Every so often, a brilliant album is condemned to oblivion by blunders in marketing. Such has been the fate of the 1985 concept album “Earth rise” by Richard Tandy and Dave Morgan; the former being the keyboardist of the Electric Light Orchestra, and the latter a fellow Brummie.
In the early eighties, a musical period when concept rock albums where out-of-fashion and “not done”, Tandy and Morgan constructed a timeless gem out of a bunch of demos by singer-songwriter Dave Morgan. The “Earth rise” story is about an intergalactic space traveller, who, in the emptiness of the Galaxy, is longing to return to his one love on Earth; in the end, he realises that true love has always been present within himself (“The secret was always inside”). Apart from the science fiction form, the content is really about universal questions, and both the compositions and the lyrics are impressively haunting: “Feeling so lonely / Feeling so blue / Feeling so empty / Like all this distance between me and you”, and “Travelling one thousand worlds, searching for only one…” Who hasn’t done this one way or another in his/her lifetime?
The album was released in 1985 on vinyl and cassette, but for all kinds of reasons, marketing was totally absent. The album got no airplay at all, which, as we all know, is deadly for commercial success. Given the proper airplay, tracks like “Spaceship Earth”, “Zero zero” and “Pictures in my Pillow” could easily have been massive hits, given the combination of commercial sound production and emotional impact.
As a minor point of this release, I found that the track order has been changed, which means the story just doesn’t seem to flow as logically as it did on the original release. Moreover, “Zero zero” has now been ‘relegated’ to the end of the disc, and 3 tracks added as ‘bonus tracks’: ‘Pictures in my Pillow’, ‘Ria(backing)’ – a mix of ‘Ria’ without any lead vocals, and ‘Starclipse One’ an alternate mix of the instrumental which precedes ‘Purpose’ on the main suite of songs. While they may not fit into the concept story lyrically, I feel that on the original release they came at exactly the right spot. Also, two left-over tracks (‘Wheels’ and ‘Caesar of the Galaxy’) have now been inserted without really adding anything significant. But hey, track order is easily rearranged when playing the CD, and, most important of all, the tracks are still the original recordings, not re-workings.
Jan van Aalst (abridged from his Amazon review)