http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=3410
United Kingdom - Germany / Krefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen
Genre:
Progressive Rock
Info:
English Rock Band - Formed Krefeld, Germany ca.1970. Disbanded somewhere in England ca. 1974.Ressurected ca. 1990 Glossopdale, England. Named as such by record company after aforementioned because of split personality nature of far-out music.There are many one album wonders that emerged from the heady days of the summer of love social phenomenom of the late sixties. Some bands even lost concept of time and prolonged it well into the '70s and to quote a line from This Is Spinal Tap ended up in " the where are they now? file". Janus was one such band and their 1972 album entitled Gravedigger was one of those wonder albums. Though it may not be up there with the Beatle's Butcher Album it has been known to fetch ridiculous prices ( as much as $350 ) at record conventions and internet record trading sites. The early misadventures of Janus even rival the ficticious rock 'n' roll catastrophes of Spinal Tap. So, where are they now? One might ask. 7 albums have come to pass between 1990 and 2006. In 2012 mastermind and guardian of the Janus flame, Colin Orr, regrouped the band once more for another album that revisits the glorious '70s. But in order to understand the Janus story proper it's best to start at the beginning...
The original band had it's origins in the Midlands of England in 1969-70 when 18 year-old Colin Orr was in a nearly-made-it band that had fallen apart as a result of lack of money and creative failure. Disillusioned with the music scene in the UK, Orr packed a suitcase and along with his guitar headed for West Germany where he had found a job with NAAFI, a food supply company that serviced NATO bases. Upon his arrival at a youth hostel in Krefeld he was almost immediately noticed by a long hair freaky guy by the name of Bruno Lord who told him he was a singer looking for a guitarist to form a band. At the time there were other English lads hanging out in Germany and before they knew it they had a band together with Roy Yates on nylon string guitar, another vocalist, Derek Hyatt, Mick Peberdy on bass and Keith Bonthrone on drums. They decided to name the band Bonthrone after their drummer because they thought that it would confuse the Germans who wouldn't be able to pronounce it correctly. While working at his day job Orr started to write original material for the band. Orr liked the variation and contrast between hard and soft believing that the latter would make the former seem louder and harder and vice versa. In addition to writing some really heavy songs, some of which could have been the harbingers of the punk rock movement which was to appear a half decade or so in the future, Orr wrote some acoustic material as well. The music as a whole was completely "out there" and fit in perfectly with the burgeoning Krautrock scene and Bonthrone started to get gigs around Krefeld and generated a considerable amout of excitement. It wasn't long before some hats at EMI caught wind of the unusual phenomenom and invited Bonthrone for a session/audition which was really just a formality because they were signed on the spot to EMI's subsidiary progressive rock label Harvest. Among the bands making their home on Harvest at the time were Barclay James Harvest, Pink Floyd, The Edgar Broughton Band and Deep Purple so Bonthrone were all of a sudden running with the big dogs. The record itself consisted of one side of heavy psychedelic tracks almost exclusively written by Orr while the other side featured a sombre 20 minute suite-like group composition entitled Gravedigger ( after which the album was named ) which was ostensibly acoustic that underscored the nylon string guitar of Roy Yates along with vocal harmonizations and string arrangements that even embraced some classical motifs and themes. Astonishingly, to this day this piece surfaces from time-to-time as a teaching aid in some European universities! However EMI didn't like the name Bonthrone so they changed it to Janus after the mythological Roman god of beginnings and endings who saw both forwards and backwards presumably to reflect the the duality of the music. The cover with a skeleton crawling over sand dunes in a top hat with a white rose that record collectors are all so familiar with was the brainwave of EMI executive Ian Groves who was particularily fond of the Gravedigger suite. Initially it was proposed to put a dead guy on the cover but in order to avoid dodgy questions a skeleton was borrowed from the anatomy department at the University Of Cologne who also suggested the top hat and the white rose perhaps as some sort of a joke. If EMI were happy with the end product that was recorded in just 24 hours of studio time , the band themselves were somewhat dismayed. The way EMI had engineered it made it sound muted and more psychedelic and not as heavy as they would have liked. A shorter version of Gravedigger entitled Gravedigger II appeared on Janus' 1993 album "Innocence" that might better reflect the band's real intentions even if it was setting the record straight more than 20 years later!
Line Up:
Colin Orr / vocals, guitars, bass, drums, keyboards
Rikki Hanson-Orr / lead vocals on '' Under The Shadow Of The Moon '', clarinet, keyboards, backing vocals
Thea Hanson-Orr / tenor saxophone
Dean Houston / alto saxophone
Ben Stafford / keyboards, backing vocals
Rachel Luxon-Robinson / backing vocals
Pam Hodkinson / backing vocals
Discography:
1972 Gravedigger
1990 Out of Time
1991 Agnus Dei
1991 Journey
1993 Innocence
1994 Free Fall 1998 Agnus Dei 2000
2002 Sea of Sighs
2005 The S Album
2013 Under the Shadow of the Moon
Videos:
Janus - Under The Shadow Of The Moon (2013)
Year : 2013
Style : Progressive Rock
Country : United Kingdom / Germany
Audio : 320 kbps + all scans
Size : 131 mb
Tracklist:
1. Under The Shadow Of The Moon ( 21:13 )
2. Dark Dark ( 4:40 )
3. How Many Times ( 3:14 )
4. Promised Land ( 4:35 )
5. Save America ( 2:01 )
6. Feeling ( 3: 47 )
7. Maybe I Was The Fool ( 5:14 )
8. I'm Not Made Of Plastic ( 4:08 )
9. If I'd Listened ( 4:22 )
Download links for all albums only on our blog here: http://goodmetalandhar.do.am/
