Henry Cow

The Cambridge experimental rock group that mixed free jazz, modernist composition and rock across five studio albums, ran itself as a co-operative, and founded Rock in Opposition before splitting in 1978.

Origin
Cambridge, England
Years active
1968-1978
Genres
experimental rock, progressive rock, avant-garde jazz, free improvisation
Labels
Virgin, Compendium, Caroline, Broadcast, Recommended Records

Cambridge

Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson met at a Cambridge blues club in May 1968, while at the University of Cambridge, and started Henry Cow. Their first concert, on 12 June 1968, was in support of Pink Floyd at the Architects' Ball at Homerton College. The name was widely taken as a tribute to the composer Henry Cowell, which the members denied; Hodgkinson said it was simply in the air that year. For three years the line-up kept changing until John Greaves settled on bass and, in September 1971, Chris Cutler joined on drums. That quartet was the core of the band until 1976.

In 1971 they entered John Peel's Rockortunity Knocks contest, and from February 1972 they recorded sessions for his Radio 1 show. In April 1972 a three-week project scoring Robert Walker's production of Euripides' The Bacchae brought in Geoff Leigh on saxophones and flute. Their historian Benjamin Piekut describes the early members as throwing together their love of free jazz, psychedelia, modernist composition and electronic music.

Virgin

An April 1973 Peel session and growing press attention brought a contract with Virgin in May 1973; Robert Wyatt, who called them his favourite band in the world, was among those who recommended them. Within two weeks they were at The Manor in Oxfordshire, recording, Cutler said, over the multitrack tape Magma had used. Legend came out later in 1973 wrapped in Ray Smith's woven sock of paint, with the band's name only on the spine, and opens with Nirvana for Mice. Virgin sent them round Britain with Faust, and at the Rainbow in London they hired ten brass players and dancers to usher the audience in.

Leigh left in December 1973 and Lindsay Cooper arrived on bassoon, oboe and flute. Unrest (1974) built its second side by improvising to tape, then looping, layering and changing speeds. From November 1974 the band merged with the song trio Slapp Happy, Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore, for two albums: Desperate Straights, written almost entirely by Slapp Happy, and In Praise of Learning (1975), named after a poem by Bertolt Brecht. It carried Beautiful as the Moon, Terrible as an Army with Banners, and Steve Lake of Melody Maker named it the album of the year. Blegvad and Moore left in April 1975; Krause stayed as the band's singer.

Italy and opposition

After a May 1975 tour of England, France and Italy with Wyatt, a Rome concert that July kept them in Italy. They met the group Stormy Six and the Italian Communist Party, played its Festa de L'Unità events, joined Stormy Six's L'Orchestra co-operative in Milan and from then on largely managed themselves. Concerts (1976), a double album they mastered and manufactured themselves for the Norwegian label Compendium, opens with their August 1975 Peel session. Greaves left in March 1976 and Georgie Born joined on cello and bass that June. In October 1977 Virgin cancelled their contract.

On 12 March 1978 they hosted the first Rock in Opposition festival at the New London Theatre, with Stormy Six, Samla Mammas Manna, Univers Zero and Etron Fou Leloublan. Their last album, Western Culture, was recorded that year at Sunrise Studios in Kirchberg, Switzerland, and the split was announced after its sessions in August. Cutler later said they could no longer agree on who they were. Western Culture came out on their own Broadcast label in September 1979.

After

Their song material passed to Art Bears, the trio of Frith, Cutler and Krause, and Cutler founded Recommended Records with Nick Hobbs, a home for the Rock in Opposition bands. Cutler, Frith and Hodgkinson played six shows at The Stone in New York in December 2006, and after Cooper's death in 2013 the band reconvened in November 2014 for tribute concerts in London, Huddersfield and Forlì, the one time they returned to the old repertoire. Since 2022 Cutler, Frith, Hodgkinson, Greaves and Annemarie Roelofs have improvised together as Henry Now, which Cutler says is not a reformation; its album Then Again appeared in November 2025.

Recommended Records has issued the archive at length, in the box The Road in 2009 and the complete Henry Cow Box Redux in 2019. Piekut's Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, built from around ninety interviews, came from Duke University Press in 2019. Myles Boisen observed that they had few imitators but inspired many, and Wyatt heard in them "the sound of thinking out loud."

Members

Records

Songs

Slapp Happy, Art Bears, Robert Wyatt, Faust, Stormy Six

Where to go next

Official

  • Henry Cow on Bandcamp The whole catalogue, including the Redux box, to stream or buy.
  • Fred Frith Frith's own site, with his discography and interview extracts.

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Henry Cow, Wikipedia
  2. Henry Cow discography, Wikipedia
  3. Chris Cutler and Maggie Thomas interview, The Non-Writer (2024)
  4. The World as a Problem Never Fully Solved, Los Angeles Review of Books (2020-08-09)
  5. Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Faust On Virgin Records, The Quietus (2024-04-30)
  6. Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, Duke University Press (2019-09-27)
  7. Henry Cow, Bandcamp