This is where Renaissance became Renaissance. Two albums in, a band assembled from the wreckage of somebody else’s group found the sound nobody else had: piano instead of guitar, a real string section instead of a mellotron, English folk melody dressed in classical clothes, and a soprano floating above all of it. Ashes Are Burning is the first great Renaissance album, it broke them in America, and it ends with a guitar solo played by a man from another band entirely.

The short version

Ashes Are Burning is the fourth album to carry the Renaissance name and the second by the line-up that made them famous. It was recorded between April and August 1973 at CTS Music Centre in Wembley — then still known as De Lane Lea — with Dick Plant producing and engineering, and released in October on EMI’s Sovereign label. Annie Haslam sings, John Tout plays keyboards, Jon Camp plays bass and guitars, Terence Sullivan drums, and Michael Dunford plays acoustic guitar. Richard Hewson arranged strings for two tracks, using a twenty-two-piece section with woodwind, and Hipgnosis designed the sleeve. It became the band’s first record to reach the American album chart, peaking at number one hundred and seventy-one, and it began the golden run that carried through Turn of the Cards and Scheherazade.

The band that wrote nothing

Here is the strangest fact about this record: not one note of it was written by a member of the band. Michael Dunford composed the music and played on it, but he was not officially in Renaissance yet — he had left, come back to visit, played them a few songs on an acoustic guitar, and simply stayed; he would not be a full member until the next album. The words are all by Betty Thatcher, a poet who lived in Cornwall and was never on stage. Their method was extraordinary: Dunford posted her a tape of a melody, she posted back a finished lyric. The one exception, On the Frontier, was written by Jim McCarty, the ex-Yardbird who had founded the original Renaissance and by 1973 had nothing to do with this one. A progressive rock album composed entirely by outsiders should not work. This one is a masterpiece. The line-up that settled here — Haslam, Tout, Camp, Sullivan, Dunford — would hold together until 1979.

The sound

Guitarist Rob Hendry had gone after Prologue and was never really replaced, and that absence defines the record. With Dunford on acoustic and Tout’s piano and harpsichord carrying the lead lines, Renaissance ended up sounding like no other band of the era: pastoral, chamber-scaled, unhurried, with almost no distortion anywhere. Camp’s bass does the work an electric guitar would normally do, roaming and singing high up the neck, and Sullivan is light and precise. Then there is Haslam, whose voice is the reason many people never leave. She is pure, controlled and effortless at the top of her range, and she uses it as an instrument rather than a showcase. Where Prologue was tentative, this album is confident and beautifully recorded — and the real strings on two tracks give it a warmth the mellotron brigade could not touch.

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The songs

Can You Understand opens with nearly ten minutes of momentum: a driving Tout piano theme, a full orchestral swell, and Haslam arriving over Dunford’s acoustic. Let It Grow is a gentle romance that closes on wordless harmonies; On the Frontier, McCarty’s song, is brisker and stranger, with Camp sharing the vocal. Side two opens with Carpet of the Sun, three and a half minutes of sunlit symphonic pop that became the piece everyone knew, and remains the best possible introduction to this band. At the Harbour is the quiet heart of the album: Tout opens and closes it with a passage from Debussy’s La Cathedrale engloutie, and Haslam sings Thatcher’s words about women waiting at the water for men who may not return, in what many listeners consider her finest performance on record. The title track takes the last eleven minutes: a slow build through piano, bass and voice, a long instrumental middle, a drop to a lone organ, and then Andy Powell of Wishbone Ash, on loan for the occasion, playing the one electric guitar solo on the whole album out into the fade. On stage it could run half an hour.

Reception and legacy

The album gave Renaissance the cult following that sustained them for the rest of the decade, and it is the one that opened America to them — a country that would treat them far better than Britain ever did, and would soon have them selling out Carnegie Hall. Critical opinion has been steady and generous ever since: alongside Scheherazade and Other Stories, this is the record most often named as the band’s best, and the Powell solo is regularly voted the single finest moment in their catalogue, which is a slightly awkward compliment for a group with no guitarist. Its wider significance is that it proved a third way existed. In 1973 progressive rock mostly meant volume, virtuosity and Moogs. Renaissance answered with a grand piano, an acoustic guitar and a soprano, and made something just as ambitious and far more beautiful.

The verdict

Start here. This and Scheherazade and Other Stories are the two essential Renaissance albums, and this is the friendlier door: six tracks, no weak one among them, and a running order that gives you the epic, the folk song, the hit and the heartbreak in turn. If you have half an hour, play Carpet of the Sun first to hear what the voice does, then At the Harbour to hear what it can carry, then the title track for the payoff. If you have four minutes, Carpet of the Sun will do. Fifty years on it has not dated, mostly because it never chased the era in the first place.

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