An eight-minute suite about nightmares, a grim meditation on mortality set to a train ride through west London, a song for a newborn baby, a song for a wife, and a hymn to a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rowed out into a storm. Ghosts contains all of that and holds together, which is the trick the Strawbs could pull in the mid-1970s and almost nobody else could. It is also the last record of their golden run, and the second and final album by the line-up that made Hero and Heroine.

The short version

Ghosts is the Strawbs’ seventh album, recorded from July 1974 and issued on A&M — in Britain at the end of 1974, in America in January 1975, which is why you will see both years attached to it. Tom Allom produced, engineered and mixed. The band is Dave Cousins on vocals, guitars and recorder; Dave Lambert on vocals and guitars; John Hawken, formerly of Renaissance, on piano, harpsichord, Mellotron, Moog, Hammond and pipe organ; Chas Cronk on bass and vocals; Rod Coombes, once of Stealers Wheel, on drums and percussion. Claire Deniz, the cellist from Dragonfly five years earlier, guests. Eight tracks, two of them multi-part suites. It is the second and last album by this line-up: Hawken left afterwards.

The last album of the golden run

The band that made this had been assembled from scratch eighteen months before. When Bursting at the Seams broke the group apart, Cousins and Lambert auditioned and rebuilt: Hawken from the first Renaissance, Coombes from Stealers Wheel, Cronk a session bassist recommended by Rick Wakeman. That band made Hero and Heroine, which is the record most people now name as the Strawbs’ best, and then made this one, and then stopped. Hawken departed when Cousins wanted to shift the style again — a decision the faithful have been arguing about for fifty years, since what followed was Nomadness, Deep Cuts and the American-facing stretch. There is a nice piece of trivia in the packaging, too: the sleeve was originally meant to show a view of Charterhouse School, and the school refused permission.

The sound

Lush and sharp at once, which should not be possible. Hawken is the reason: Mellotron, harpsichord, pipe organ and Moog stacked into arrangements that never turn to soup, with Allom’s production keeping edges on everything. Cousins’s gothic instincts drive the big pieces, Lambert’s guitar gives them teeth, and around them sits a surprising amount of light — country twang, honky-tonk piano, a nostalgia ballad, a bit of playfulness. Some hear that variety as incoherence, and it is true the country-flavoured songs were partly aimed at America. What holds it up is melody and conviction. This band could put a children’s choir on one track and a nightmare on another and make both sound like the same group, and the reason is that Cousins meant every word of it.

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The songs

Ghosts opens the album in three parts across eight and a half minutes: harpsichord, then acoustic guitars, then Night Light — sung by Lambert and the most urgent thing on the record, with a guitar solo that does a fair impression of panic — and out through the calmer Guardian Angel. Lemon Pie is folk rock with a twang and a wink, and Cousins wrote it for his wife. Starshine / Angel Wine is the mellow one, and Starshine is an ode to Chas Cronk’s newborn child. Where Do You Go (When You Need a Hole to Crawl In) is piano pop with a rolling honky-tonk feel; Cousins has been open about Cat Stevens, a friend and label-mate, as an influence on this side of the band. The Life Auction is the other epic — Impressions of Southall From the Train giving way to The Auction, Mellotron everywhere, a bleak inventory of pride, greed, desire and peace of mind. Don’t Try to Change Me and Remembering / You and I are the soft-rock breath. And Grace Darling closes it, choir and church organ behind a tribute to the young woman who rowed out from a Northumberland lighthouse to save shipwrecked sailors.

Reception and legacy

It is the last title in the sequence — Antiques and Curios, From the Witchwood, Grave New World, Bursting at the Seams, Hero and Heroine, Ghosts — that Strawbs listeners treat as the golden era, and plenty of them name it their favourite outright. The Life Auction in particular is regularly compared to Genesis at their most theatrical, and the title suite has never left the reputation of the band. New York and the American northeast were a stronghold; people who saw this line-up on the Ghosts tour still write about it. Then Hawken went, the style shifted, and the run ended. Everything after this is a different band with the same name and the same singer, doing something else.

The verdict

The best entry point to the Strawbs after Hero and Heroine, and arguably the more rewarding of the two once you know them. Start with the title suite, all eight minutes, and pay attention when Lambert takes over. Then The Life Auction, which is the band at their darkest and most ambitious. Then Grace Darling, which sends you out on a choir and an organ and a true story from the Northumberland coast, and is as English as this music ever got. If those three do not convince you, nothing in the catalogue will.

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