The title turned out to be a prophecy. Bursting at the Seams gave the Strawbs a number two album, the two biggest singles of their career and 52 sold-out British dates, and by the end of the tour that promoted it the band had stopped speaking to each other and split into camps. Hudson and Ford left. Blue Weaver left. The most successful record they ever made destroyed the line-up that made it. Cousins’s own verdict, years later, was that it was a tragedy they fell apart, because for sound and invention this remains their best album.

The short version

Bursting at the Seams is the Strawbs’ fifth album, released in January 1973 on A&M and produced by the band, with Tom Allom engineering. The line-up is Dave Cousins on vocals, guitars and banjo, Dave Lambert on vocals and guitars, Blue Weaver on organ, piano and Mellotron, John Ford on bass and vocals, Richard Hudson on drums, sitar and vocals. It is the first album after founder member Tony Hooper left in the autumn of 1972, unhappy with how far Cousins was pulling the band away from folk; Lambert, a blues and hard rock player, replaced him. Ten tracks. It reached number two in Britain and spent twelve weeks in the Top 100 — their most successful record. Lay Down had gone to twelve the previous October; Part of the Union reached two in January.

The song that broke the band

Part of the Union was written by Hudson and Ford, recorded with no contribution from Cousins at all, and was originally intended for release under the name The Brothers. It sold over a quarter of a million copies, spent two weeks at number two and was adopted almost immediately as an unofficial anthem of the trade union movement, at the height of Britain’s industrial unrest. Whether that was the intention has been argued over ever since — some read the chorus as satire of union power, and the band have since confirmed the song was meant sincerely, in support of the unions. On Top of the Pops in February 1973 Hudson played a marching bass drum lettered The Associated Union of Strawbs Workers, which tells you the tone they were going for. What is not in dispute is what it did to the group. The sessions had already run to three months because Hudson and Ford were fighting to get their songs on the record while Cousins tried to keep it sounding like the Strawbs. As Cousins later put it, he wanted his long epics and they wanted their pop songs. The hit settled the argument in their favour, and they left.

The sound

Everything at once. This is folk rock, hard rock, country, pop, orchestral balladry and one genuine prog epic, sequenced with no obvious plan, and depending on your temperament that is either the charm or the flaw. Lambert’s arrival changes the band audibly — there is proper electric lead guitar here for the first time, used sparingly and well — while Weaver’s Mellotron and harpsichord keep one foot in Grave New World. Cousins hands over nearly half the writing, which is generous and also fatal to the album’s coherence: five writers pulling five directions produces a record with no centre. The production is big, some say too big. What survives all of it is the material. Even people who file this as the weakest of the golden run — From the Witchwood through to Ghosts — usually admit that two or three tracks here are as good as anything the band recorded.

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The songs

Flying opens with narrative verses, a big harmony chorus and an instrumental break built on banjo and Mellotron together, which is a combination nobody else was attempting. Lady Fuschia is Hudson and Ford’s, sung by them, with sitar underneath and an exotic haze over it. Stormy Down is a country-flavoured rocker with dark words and a bouncing piano. The River is short, slow and haunting, and previews the band that would make Hero and Heroine. Down by the Sea is the epic: six minutes moving from acoustic calm to heavy electric guitar and out through a coda of brass, strings and thundering drums, and it got American airplay. Part of the Union follows, complete with Weaver’s honky-tonk piano. Tears and Pavan is the other masterpiece — echoed vocals, stately Mellotron and real grief, joined by a harpsichord bridge to a pseudo-Renaissance dance from Ford. The Winter and the Summer is Lambert’s first Strawbs song, Lay Down is the anthem, and Thank You closes on a piano that sounds like a school hall.

Reception and legacy

Number two, both singles in the top twenty, favourable trade reviews and a band poised, as one contemporary writer put it, for transatlantic success. Then 52 UK dates and an American tour, and it all came apart on the road. Hudson and Ford went off to be Hudson-Ford and had hits; Weaver returned to session work and later joined the Bee Gees for the disco years; Cousins and Lambert auditioned a new band — John Hawken on keyboards, Chas Cronk on bass, Rod Coombes on drums — and made Hero and Heroine, which is the record most people now consider their best. Cronk and Coombes were still there four years later on Burning for You. Bursting at the Seams remains the Strawbs album most Britons have actually heard, on the strength of a song that is not remotely typical of them, which is a fate the band has borne with reasonable grace ever since.

The verdict

A better album than its reputation, and a worse one than its chart position. If you know the Strawbs only through Part of the Union, everything here will surprise you; if you know them through Hero and Heroine, this is the messy, generous, overcrowded record that preceded it and paid for it. Start with Down by the Sea, then Tears and Pavan, which between them make the case that this band belonged in the same conversation as Jethro Tull and early Genesis. Then play Part of the Union and listen to a group accidentally writing their own obituary in a singalong.

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