Unhalfbricking

The band went to Bob Dylan's London music publishers to hear unreleased songs from the Basement Tapes sessions. Hutchings said they loved it all and would have covered every song if they could. They used three: "Percy's Song", "Million Dollar Bash" and "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", which they retitled Si Tu Dois Partir. "Percy's Song" and "Million Dollar Bash" had never been released. Matthews left during the sessions after singing only "Percy's Song", and Denny sang lead on everything else, including her own "Autopsy" and Who Knows Where the Time Goes?.

Thompson wrote "Genesis Hall", a slow waltz with Nicol on dulcimer, named for a former hotel on Drury Lane that became a squat in early 1969, and "Cajun Woman", which opens side two with Swarbrick's fiddle, his first work with the band. The fiddle had no pick-up, so the band smashed open a telephone and fixed its microphone to the instrument with an elastic band. The traditional A Sailor's Life runs just over eleven minutes.

The title came from Ghost, a word game the band played while travelling to gigs, and "Unhalfbricking" was Denny's invention. The UK sleeve, shot by Eric Hayes, showed Denny's parents outside their Wimbledon home with the band visible through the garden fence, and carried neither title nor band name. The US edition on A&M used a picture of circus elephants.

The album reached number 12 on the UK chart, giving the band their first chart success, and spent eight weeks there. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic called it a transitional album that shed the band's closest ties to American folk rock. Q placed it at number 41 in its 2004 list of the 50 Greatest British Albums Ever, and it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.