Henry Cow

Henry Cow were an English experimental rock group, founded at the University of Cambridge in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. Henry Cow's personnel fluctuated over their decade together; alongside Frith and Hodgkinson, however, drummer Chris Cutler, bassist John Greaves, and bassoonist/oboist Lindsay Cooper were important long-term members.

An inherent anti-commercial attitude kept them at arm's length from the mainstream music business, enabling them to experiment at will. Critic Myles Boisen writes, "[their sound] was so mercurial and daring that they had few imitators, even though they inspired many on both sides of the Atlantic with a blend of spontaneity, intricate structures, philosophy, and humor that has endured and transcended the 'progressive' tag." this has been repeatedly denied by band members. According to Hodgkinson, the name "Henry Cow" was "in the air" in 1968, and it seemed like a good name for the band. It had no connection to anything. In a 1974 interview, Cutler said the name was chosen because "[i]t's silly. What could be sillier than Henry Cow?"

History

Early years

Fred Frith met Tim Hodgkinson, a fellow student, in a blues club at Cambridge University in May 1968. Recognising their mutual open-minded approach to music, the two began performing together, playing a variety of musical styles including "dada blues" and "neo-Hiroshima". One of Henry Cow's first concerts was supporting Pink Floyd at the Architects' Ball at Homerton College, Cambridge, on 12 June 1968.

In October 1968, Henry Cow expanded when they were joined by Andy Powell (bass guitar), David Attwooll (drums) and Rob Brooks (rhythm guitar). They performed with this line-up until December that year, when Frith, Hodgkinson and Powell split off from the rest of the group and became a trio. Powell at the time was studying music at King's College under Roger Smalley, the resident composer. Smalley was influential in Henry Cow's early development. He exposed them to a variety of new music from bands and musicians like Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Smalley also introduced them to the idea of writing long and complex musical pieces for rock groups. It was at this time that Henry Cow began writing music to challenge their collective ability to play, then using it to improve on themselves.

As a trio, with Frith on bass guitar, Powell on drums and Hodgkinson playing an organ that Frith and Powell had persuaded him to learn, Henry Cow performed a number of gigs on the university calendar, including the annual Architects' Ball and the Midsummer Common Festival, as well as a performance on the roof of a 14-storey building in Cambridge. In April 1969, Powell left and the band reverted to a duo, with Frith playing violin and Hodgkinson on keyboards and reeds. In October 1969 philosopher Galen Strawson auditioned for the band. Later, Frith and Hodgkinson persuaded bassist John Greaves to join the band; with the services of a couple of temporary drummers and then Sean Jenkins, Henry Cow performed as a quartet for the next eight months. In May 1971, Martin Ditcham replaced Jenkins on drums, and with this line-up they played at several events, including the Glastonbury Festival alongside Gong in June 1971.

Ditcham left in July 1971, and it was not until September that year that the drummer's seat was filled again, this time by Chris Cutler. Responding to one of Cutler's adverts in Melody Maker, the band invited him to a rehearsal, This exposure, and a John Peel recording session in April 1973, led to the band signing with Virgin Records in May 1973.

Unrest

Within two weeks of signing the contract, Henry Cow began recording their debut album Legend (also known as Leg End) at Virgin's Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. It took three weeks of hard work, but at the end they were able to handle the studio themselves, which would prove to be invaluable later in their career. The track "Nine Funerals of the Citizen King", sung by the whole group, was Henry Cow's first overtly political statement.

To promote its new signing, Virgin organised a UK tour for Henry Cow and Faust, who had also just signed to the label. During this tour, Henry Cow began preparing music for an unorthodox and provocative play, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Some of this music was used on their next record Unrest. In November 1973, members of the band participated in a live-in-the-studio performance of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for the BBC, which was later released on the 2004 DVD edition of Oldfield's video compilation, Elements.

During a tour of the Netherlands in December 1973, Geoff Leigh left the group. The success of this venture prompted a merger of the two bands, and in early 1975 they recorded In Praise of Learning at The Manor. The merger ended in April 1975 when Moore and Blegvad left. Krause remained with Henry Cow, which effectively spelled the end of Slapp Happy.

