A Finnish band with an English singer, an American producer and no guitarist in the line-up. Wigwam were odd from the first record onward.

The short version

Wigwam formed in Finland in 1968 out of the break-up of the Helsinki group Blues Section, and their first album appeared on Love Records in November 1970. The line-up is Jim Pembroke on vocals, Jukka Gustavson on organ and piano, Pekka Pohjola on bass and violin, and Ronnie Österberg on drums, with guitar supplied by guests. The producer was the American Kim Fowley, who also co-wrote one track. Eleven tracks, recorded at Finnvox in Helsinki, sung in English.

An Englishman in Helsinki

The single most important fact about Wigwam is one the name conceals: their singer and principal lyricist, Jim Pembroke, was English, born in London and resident in Finland from 1965. That is why a Finnish band with a North American name sang in English from the beginning without it ever feeling like a marketing decision. The other structural oddity is that Wigwam had no permanent guitarist at this stage, so the front line is organ, piano, bass and voice. One track on the album is not a Wigwam performance at all: it is an electronic piece by Erkki Kurenniemi, originally recorded in 1968 and included here.

The sound

This is eccentric, song-cycle symphonic prog, and eccentric is doing real work in that phrase. Gustavson’s organ carries the harmony, Pohjola’s bass is unusually melodic, and Pembroke writes songs that veer between English whimsy and something considerably darker. The absence of a regular guitarist gives the record a keyboard-led sound closer to some British bands of the same year than to anything Nordic. The two writing voices — Pembroke’s songs, Gustavson’s more expansive pieces — are already distinct here, and the tension between them is what makes the band interesting for the next four years.

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The songs

The title track opens the album and is Pembroke’s, setting the tone for his contributions across the record. ‘Frederick & Bill’ is the longest piece at over four minutes, co-written by Pembroke and Pohjola. ‘Dance of the Anthropoids’ is the outlier: an electronic composition by Erkki Kurenniemi, not performed by the band, and worth knowing about before you form a view of the album’s range. Those three cover its three quite different modes.

Reception and legacy

Contemporary Finnish critical writing on the album is not accessible through the sources available. What is documented is its complicated release history: an American edition appeared on Verve Forecast as a two-record set with twenty-one tracks, padding the original eleven with material by Blues Section and others, and the album has since been reissued on Love, on a British specialist label and repeatedly on vinyl in the 2010s and 2020s. That is a long afterlife for a debut, and a fair measure of the interest the band still attracts.

The verdict

This is a debut worth hearing on its own terms rather than as preparation for what follows. It is stranger and less coherent than the albums after it, the production is thin, and the guest guitar work sits awkwardly against a band that had not yet decided whether it wanted a guitarist at all. What it does have is personality in abundance and two songwriters already pulling in different directions. Newcomers would do better to start with ‘Nuclear Nightclub’; anyone who liked that one should come back here for the raw material.

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