Azure d’Or is the album where Renaissance blinked. No orchestra. No epic. Ten short songs and a wall of synthesisers where the grand piano used to be. It is the record that fans of the symphonic band tend to describe as the moment it all went wrong, and the record that, taken entirely on its own terms, contains some of the loveliest things they ever did. It is also the last one made by the five people who defined them. Approach it with the right expectations and it has a great deal to give.

The short version

Azure d’Or — the title means azure gold — is Renaissance’s ninth album, released in May 1979 on Warner Bros. It was recorded at Maison Rouge Studios in London between November 1978 and February 1979, with David Hentschel producing and engineering again after A Song for All Seasons, assisted by Dick Plant and a young Dave Bascombe. The classic line-up is here for the last time: Annie Haslam, Michael Dunford, John Tout, Jon Camp and Terence Sullivan. The Royal Philharmonic is not. There are ten tracks, none longer than about five minutes, and the longest instrument list belongs to Tout, who swapped much of his piano for a rack of Yamahas, ARPs and a Mellotron. Gered Mankowitz photographed the embossed sleeve. Tout and Sullivan left soon after, and the band that made it ceased to exist.

After the hit

The logic is easy to reconstruct. Northern Lights had given them a top ten single and their best-selling British album; the obvious move was more of that and less of the other thing. So the orchestra went, the long pieces went, and the songs got shorter and tighter. Two other shifts matter more than they look. Jon Camp emerges as a writer, taking half the record, while Betty Thatcher — the poet in Cornwall who had written almost every Renaissance word since 1972 — supplies lyrics for only five tracks. And Hentschel, who had helped build Elton John’s biggest records and had once engineered for Phil Spector, layered everything rather than letting the parts breathe. The result is dense and glossy where the band had always been open and airy. Everyone involved was trying to evolve rather than repeat, which was arguably the only honest choice available in 1979. It simply cost them the thing that made them unmistakable.

The sound

Take away the orchestra and Tout’s piano and you take away the two pillars. What fills the gap is a Yamaha CS-80, an ARP String Ensemble and a good deal of studio polish, and while synthesised strings in 1979 were state of the art, they are the one thing here that has aged. Camp steps up in every direction: he writes, he sings lead on a track, and he plays electric guitar. Dunford spreads out too, adding mandolin, autoharp and classical guitar. Sullivan brings kalimba, gongs and xylophone. It is a busier, more colourful and more conventional-sounding band. Haslam, thankfully, is untouched by any of it, and Hentschel uses her voice cleverly, stacking it in layers as another instrument in the weave. When the arrangements thin out and let the acoustic guitar and the voice do the work, the old magic is instantly back in the room.

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The songs

Jekyll and Hyde opens with a sneer and a snap, one of the album’s best and least typical moments, with Camp’s cello underneath. The Winter Tree is brief and bright. Only Angels Have Wings is a Camp song with a Camp lead vocal, baroque and jaunty, and one of the tracks the label pushed. Golden Key brings Tout back to the piano for something closer to the old shape, and Forever Changing — Sullivan’s lyric, Dunford’s acoustic, Haslam at her most affecting — is the album’s quiet triumph, an underrated gem that plays like a companion piece to Northern Lights. Side two is weaker and more commercial. Secret Mission is dressed in gongs and chimes; Kalynda (A Magical Isle) is genuinely beautiful folk and the best thing on the side; The Discovery is a rare Renaissance instrumental, brisk and enjoyable; Friends is slight; and The Flood at Lyons closes with more synthesiser than melody. Promotional films were shot for Jekyll and Hyde, The Winter Tree and Secret Mission — a band being marketed, in the year that stopped working.

Reception and legacy

It did not sell, and the progressive audience largely refused it. The standard verdict, then and now, is that Azure d’Or is where Renaissance lost their way: the point at which the group that had answered punk with the Royal Philharmonic decided to answer it with radio edits instead. There is a fairer reading. Judged against what its peers were putting out in 1979 it is more musical than most, it is honestly made rather than cynical, and three or four of its songs belong in the catalogue. But it is the end. Tout and Sullivan departed, Haslam, Dunford and Camp carried the name into Camera Camera and Time-Line, and the sound built on Ashes Are Burning did not survive the decade it was born in. Twelve years later Renaissance would come back; the version of the band that made this record never did.

The verdict

The last album to buy, not the first — Ashes Are Burning, Scheherazade and Other Stories and A Song for All Seasons all come well before it. Come to it expecting late-seventies art pop with a magnificent singer rather than symphonic prog and it holds up far better than its reputation: Forever Changing and Kalynda are worth the price on their own, and Jekyll and Hyde is a small pleasure. Come to it expecting Carpet of the Sun and you will be disappointed, which is precisely what happened to everybody in 1979. A goodbye that nobody knew was a goodbye.

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