Emerlist Davjack is not a person. He is four people: EMERson, o’LIST, DAVison and JACKson, welded into one name and credited on the first pressing as the author of two of the songs and the producer of the record. That tells you most of what you need to know about the Nice’s debut — a band seven months old, self-producing at Olympic with Glyn Johns at the desk, who had spent the summer backing a soul singer and now wanted to put Dave Brubeck and Bach on the same eight minutes of vinyl. The rest of the album is 1967. That one track is not.

The short version

The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack is the Nice’s debut, made for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. This is the only full album with the founding four-piece: Keith Emerson on organ, piano and harpsichord, David O’List on guitar and trumpet, Lee Jackson on bass, guitar and vocals, Brian Davison on drums and tubular bells. It was cut at Olympic Studios in the autumn of 1967 with Glyn Johns engineering and the band producing themselves under the Emerlist Davjack name. Eight tracks. The dating is genuinely contested — the title track came out as a single in November 1967, the album followed either at the tail end of that year or in the first months of 1968, and reissues, reference books and the band’s own chronology do not agree. The sleeve is by Derek Burton with photographs by Gered Mankowitz.

P.P. Arnold, Steve Marriott and a dagger

They existed because P.P. Arnold needed a band. Emerson, O’List, Jackson and the drummer Ian Hague were assembled to back her on a UK tour in 1967; Hague was soon replaced by Brian Davison on O’List’s recommendation, and by October the group had split off to work on their own material. Steve Marriott of the Small Faces gave them the name, meaning it ironically. Immediate signed them, Glyn Johns worked on the sound, and the live shows — long, improvised, and increasingly built around whatever Emerson felt like doing to his Hammond — built a following fast. In October 1967 they recorded their first session for John Peel and opened for the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Marquee. It was around this period that a roadie named Lemmy Kilmister gave Emerson a dagger, which he took to jamming between the keys of the organ to hold notes down, and which stayed with the act for the rest of his career. The theatre came first. The music caught up.

The sound

Four-fifths psychedelic pop, one-fifth the future. Most of this record sits comfortably beside early Pink Floyd or the Nuggets boxes: bright, energetic, faintly silly, with harpsichord where an organ would normally be and a rhythm section far better than the material requires. Jackson sings, and his voice is the thing everyone argues about — untrained, flat in places, and either a charming liability or a serious problem depending on the listener. O’List’s guitar is loud and Hendrix-shaped and this is the only album that has it. What lifts the record out of its year is the quoting. Emerson pulls in Bach and Brubeck not as decoration but as structure, and in doing so hands the band something no other 1967 group had: a reason to play instrumentally for eight minutes at a time. That is the whole trick, and every keyboard-led prog band of the next decade uses it.

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The songs

Flower King of Flies opens the album with a title borrowed from Golding and a lyric Jackson has said he wrote thinking about Paul McCartney. The title track is bubbly pop with brass and harpsichord, with backing vocals from the Immediate staffer Billy Nichols, and it was the single — backed with Azrial (Angel of Death), which is not on the album. Bonnie K is the loud one. And then Rondo: eight minutes taken from Dave Brubeck’s Blue Rondo a la Turk, off Time Out, with the 9/8 flattened out to 4/4, O’List raging over the top and Emerson dropping the fugue from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor into the middle of it. It became his signature piece and one of very few Nice numbers he took with him into ELP. War and Peace opens side two and reworks Silver Meter by the organist Big John Patton — a piece Jackson and Emerson had already recorded, unreleased, with Gary Farr and the T-Bones years earlier. Tantalising Maggie is psychedelia proper, Dawn is whispered rather than sung, and The Cry of Eugene closes with the album’s best singing and its wildest playing.

Reception and legacy

It is one of the records people nominate when they argue about the first progressive rock album, and the nomination rests almost entirely on Rondo. That is fair enough. The claim it can actually support is smaller and more interesting: this is where the method arrives — take a classical or jazz theme seriously, arrange it for a rock band, and play it at full volume for as long as you like. Days of Future Passed had brought an orchestra to rock; the Nice brought rock to the repertoire, which is the opposite operation. There is a lovely footnote for Italian listeners: the title track was adapted into Italian more than once in the late Sixties, including a version by Quelli, the Milanese group who would shortly become PFM. O’List was gone within a year, and everything after this was a trio.

The verdict

A curiosity with one monument in the middle of it. Do not start here if you want to know why the Nice matter — Five Bridges is the record for that — but do come for Rondo, which is still ferocious and is the single most influential eight minutes the band ever committed to tape. Then War and Peace, which is heavier than anything else recorded in Britain in 1967 apart from Hendrix. The rest is period charm, played with more skill than it needed. If you have ever wondered where ELP actually began, it is here, four young men and a borrowed jazz standard, months before anybody had a word for it.

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