it on the road in America and played it first at Harvard. Sad Young Man is Rod Coombes’s. Just Love is Lambert’s, upbeat with a lovely dramatic collapse in the middle. Shine on Silver Sun was meant to be the hit and had already failed as a single despite Top of the Pops; it is the odd one out, country-tinged and sweet. Side two opens with the title track, which is short, hallucinatory and frightening. Midnight Sun brings Deniz’s cello. Out in the Cold is quietly bitter about a love affair gone wrong, Round and Round snarls at the failure of the flower-power era, Lay a Little Light on Me shifts from ballad to melodrama without a seam, and Hero’s Theme, another Lambert piece, closes the circle.

Reception and legacy

Among Strawbs listeners this is usually the answer to which album is best, with Grave New World and Ghosts the only real competition, and it is the record that finally opened America to them — the FM stations took to it, and the northeast became a stronghold for the rest of the decade. It should have been bigger than it was. The same line-up made Ghosts the following year and then fractured, and everything afterwards is a different proposition. The back cover carries a verse about the hero and the heroine that tells you what the album is: a doomed romance in the shape of a rock record, with a snow-white dove and a man watching his own soul depart. Nobody else was writing like that in 1974.

The verdict

Start here. If you only ever play one Strawbs album, play this one, and play Autumn first — all eight minutes, no skipping, and wait for the last movement. Then Round and Round for the darkness, then the title track for the sheer strangeness of it. This is a folk band that turned itself into one of the heaviest progressive groups in Britain by rebuilding from two members and a set of auditions, and it worked completely. That it has spent fifty years as a connoisseur’s record rather than a famous one is one of the more baffling facts in this whole genre.

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