Short Reviews [Twelfth Night - 2022 - Smiling At Grief.... Revisited"]

It is sometimes hard to recognise that Twelfth Night only released four studio albums during their existence, two with Geoff Mann as singer and two with Andy Sears. In a world containing any justice they would have been huge, and their albums would all rightly be recognised as classics, yet we all know the world is not fair and so they disappeared. But, it must be said that due to the fans and the incredible work put in by drummer Brian Devoil they have had a much longer life than anyone expected. Albums have been reissued and extended, new rarities have been made available, and a whole series of live shows released on CD. They even reformed and in various line-ups put on some fantastic shows, and now they have turned their attention to their debut studio album, ‘Smiling At Grief’. To put this into some context, the band had started life as an instrumental outfit at Reading University, settling on a line-up of Andy Revell, Brian Devoil and Clive Mitten. Their mate Geoff Mann was around as backdrop painter, while Rick Battersby operated the dry ice, but their first singer was Electra Mcleod who sang on one tape. After she left there were various auditions held, and by the time they recorded this their debut album in 1982 the line-up was settled with Geoff and Rick both now in the band to create the ‘classic’ line-up. ‘Smiling At Grief’ has been made available in a few different versions prior to this, but this time the band invited in others to remix different songs and possibly even add some instrumentation and additional vocals to the original. The project was kicked off by Steven Wilson, who had this to say, “This is easily my favourite period of Twelfth Night, when the band were reaching for some kind of new wave / progressive hybrid – and successfully so, they really captured something of that moment in time, both the past and the future. Even if these were meant to be quick and dirty demo recordings it’s been great to be given the chance to elevate the sonics a little (hopefully!)“. Each musician was given a song, or two, to work with so as well as Wilson we have Pete Jones, Andy Tillison, Rod Reed, Gareth Cole, Simon Godfrey and many others and the result is a cleaning up of the originals yet everyone has stayed true to the originals, paying homage as opposed to trying to turn them into something which is theirs. In all this set contains the original nine tracks plus seven bonus cuts while there are another five available digitally. I always felt this was the album which contains greatness, just not at the same level as ‘Fact and Fiction’, but “Creepshow” will always be thought of by many as Geoff Mann’s finest hour, and the versions by Simon Godfrey and Paul Hodson demonstrate why that is indeed the case. Surely any fan of modern prog already has this album, often multiple times (like me), but this is yet another which must be added to the list. 40 years on, it is still completely essential. I haven’t said a single word about the music and what it sounds like, but if you are a TN fan you already have this in your collection, and if you are a proghead and don’t know about TN then now is the time to rectify that omission.