It opens with a cover of a jazz organist and closes with ten minutes recorded live in Leicester. In between, a British hard rock band plays folk, acoustic guitar, four-part harmonies in the manner of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and a scat vocal that has divided their audience for fifty-four years. Pilgrimage is the album where Wishbone Ash worked out what they could do, seven months before Argus proved it, and it went to number 14 without anyone quite being able to say what genre it was.

The short version

Pilgrimage is Wishbone Ash’s second album, released on 17 September 1971 on Decca and MCA. The studio tracks were cut at De Lane Lea in London in May 1971, produced by Derek Lawrence and engineered by Martin Birch — the same team as the debut and, the following year, Argus. The band is Andy Powell and Ted Turner on guitars and vocals, Martin Turner on bass and vocals, Steve Upton on drums; Martin and Ted are not related. Seven tracks, thirty-nine minutes. The four of them wrote everything except the opener. Hipgnosis did the gatefold. It reached number 14 in Britain, a significant jump from the debut’s 29.

Jack McDuff and De Montfort Hall

Two facts about this record are worth more than the rest of its reputation. The first is that the opening track is not theirs: Vas Dis is a Jack McDuff composition, lifted from the world of the jazz organ trio, and Wishbone Ash open their second album with it. The second is that the closing track is not a studio recording at all. Where Were You Tomorrow was taped live at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester on 14 June 1971 by the PYE mobile unit, and runs ten minutes. So the album begins with somebody else’s jazz tune and ends with a concert, and the five songs in between are the only conventional studio originals on it. That is an unusual amount of nerve for a band on their second try, and it explains why nobody could agree on what to call this music.

The sound

Folkier and more acoustic than the blues-rock debut, and considerably stranger than either. The twin guitars are further forward than ever — the standard criticism is that they are forward precisely to cover for the singing, which is fair and has never mattered much — and the writing has jumped a long way in nine months: catchy riffs, real time changes, marching beats, layered scat vocals where a chorus would normally sit. Between the loud pieces there are two short, moody instrumentals that do nothing a hard rock band would do. It is a genuine jumble of prog, jazz, folk and blues that somehow coheres, mainly because the four of them play beautifully and because Birch caught it all cleanly. Fifty years on the sound quality still holds up.

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The songs

Vas Dis opens with the jazz workout: blistering guitar and drums, that scat vocal, and a love-it-or-hate-it quality that has never faded. The Pilgrim follows and is, for a good many people, the finest thing the band ever recorded — eight and a half minutes drifting in on soft echoed guitars, building into riffs, no real lyric, just layers of voices used as an instrument, and lead playing that tells you exactly how far they had come since the debut. Jail Bait boogies in and puts the twin leads to full use; it has stayed in the live set ever since. Alone and Lullaby are the short instrumentals, slow and moody. Valediction is the ballad, four-part harmonies in the CSN and Young manner, with lovely bass underneath. And Where Were You Tomorrow closes it live from Leicester, ten minutes, the band in the room they were actually built for.

Reception and legacy

It sold, it charted at 14, and it did the job an album before a masterpiece is supposed to do. Argus arrived seven months later and swallowed the conversation whole, which is why Pilgrimage now gets discussed mainly as a stepping stone — unfairly, since Vas Dis, The Pilgrim and Jail Bait all became permanent fixtures of the live show and have stayed there for half a century. Hipgnosis wrapped it in two yellow-tinted photographs of a dead tree, one sideways and one from below, which is about as 1971 as an object can be. In October they played the fourth episode of the Old Grey Whistle Test alongside Lindisfarne. Then they went back to De Lane Lea and made Argus.

The verdict

The best album to hear after Argus, and the one that explains it. Start with The Pilgrim, all of it, which is Wishbone Ash discovering the long form. Then Jail Bait for the boogie and the twin leads. Then Valediction for the harmonies, which will surprise anyone who thinks this band only did one thing. Vas Dis you will either adore or skip, and both responses are traditional. Argus is where you begin. But this is where the band that made Argus arrived, and it is a fine, odd, generous record that deserves better than being remembered as the one before.

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