Novella is the last time Renaissance made a record entirely on their own terms. There is barely an electric guitar on it, there is a full orchestra all over it, and the two longest tracks take up more than half the running time. In 1977 that was not merely unfashionable, it was almost provocative. It became their biggest American album, it was nearly impossible to buy in Britain, and it remains the quietest and most underrated of their great four.

The short version

Novella is Renaissance’s seventh album and the fourth by the classic line-up of Annie Haslam, Michael Dunford, John Tout, Jon Camp and Terence Sullivan, with Betty Thatcher writing most of the words. Richard Hewson — who had arranged strings for Ashes Are Burning four years earlier — returned to write and conduct the orchestral arrangements. Five tracks: two epics, one ballad, and two in between. It came out in America and Canada on Sire in February 1977 and reached number forty-six on the Billboard chart, the highest position the band ever managed there. British fans had to wait most of the year, and many of them simply imported the American copy instead.

The label that went bust

The delay was not the band’s fault. Their British label, Miles Copeland’s BTM, collapsed in 1976, only months after releasing their Live at Carnegie Hall album, taking the UK release schedule down with it. CBS signed Renaissance and got as far as cutting a test pressing of Novella before passing them on to Warner Bros., who eventually put it out in Britain. In the meantime the album was on sale in New York and unavailable in London, which is a strange thing to do to a band from Surrey and Lancashire. There is a nice consequence buried in this mess. On 8 January 1977, with the album still unreleased at home, Renaissance became the first act featured on the BBC’s Sight and Sound In Concert — a pioneering simulcast that put the pictures on television and the stereo sound on Radio 1 at the same time — and they played Can You Hear Me? and Touching Once from a record almost nobody in the country could yet buy. Even the sleeve got tangled: the first American pressing carried unique artwork by the Sire staff artist Pamela Brown, and when the label switched distributors the cover was redrawn to match the British one.

The sound

This is Renaissance at their most formal and most orchestral. Hewson does not decorate the songs, he integrates them: strings and choir open the album before the band arrives, and the writing moves between the two as though it were all one score. Tout works a Steinway grand rather than a synthesiser. Dunford plays six and twelve-string acoustics and, on one track, Spanish guitar. Camp’s Rickenbacker is as prominent as ever, functioning as the lead voice in the instrumental sections, and he adds cello. Sullivan brings timpani. Electric guitar barely appears. Haslam, meanwhile, is at the height of her powers: commanding, precise, and used here almost as a solo instrument in the orchestral passages. Some listeners find the result mannered and airless, and there is a case that the production lacks the sparkle of Scheherazade. Others hear the most beautiful record the band ever made. Both are listening to the same thing.

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The songs

Can You Hear Me? takes nearly fourteen minutes and is the album’s reason to exist: an eerie opening, a great orchestral flourish with choir, a sprightly piano figure, a wordless vocal refrain, and Haslam moving through the whole thing like a narrator. It is a symphony in miniature and it stands with Ashes Are Burning and Song of Scheherazade. The Sisters follows, a Dunford and Tout composition with Michael on Spanish guitar and Thatcher at her most literary. Midas Man opens side two and is the album’s dark horse: subdued, spacious, murky, with bells tolling behind the chorus, and it is many listeners’ favourite thing here. The Captive Heart is a short piano ballad built on layered harmonies — and it would go on to become the B-side of a single the following year. Touching Once (Is So Hard to Keep) closes the record across nine and a half minutes, multi-sectional and swelling, with a lilting dance in its middle. Note the credits on those last two: Jon Camp wrote the lyrics himself, the first crack in the Dunford and Thatcher partnership that had run the band since 1972.

Reception and legacy

America took to it. Number forty-six was the best the band ever did there, and it confirmed what the Carnegie Hall run had already shown — that a British group nobody at home could quite place had found a genuine audience across the Atlantic. The critical reading, then and now, is that Novella is superbly made but safe: the fourth album in a row built to the pattern of Ashes Are Burning, with nothing on it that the previous three had not already suggested. That is true, and it is also why the next album changed course, chased a hit and found one. What Novella has instead is poise. It is the final statement of the uncompromised version of this band, made in the year punk broke, with an orchestra, in Latin-sleeve packaging, apologising to nobody.

The verdict

The fourth of the four essentials, after Ashes Are Burning, Turn of the Cards and Scheherazade and Other Stories — but do not mistake fourth for optional. Can You Hear Me? is a peak, Midas Man is a small masterpiece that almost nobody talks about, and the album rewards patience more than any other in the catalogue: it gives up nothing on first listen and a great deal on the fifth. Play it late, play it whole, and play the Esoteric remaster if you can find it, which lifts a production that was always a little too polite. The last Renaissance album made without one eye on the radio.

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