Having made guest appearances on both the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy albums, Cooper rejoined in April 1975 and Henry Cow became a sextet. In May 1975 they embarked on a concert tour with Robert Wyatt in England, France and Italy to launch In Praise of Learning and Wyatt's new album, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard. was brought on partly out of necessity rather than choice. They began working outside the music industry and did everything for themselves. They abandoned agencies and managers and stopped looking for approval from the music press. Henry Cow quickly became self-sufficient and self-reliant.

Virtual exiles from their own country, they made mainland Europe their second home where they (and their music) were well received. After a concert in Rome in July 1975, Henry Cow remained behind with their truck/bus/mobile home and began meeting local musicians, including progressive rock band Stormy Six, and the PCI (Italian Communist Party). The PCI offered them concerts at Festa de L'Unità (large open-air fairs that run every summer all over Italy), and they joined Stormy Six's L'Orchestra, a musicians' co-operative in Milan. Each contact they made led to more contacts and soon doors opened for Henry Cow all over Europe.

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While rehearsing for an upcoming tour of Scandinavia in March 1976, John Greaves left the band to start working on the Kew. Rhone. project with Peter Blegvad, and Dagmar Krause withdrew due to ill health. Committed to the tour, Henry Cow had to perform as a quartet (Hodgkinson, Frith, Cooper and Cutler) and adjust their music accordingly. They took the radical option and abandoned composed material completely in favour of pure improvisation.

In May 1976, Henry Cow compiled a double LP Concerts for a new Norwegian underground label Compendium (re-released later on the budget Virgin sub-label Caroline). For the first time, they did everything themselves: the mastering, cover design, cutting, pressing and manufacturing. The album included an excerpt from one of several concerts performed with guest artist Robert Wyatt in 1975.

Henry Cow began auditioning for a bass player and found Georgie Born, a classically trained cellist and improviser. Even though she had never played bass guitar before, she joined the band in June 1976 and tuned her bass in 5ths like a cello with a lower C. In the interim, the band's compositions, including a new Hodgkinson epic with the working title of "Erk Gah", grew more complex.

Henry Cow returned to London in early 1977, where they merged with the entire Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong to form the Orckestra. They played their first concert at the Moving Left Revue at The Roundhouse in London and then at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park. The Orckestra later went on to tour in France, Italy and Scandinavia (extracts from some of these performances were released in 2006 on a CD-single included in the Henry Cow Box). At more or less the same time they set up Music for Socialism and its May Festival. It had been three years since Henry Cow had performed more than one concert a year in their own country. In an attempt to break the apathy that seemed to be discouraging anyone from wanting to put them on, they tried to organise a small alternative tour themselves, but abandoned it after 11 concerts when they started losing money: clearly nothing had changed.

Their contract with Virgin Records had now become a burden to both Henry Cow and Virgin: none of Henry Cow's records were licensed or distributed in the countries in which they spent all their time playing, and Henry Cow were not making any money for Virgin. Henry Cow needed to record again but Virgin refused to give them studio time at The Manor. When Henry Cow referred to the contract ("one month at a first class studio"), Virgin Records (in October 1977) agreed to cancel it.

By now, Krause's health had deteriorated to such an extent that touring became impossible for her and she decided to leave the group, although she agreed to sing on Henry Cow's next album. The recording of this album was to begin at Sunrise studios in Kirchberg, Switzerland in January 1978. However, a group meeting one week before threw into question the material planned for it, the aforementioned "Erk Gah" in particular. Cutler and Frith hurriedly wrote a set of songs which, along with some of the planned material, were duly recorded. On returning to London, another meeting was convened to question the predominance of songs on the album. The group agreed that the songs would be released separately by Cutler and Frith, while the instrumentals would be released later by Henry Cow. This decision, however, spelled the end of the band. Cutler, Frith and Krause released the songs, with four extra tracks recorded at David Vorhaus's Kaleidophon Studio in London, as Hopes and Fears under the name Art Bears, crediting the rest of Henry Cow as guests. Later that year Henry Cow returned to Sunrise, by then without Dagmar Krause and Georgie Born, to record their last album, Western Culture, an instrumental. Annemarie Roelofs had joined the band two months before the split and plays on the album as well. In December 2006, Cutler, Frith and Hodgkinson performed together at The Stone in New York City, only their second concert performance since Henry Cow broke up in 1978. The first was in London in 1986. Frith and Hodgkinson also performed improvised duo concerts in 1990. Extracts of the concerts were released in 1992 as Live Improvisations.

