'Igginbottom – 'Igginbottom's Wrench

Someone needs to get on with a decent LP reissue!

Often touted as one of the primordial pioneers of the expanding "Canterbury Scene" the unlikely named 'Igginbottom actually originated from Bradford in Yorkshire! Back in 1969, they were fresh faced and highly explorative combo who then went south with the promise of a lucrative record deal on the burgeoning Deram record label. But no fame came their way, as the album they created became more of a controversial talking point than anything else. According to one source it never sold enough to pay the band's advances, and rather than keep 'Igginbottom on the label's roster, like the similarly ill-fated Aardvark, they were dumped and forgotten, with many of the remaining stocks sold-off cheap at places like Woolworth's and Tesco.
The reason 'Igginbottom would become a talking point amongst the few that bought the album would have been down to its intrinsically strange "uniqueness". Only one track I know of elsewhere inhabits this same musical world, and that is Moonchild from King Crimson's debut IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING. That track itself divides King Crimson fans often quite extremely, so what of an album that roughly inhabits that strange abstract world throughout?
The line-up of 'Igginbottom looks conventional enough, with Dave Freeman (drums), Allan Holdsworth (guitar, vocals), Mick Skelly (bass) and Steve Robinson (guitar, vocals), but it's the way they combine and scatter these instruments, using such subtle and precise invention and dexterity that's the surprise. You may think when listening to it that these guys were all stoned and out of it. But, if so, how could they have so acutely both dissonant and coherent. No, a lot of that craziness was just the mood of the time. Basically, they played jazz lines in a complex rock and folk concoction, or you could say it was the other way round. Alan and Steve's guitar's, often played with a semi-acoustic hybrid of early Fripp and soft-blues, tend to dance around each other both in and around the structure of the pieces, whilst the bass and drums tend to hold it together. This is not always the case, as sometimes the music gets so loose and ethereal that you expect the musicians to fall asleep.
You probably won't even recognise the version of California Dreamin'. It's an album that stylistically defies any attempt at serious description or classification. As the rear of the LP reissue states "unique, unique, unique".