slowly dashed: “Take it from me,” says Peter Jones of Record Mirror in the sleeve notes of the sole 1971 album by Fresh Maggots, which sold next to nothing, “Fresh Maggots are going to be very, very big indeed.” All captured, deliberately or not, both the mystery and mundane reality of British life. And all were hankering after a pastoral idyll that exists only in the mind.


Heron took the late ’60s cliché of getting it together in the country to its ultimate conclusion. The drummer-free band emerged from a folk club in suburban Maidenhead, played at a pre-fame David Bowie’s Arts Lab in Beckenham (“David Bowie carried my PA into a folk club – once,” remembers guitarist Roy Apps), and signed to Pye’s Underground label Dawn in ’70. After a few disastrous studio experiences Heron decided to decamp to singer Tony Pook’s parents’ cottage in Appleford, Berkshire. With the help of the Pye mobile unit they made their


wonderful debut. Heron marked themselves out as provincial bohemians with the classic line “sitting in your mother’s garden smoking Lebanese, beneath the privet hedge” (from ‘Upon Reflection’), but they could be transcendental too, as ‘Lord And Master’ proves. A secular hymn to nature, Tony Pook’s song reveals a depth of feeling for the English countryside that does not descend into cliché.


Heron’s debut album is a quiet masterpiece, but fate was to conspire against the luckless band. After Tony Blackburn made it his Record Of The Week the album’s lead single ‘Bye And Bye’ looked set to be a hit, with huge amounts of airplay and press interest. Then there was a problem at the vinyl pressing plant. When that was resolved, a nationwide strike of delivery van drivers meant that nobody could get the single. Heron’s moment passed, cursed by British ineptitude and class politics, before they even had it.


Bad luck and missed opportunities dogged Fresh Maggots, too. You could say that they were doomed the moment they chose such a less than enticing moniker, but they had early breaks that came to nothing.


Childhood friends growing up on the same housing estate in Nuneaton, Mick Burgoyne and Leigh Dolphin combined heavy rock and gentle folk in a very simple way: one played distorted fuzz guitar and the other picked melodies on an acoustic. Signing a management contract to The Beatles’ music publisher Mike Berry after their second ever gig (a support slot in a church hall), Fresh Maggots were quickly picked up by RCA and doing sessions at Radio Luxembourg while still returning to Nuneaton to sign on each week.


Though Burgoyne and Dolphin were only 19 when they made the album, Fresh Maggots is a hugely accomplished debut. The string- laden acoustic tune ‘Rosemary Hill’, inspired by the name of a place in Devon


Hatched! Fresh Maggots do bucolic to a tee. 25


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