Two albums, two years apart, made by what is nominally the same Danish band and sounds like two different ones. The first is three long psychedelic pieces and two short ones; the second is ten songs with a keyboard on them. Both were produced by a founder member of Colosseum.

The short version

Day of Phoenix formed in Copenhagen in early 1968 out of a rhythm-and-blues group called The Maniacs, went through two substantial line-up changes before it ever reached a studio, and released Wide Open N-Way in 1970 and The Neighbour’s Son in 1972. Both records were sung in English and both were produced by Tony Reeves. The band broke up shortly after the second one. Neither album charted anywhere that can be documented.

Copenhagen, 1968, and a singer from London

The founding group was Cy Nicklin on vocals and guitar, Ole Prehn and Karsten Lyng on guitars, Jess Stæhr on bass and Henrik Friis on drums. Nicklin, unusually for a Danish band of the period, was English. Neither he nor Stæhr appears on either album: Nicklin left in 1969 and went on to found Culpeper’s Orchard, and Stæhr left to join Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe. Their replacements were Hans Lauridsen on lead vocals and Erik Stedt, who came from the Beefeaters, on bass. The band that recorded the first album had therefore already replaced two of its five members before making a note.

The Colosseum connection

The single most consequential thing that happened to this band was a support slot. They opened for Colosseum at a gig in Aarhus, and Colosseum’s bass player Tony Reeves — who had co-founded that group and would shortly be a founder member of Greenslade — was impressed enough to produce them. He produced both albums, took the first one to Olympic Studios in London to mix, and on the second one stepped in front of the desk to play bass on a track. A Danish band on a Danish label with a British producer and a British mixing room is not a common combination for 1970, and it shows in the sound.

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Two albums that barely resemble each other

The two records share four musicians and almost nothing else. Wide Open N-Way is five tracks in forty-four minutes, with an eleven-minute title piece, a fourteen-minute two-part suite filling the rest of the first side, a twelve-minute piece on the second and guests on oboe, piano and double bass. The Neighbour’s Son is ten tracks in thirty-six minutes, the longest of them six and a half, with organ and piano from Karsten Lyng and not a single extended piece. The first is a blues-descended psychedelic album; the second is a set of rock songs. If you play them back to back without knowing, you will not guess they are the same group.

Where the members came from and went

Between the albums the band lost its bassist. Erik Stedt is on the first record and not on the second, and nobody was brought in permanently to take his place: Ole Prehn covered the part himself while keeping his guitar credit, with Tony Reeves and the returning Jess Stæhr playing on one track each. That change explains most of what separates the two records — a band with a dedicated bass player makes long interlocking pieces, and a band without one makes songs. Karsten Lyng took over almost all the writing, with a credit on nine of the second album’s ten tracks.

Album by album

Two studio albums, 1970 and 1972. Tap either title for its guide.

What is documented and what is not

This is a thinly documented band and it is worth being straight about that. There is no chart placing, no sales figure and no certification for either album or either single. There is no review by a named critic in a named publication for the second album at all, and only one for the first, written half a century after the fact about an anthology. Danish-language sources exist but are not reachable from here, so the post-band careers of Lauridsen, Lyng and Henrik Friis are simply not established on this page. Where the reference works disagree — and on running times for the second album they do — the figures here follow the original vinyl.

Where to start

Start with Wide Open N-Way (1970), which is the record the band is remembered for and the one that justifies the remembering. The title piece and the two-part suite on the first side are the strongest things they did. Come to The Neighbour’s Son (1972) afterwards and on its own terms, as a set of songs by a group that had reorganised around one writer, and it will treat you better than its reputation suggests.

Why they still matter

Day of Phoenix matter as evidence of how far the British underground reached in 1970. A Copenhagen band with a Colosseum producer, a London mixing room and English lyrics is not a Danish scene story; it is a European one, and the record they made out of it stands with a good deal of what was coming out of Britain that year. They also make an unusually clean case study of what a single departure does to a band: one bassist leaves, and the group that remains writes a completely different kind of music. Two albums is not much of a catalogue, but they are two genuinely different albums.

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