An acoustic trio with a double bass and no drummer, produced by the man who would shortly make Elton John famous, arranged by the man who would shortly make David Bowie famous, with John Paul Jones on bass and Nicky Hopkins on piano and an Arab string section on one track. The Strawbs were the first British band A&M ever signed, and this is what they did with the money. The single was banned by the BBC. The closing track is six minutes about a siege, and it is the sound of progressive rock arriving a year early.

The short version

Strawbs is the band’s debut proper, released by A&M in May 1969 and cut at Sound Techniques in London. Gus Dudgeon produced and engineered; Tony Visconti arranged the strings and woodwind, credited on the sleeve as musical vibrations. The band is Dave Cousins on vocals and guitars, Tony Hooper on vocals and guitars, and Ron Chesterman on double bass — there is no permanent drummer and no bass guitar. Guests include John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Nicky Hopkins, the actor Richard Wilson reading the spoken introduction, and Norati and his Arab Friends on strings. Eleven tracks: Cousins wrote six and co-wrote four with Hooper. An earlier album with Sandy Denny, All Our Own Work, had been recorded first but was not issued until 1973.

Bowie, an arts lab and a free festival

The deal came through Denmark. Karl Knudsen of Sonet played the Sandy Denny tapes to A&M’s Dave Hubert, who passed them to Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss just as the label was opening a London office, and the Strawbs became the first UK act on the roster. Denny went to Fairport Convention; the trio made a single, Oh How She Changed, which A&M loved enough to fund an album. Then things get interesting. Through Visconti, Cousins knew David Bowie, and was impressed enough by Bowie’s Beckenham arts lab to start his own at the White Bear in Hounslow — where he booked Bowie the week Space Oddity charted, and later Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and John Martyn. On 16 July 1969 the Strawbs shared a bill with Bowie at a free festival on Beckenham Recreation Ground. Bowie went home and wrote Memory of a Free Festival about it. On BBC2 the two acts appeared together, the Strawbs playing The Man Who Called Himself Jesus and Bowie miming to their Poor Jimmy Wilson.

The sound

Two acoustic guitars, two voices in harmony, a double bass and whatever Dudgeon felt like adding — which turns out to be a great deal: strings, organ, timpani, hand drums, recorder, session players from the top of the London call sheet. It is a big-budget record made by a folk group, and the tension between those two facts is what makes it interesting. The material is charming without being whimsical, English to the bone, and mostly short. The best of it is the stripped-down material, where the harmonies do the work; the string arrangements pull it towards the mainstream and towards the Moody Blues. Underneath, though, there is something else moving. Cousins was already writing narratives rather than songs, and one track shows exactly where that was going.

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The songs

The Man Who Called Himself Jesus opens the album hard and loud, imagining how the modern world would treat a returning Christ, and the BBC banned it as a single almost immediately. That Which Once Was Mine and the other short pieces are period folk-pop of a high order. Tell Me What You See in Me was reworked from the 1967 Sandy Denny sessions and carries the Middle Eastern strings. Oh How She Changed is the 1968 single, the one that got them the album. Or Am I Dreaming? is bright and orchestral in a Simon and Garfunkel way. Where Is This Dream of Your Youth had originally been written in the hope that the Young Tradition would record it. And then The Battle closes the record: six and a half minutes of medieval narrative, a castle under siege, scored with organ, timpani and layered voices. People have been calling it proto-Genesis for fifty years and they are not wrong. Nothing else in 1969 folk sounds remotely like it.

Reception and legacy

A neglected debut, and unfairly so. Prog listeners tend to start at Grave New World and treat everything before it as prehistory, which means this album is mostly known for its guest list. There is a story, repeated by the band, that the record A&M first received was judged too pop and that the label asked for something more adventurous — if true, The Battle is the answer, and the entire subsequent career grows out of it. Cousins, who died in 2025, led this band for six decades from here; Hooper, his partner since school, stayed until 1972. What they made in this room in 1969 is a folk record with a rock band’s ambition trying to get out, which is precisely what the Strawbs would be for the next ten years.

The verdict

Not the place to start, but a lovely place to arrive. Go to The Battle first and hear the seed of Autumn and The Hangman and the Papist, eight years and four line-ups early. Then The Man Who Called Himself Jesus for the nerve of it. Then sit with the quiet songs, two guitars and two voices, and understand what the Strawbs gave up when they plugged in — and why, on every album afterwards, Cousins kept a dulcimer within reach.

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