Comus: First Utterance (1971)
Photo Courtesy of Dave Akshar- Pexels
The Autumn leaves fall before your eyes and crinkle under your feet as you approach a local record store. The crisp air melds into a vintage atmosphere as you step inside and search for the folk bin. You flick each album forward after a brief scan of the artwork: Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Joni Mitchell, and others, but nothing seems to catch your eye. That is, until you find yourself looking down at a tortured soul, its body deformed under the weight of damnation, a single tear streaming from its eye. You read “Comus” in the top right corner. It does not look like any folk album you have seen before, yet you know you must hear it.
Comus was a folk anomaly when they dropped into the scene. They have been defined as acid folk, dark folk, and progressive folk, but no definition feels satisfactory. Their music radiates pagan energy, each note a calling, like faeries in the grooves luring the listener into the woods. To dance around a campfire at midnight, celebrating the full moon: that is the feeling Comus provokes with their debut, First Utterance (1971).
According to Jon Seagroatt on Comus’ official website, husband of band member Bobbie Watson (vocals), Comus was formed in Kent, England circa 1967 when two of the founding members started to play acoustic music together. Roger Wotton (lead singer, acoustic guitar) bonded with Glenn Goring (slide guitar, hand drums, backing vocals) over their shared love for Bert Jansch, The Mothers of Invention, and The Velvet Underground.
Colin Pearson (violin) was the next member to join the band, as stated by Seagroatt. Bassist Andy Hellaby followed.
Bobbie Watson, only 16 years old at the time, heard the band harmonizing during a rehearsal and joined in. Her vocals were distinct and esoteric. She was invited into the band, and her operatic vocal performance throughout First Utterance (1971) will go down as one of the best in folk music history.
They were only missing someone who could take the reins of the woodwinds. After some trial and error, a friend of Bobbie and Pearson, Rob Young, took the position.
The lineup for First Utterance (1971) had officially come into being.
The album kicks off with “Diana.” The atmosphere is immediately established with an acoustic repertoire that we will continue to see throughout the album. The lyrics follow a woman stalked and attacked in the woods by an ominous figure. The bass line anchors the song with a “one two three and four and” beat in 4/4 time that continuously builds energy without giving us the satisfaction of a transition. Slide guitar is played in dissonant lines that pan around the mix. Roger sings in his iconic nasal cadence. Bobbie’s voice comes in for vocal runs, performed in unison with Roger, as if she is a forest spirit harmonizing with this deranged stalker. The percussion is a mix of hand drums and maracas, which sit in the listener’s ear and drive the upbeat rhythm of the music. Pearson’s violin comes in for verse to chorus transitions, slowly building intensity deep in the mix until it comes into focus, filling the mix with fervor.
Comus did not just satirize the counterculture like Frank Zappa did in The Mothers of Invention, nor simply disturb the listener with gritty realism like The Velvet Underground; they took the core tenets of the free-love movement and contorted them into demented fairy tales of violent transgression. Instead of folk songs about love, new-age spirituality, and drugs, they wrote about necrophilia, mental-illness, paganism, and religious hangings. It is an uncompromising antithesis of everything the counterculture stood for. Comus wanted to make a statement: they are taking folk back from the hippies.
“Drip Drip,” track three of First Utterance (1971), builds on the structure we see in “Diana.” It opens with spacey slide guitar; its dissonance palpable and tangy. Roger’s lyricism and vocal performance bring us into the psyche of a deranged man as he prepares to sleep with a corpse. The string section is accented by hand-percussion in such a way that makes the track quite danceable despite the macabre lyrics. It feels bohemian, echoing sentiments of gypsy folk. It is something that would play at a pagan ritual, a night of celebration, dancing with the ghosts of the forest. It is strangely human in a way that is hard to articulate. The instrumental writing feels ancestral, like something we should not be listening to with modern technology, as if it is supposed to be lost in time.
As confirmed by Seagroatt on the official website, the band got their name from the John Milton poem, Comus. Comus was the Greek god of festivity and revelry. John Milton’s poem presents Comus as an evil sorcerer who tricks a lost noblewoman in the forest and captures her.
The band expands this further on track four, “Song to Comus,” painting Comus as a figure who lures individuals into the forest with his music, attacking them when they fall for his scheme. The band uses heavy lyrical alliteration and woodwind solos to envelop the listener in this scene throughout the track. This change is interesting as it goes beyond just repurposing the story to align with the themes of the album. Their British psyche regarding folklore could have its origins in British imperialism. When the British started to violently colonize Ireland, the Irish natives were treated as a lesser, barbaric race. The Irish lived in a deeply communal society, with little industrialization and a pagan-influenced Catholic culture. Due to a fear of attacks from the Irish natives and the general assimilation of Celtic folklore, the English developed a fear of the wilderness that seeped into their cultural storytelling.
Moving back to the album’s second track, “The Herald,” we find the only break from the disconcerting intensity of First Utterance (1971). It is a 12-minute acoustic suite about an eternal herald who uses his flute to transition the day to night. The track opens with a haunting whine. The consensus for years was that a theremin was used to create the sound, but live footage from their reunion confirms that it is actually a metal slide used just over the bridge pickup of an electric bass. The whine continues as Roger's acoustic guitar fades into the mix. Bobbie takes lead vocals, her voice perfectly accented by Roger’s methodical finger-plucking. Young’s woodwind performance sounds like a soft breeze echoing through the forest sound. We as listeners start the song at the foot of the trees. Bobbie is the forest faerie that takes our hand and pulls us into the woodland.
Comus’ First Utterance (1971) is a once in a generation work of art. Its lyricism and instrumentation intertwine to tell stories that spit in the face of the era’s tastemakers, dissecting the cultural zeitgeist and distorting it beyond all recognition. While doing so, they create a musical atmosphere that will forever belong to a time and place that is inaccessible beyond dropping the needle and closing your eyes.