Music Inspired by Watership Down [Original recording remastered]

Bo Hansson's final solo album in the quartet which began with "Lord Of The Rings" - another fantasy epic - is a difficult affair, but no less rewarding than its brothers. It is a different beast altogether, and shows Hansson and in particular guitarist lieutenant Kenny Hakansson finally getting to grips with the studio environment and its possibilities (remember, "Lord Of The Rings" was recorded on a four-track!). Yet its out-of-hand dismissal as self-indulgent rubbish, especially at the hands of the New Musical Express - then in thrall to punk's savage charms - was unfair; here there is much to be savoured. That said, Hansson didn't help by including verses from Keats and Shakespeare to illuminate titles such as "Allegro For A Rescue" and "The Kingdom Brightly Smiles"! Of all his albums, this is the one where Hansson and his hand-picked musical survivors sound most like a proper band, and there is a reliance on the guitars of Hakansson and Hansson himself to drive this music forward. Here you will find echoes of Swiss folk song, heavy metal and reggae, plus the chopping and changing time signatures that so delighted his fans and so alienated everyone else. Standout tracks are the epic "Born In The Gentle South", and the sad, reflective "The Twice-Victory". For the faithful, this beautifully re-mastered album with excellent sleeve notes and original packaging, will prove a delight (and there is even a bonus track in "Migration Suite", a kind of mini album in itself). Nobody else will get it. As usual.

Bo Hansson's masterpiece is surely this extraordinary album.First timers to his work wanting an accessible introduction to his canon should look no further than this cd. Taking as it's point of departure Richard Adam's seminal work of anthromorphic mythologizing,Hansson takes us on a musical journey of complex,subtle and rousing themes,creating the living febrile landscape of Adams's rabbits ,uncannily,as each track on this shortish album draws us ever more into the world of brutal but exhilirating nature,inviting us,tempting us to lose the aloofness of our born natures and to live briefly at a rabbit's eye level:a viewpoint,Hansson seems to be saying with his frisky,melancholic and earth brown rich virtusoity and his keyboard jazz riffing,beyond the range of ordinary lumpen materialistic nature to comprehend;the more we allow the music to suffuse our minds with its evocative imagery,the greater and more intense is our musical journey through the warrens of his(and our) creativeness:our journey toward an inner mediated peace,a oneness with the anima of both life and this mysterious entity that we call 'music',as he,playing off and sparring with the jazz-rock infused guitar of his old jazz trio partner ,Hakensson,call to mind the book's South Downs setting by intricately weaving rural Folk emblems throughout;whilst at the same time with the alchemy of his own Swedish sensibilities and his own unique brand of melodic genius,overlaying those sinuous,catchy progressions with an unmistakeable Scandinavian flavour that universalizes the struggle of Adams's persecuted rabbits on their mythic quest for their one true Eden,their Avalon,their earthly Nirvana,and thus putting them on an ecliptic,a plain of musical truth,taking them out of their native landscape,transforming them into emigrees of a much bigger world,a world of frightening unknowns;but like the music,all the more startling and pleasantly surprising by virtue of those very same dangerous possibilities that at first seemingly go against instinct and reason,which at the instant they compromise ordered life,an ordered way of thinking,leap upon us from the musical margins,the edge of the music sheet,the gathering darkness of revelatory musical expositions yet to come-the scary place of anticipation that might,you fear,not be fulfilled, giving us hope that life itself is eternal,just as,in the end of the book of Watership Down,Hazel finds his life and the life of his warren bound as one by the repetitions of secular revelation-though death has clearly severed his links with his kin and the security that he alone has ensured for them and for the generations to come. In a similar way it's like when the album reaches its climax,its natural point of departure,when the last note rings out on the lp's melodic apotheosis and final medley,MIGRATION SUITE,we know the beginning is but the place where we had no choice but to start from,that this musical cycle,like the four seasons and the short and brutal life of the average rabbit,is only the four stages of a bigger adventure:the rush of the breeze on the cheek as a hill is ascended or a warren bolted down-these are the sensations that give birth to both shivers and waves of joy,that mark out the moments in an unremarkable life,that partition,in four acts,the unfolding of history and destiny-these are the evocations that Hansson's keynotes hold out to us,these are the paste gemstone grace notes of nature's reality,not the diamond sparkle of merely pretty tunes-although they're there too,in abundance. So Hansson,by use of repetition and constant reintepretation of the four simple themes set out in the opening track,BORN IN THE GENTLE SOUTH,foretells a multitude of endings for the story;the most dominant theme,like Hazel,winning out against adversity to lead the way through the ethereal realms of the coda and thereby creating illumination against the encroaching dark inevitabilities born of closure:the end of the record,the end of the virgin experience that listening to this record for the first time has engendered;another experience-we heartfelt mourn-irretrievably lost to the grey dawn of materialistic and envious experience.Hansson with a single key change unsettles the certainties which we,like the rabbits,have entered this story with.This genre of musical fusion turns our narrow musical perceptions into an intellectual refugee,at the same time as the rabbits are made refugees from the once safe refugia of their heritage and birthright: their home for a thousand generations hewn out of the soil by the metal claws of man and his brutalist machines... Obtain,listen,enjoy,think
...It really will be the greatest musical odyssey that you've ever been on.It's not necessary to have read the novel to really appreciate this true masterpiece-the basic story is by now quite well known,anyhow-but it is certainly an enhancement of the written word-Like El-althrith,the prince with a thousand names-this companion piece,this wordless and formless(in the literary sense) counterpoint will only enhance the novel's power in the imagination forevermore. Books don't come more epic than Watership Down,and music doesn't become this epic without a tradition behind it that pre-dates the written word.Hansson has fused and forged an everlasting bond between the primeval musical stirrings of our prehistoric ancestors and the music of the future.Hansson was a pioneer of synth-ambient. In his music we can catch at what must have been the first primitive stirrings of the ancestral brain-the sound of stones being struck against each other;the percussive ecstasy of feet stamped in time to ululations and guttural paeans to the moon and sun... The music has a watery quality,a fluidity,a drifting into an unknown ocean feel to it.This,at first,jars with the true setting of Watership Down;the Berkshire Downs, where the real watership down is to be found ,is nowhere near the sea,yet this 'feel' of water is both a challenge to the senses as well as a comfort.Perhaps it is the amniotic fluid of the birth of possibility that we are listening into.After all this is a story that must ultimately end with truimph and the renewal of seeds sown,both metaphorically and literally:Watership Down is the haven IT IS because of the fecundity of green vegetation that lushly blankets its steep sides.The grass grows longer here than anywhere else,we are told,in Hansson's final musical setting.The eating is good and the renewable nutrient and energy to ensure the warren's survival comes from the ground,free of poison here ,free of over-competition,free for all...

Heavy, rock, punk, pop. Although the cover said inspired by Watership Down, there was only one track that that I could perhaps link with the book or film. The beautiful rolling quietness of the downs and nature was nowhere interpreted to me by this pop-music.