Scheherazade and Other Stories

The London Symphony Orchestra worked in Abbey Road's Studio 1 while the band mostly used Studio 3. Song of Scheherazade began as Dunford's score for a planned theatrical musical, which he and Camp worked on at Dunford's house in Windlesham before Tout joined the sessions at the band's rehearsal hall in Longcross. It is not based on Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, though a brief recurring six-note motif alludes to that work.

David Hentschel was the first choice as producer but was unavailable, so David Hitchcock took the job, partly because of his work on Caravan's In the Land of Grey and Pink and because he shared a manager with the band. He produced Caravan's Cunning Stunts by day and this album at night. Both sides later said it never fully came together, and the words "and Other Stories" were added to the title at the last minute. Haslam and Sullivan said The Vultures Fly High was recorded at Air Studios before the band moved to Abbey Road.

Trip to the Fair was inspired by Haslam's first date with Roy Wood, when the fair on Hampstead Heath turned out to be closed for the night. The laughter on the track comes from dubbing together takes in which Haslam kept laughing at the same spot. The Vultures Fly High was written about the treatment the band received from music critics. The suite has nine sections: Fanfare, The Betrayal, The Sultan, Love Theme, The Young Prince and Princess as told by Scheherazade, Festival Preparations, Fugue for the Sultan, The Festival and Finale. Camp sings the lead on The Sultan, and the credits for the individual sections are hard to assign because the writers borrowed themes from each other.

The cover is by Hipgnosis, who had planned a series of paintings arranged as a tapestry, but the painter died after completing one, and that one became the cover. It is the first album by the Haslam line-up without quotes from existing classical pieces. AllMusic's Bruce Eder gave it four and a half stars and noted that many fans see it as the band's magnum opus. He found Song of Scheherazade continuous and powerful in places but also pretentious and repetitive, and judged the other three songs more completely successful. It reached 48 on the US Billboard chart. Wikipedia's album page gives the release as July 1975.