thumb|190px|left|Echoes of Henry Cow by the Michel Edelin Quintet

Cooper died in September 2013; In June 2014, it was announced that there would be a Henry Cow reunion as part of two concerts celebrating her life and works. The band, including Henry Cow members Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, John Greaves, Tim Hodgkinson, Annemarie Roelofs and Dagmar Krause, performed a set of Cooper's compositions in Henry Cow, then in News from Babel, Music for Films and Oh Moscow. The Henry Cow set featured Cutler, Frith, Greaves, Hodgkinson, Roelofs, Michel Berckmans, Alfred Harth and, on one piece, Veryan Weston and Zeena Parkins; Krause performed later in the evening, but not on the Henry Cow set. The concerts were performed at the Barbican Centre, London on 21 November 2014, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, on 22 November 2014. A third remembrance concert for Cooper featuring the same line-up above was held in Forlì, Italy on 23 November 2014.

In a review of the Barbican concert on 21 November, Dom Lawson of The Guardian called it "a fitting salute to Cooper's life", adding "what tonight’s experience never becomes is self‑indulgent: there’s a sharpness to the intricate arrangements as very obvious waves of passion and commitment from everyone on stage flow and spread across the auditorium."

In May 2019, the with John Greaves released Echoes of Henry Cow, an album of variations on Henry Cow compositions and other music. Aymeric Leroy wrote in the liner notes that it should not be seen as a Henry Cow tribute album, but rather "echoes (much transformed during its long journey through time, space, memory and the mysterious twists and turns of the creative process) in [Edelin's] own musical inner world".

On 18 November 2022, Greaves, Frith, Hodgkinson and Cutler reunited for concerts in Piacenza, Italy, under the moniker of Henry Now with Italian friend guesting. The same line-up played two gigs in the Czech Republic in November 2023. In January 2024 Henry Now performed in Barcelona with a line-up of Cutler, Frith, Hodgkinson and Annemarie Roelofs.. On 18 November 2025, a Henry Now album, Then Again was released on Italian avantgarde label in a limited audiophile edition consisting of Frith's mix from the band's first two Italian concerts in November 2022.

Music

Henry Cow's music included elaborately scored pieces (often with complex time signatures), tape loops and manipulations, "flat-out free improvisation" and songs. It incorporated elements of jazz, rock, contemporary classical music and the avant-garde. Dagmar Krause's vocals added another dimension to their sound, giving it a dramatic, almost Brechtian flair. Music journalists at the time often underestimated the formal compositional element of their music,

Trond Einar Garmo described Henry Cow's music as avant-garde rock. Writing in his book, Henry Cow: An Analysis of Avant Garde Rock (2020), Garmo stated:

<blockquote>I have chosen to use the term 'avant-garde rock' for Henry Cow's music. The word 'avant-garde' is usually associated with art that is 'difficult', 'incomprehensible', and to some extent 'meaningless'. The actual meaning of the word, however, is 'vanguard'. Avant-garde artists are, therefore, artists who find new directions and expand the boundaries of the art form in which they operate. And it is in this sense that I have used the word. Avant-garde rock represents the most experimental and radical trends within rock.</blockquote>

Henry Cow's music was challenging, not only to the listener, but also to the band themselves. They often composed pieces to challenge their own capabilities. Some of their music was scored beyond the conventional ranges of their instruments, necessitating that they "reinvent their instruments" and learn how to play them in completely new ways. And yet their music may not have been as good as it could have been. Henry Cow conducted their affairs as a collective and all decisions, including those related to their music, had to be approved by the group. Cutler said at a conference on "Composition and Experimentation in British Rock 1967–1976" in Italy in 2005 that Henry Cow had a rule that "the composer no longer owned the composition once the band had started to work on it." In a 1998 interview Frith said that this may have led to much of Henry Cow's material being "watered down" rather than strengthened.

Henry Cow were largely a live band, yet of the original six albums they made, only one, Concerts gave a glimpse of their live performances. In January 2009 Recommended Records released The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set, a nine-CD plus one-DVD collection of over 10 hours of previously unreleased and mostly live recordings made between 1972 and 1978, over four hours of which was improvised. This offered, "for the first time," according to Kelman, "a comprehensive account of Henry Cow's breadth and depth." but several sources have stated that this is incorrect, and that it was Henry Cow's previous drummer, Sean Jenkins.