John Hawken left after Ghosts, which left the Strawbs without a full-time keyboard player for the first time since 1970. So they hired several. One of them was Rick Wakeman, who had walked out of this band four years earlier to join Yes and now turns up playing electric harpsichord on a two-minute cabaret number. Nomadness is what a group sounds like when the era they defined has ended and they are trying, politely and professionally, to work out what comes next.

The short version

Nomadness is the Strawbs’ ninth album and their eighth in the studio, released in the autumn of 1975 on A&M — the last of their five years with the label. It was recorded at Sound Techniques in London across June and July 1975, produced by Tom Allom with Vic Gamm engineering. The band is now a quartet: Dave Cousins on vocals, acoustic guitar, dulcimer and banjo; Dave Lambert on vocals and guitars; Chas Cronk on bass and vocals; Rod Coombes on drums and vocals. The keyboards are all guests — Rick Wakeman, John Mealing, Tommy Eyre, John Lumley-Savile — alongside Tony Carr on congas, Jack Emblow on accordion and Allom himself on cimbalom. Ten tracks, none over five minutes, no suites. Cousins wrote six, including both singles.

The end of the A&M years

Hawken had been the prog engine of the previous two albums, and he went off to reassemble the first Renaissance under the name Illusion. Without him the band did not replace the chair; they hired hands as needed, which is how this record ends up with four keyboard players and none of them in the group. It was recorded soon after Ghosts, with the A&M relationship winding down and America still refusing to happen despite Hero and Heroine, and the strategy shows: shorter songs, an American rock and blues undertow, country and pop back in the mix. There is one more consequential decision buried in here. Cousins handed roughly half the lead vocals to Dave Lambert, including on songs he had written himself — the first move in an argument about which voice could sell a Strawbs record that would still be running three years later on Deadlines.

The sound

Leaner, slicker, and pulled in several directions at once. The production is genuinely excellent — Allom had been with them since Bursting at the Seams and the record still sounds good — and the playing is beyond reproach. What is missing is a centre. Where Hero and Heroine had eight minutes to build and Ghosts had a suite at either end, Nomadness has ten compact songs in six different styles, and the connective tissue that made the earlier albums feel like single organisms is not there. The best of it is unmistakably the same band. The rest is a group of professionals demonstrating that they can do Southern rock, lounge, country and anthemic guitar pop, which nobody had ever asked them to prove.

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The songs

To Be Free opens with defiance and Lambert’s sharp electric phrasing, and it was the single. Little Sleepy is heavier and points south. The Golden Salamander is the one everybody agrees on: Cousins, a dulcimer and almost nothing else, as delicate as anything on From the Witchwood, and the loveliest thing here by a distance. Absent Friend (How I Need You) is the strange one, loungier than the Strawbs had any business being, and it divides the audience completely. Back on the Farm is the country exercise. So Shall Our Love Die? opens side two on twelve-string and is Cousins at full strength. Tokyo Rosie is the cabaret piece with Wakeman’s harpsichord. A Mind of My Own is Rod Coombes’s, bluesy and swirling, and it comes closest to the darkness of Hero and Heroine. Hanging in the Gallery is introspective. And The Promised Land, written by Chas Cronk and sung by Cousins and Lambert together, is the most ambitious thing on the album and closes it properly.

Reception and legacy

Nomadness divides the faithful more than any other Strawbs album. One camp calls it the most underrated record they made and points at the songs; the other files it as the moment the golden run stopped and the professional decade began, and notes that the material never coheres. Both are arguing from the same evidence. It did not break America, which was the point of it, and it closed the A&M chapter; the band moved to Oyster and made Deep Cuts, and the trajectory from here is well documented. It stayed unreleased on CD for an absurdly long time, which did nothing for its reputation and is the reason a lot of people who love this band have simply never heard it.

The verdict

For people who already know the Strawbs, and worth their time. Not a starting point — Hero and Heroine, Grave New World and Ghosts come first, in that order — but do not accept the received wisdom that there is nothing here. Play The Golden Salamander, which belongs on any compilation of Cousins’s best ballads. Then The Promised Land for Cronk’s writing and the two Daves singing together. Then A Mind of My Own, the drummer’s song, which is better than a drummer’s song has any right to be. Three out of ten is not a great strike rate. Those three are the real thing.

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