DANTALIANS CHARIOT
 Formed
by arch extrovert Zoot Money out of the ashes of The Big Roll
Band, Dantalian's Chariot - obscurely named after the god of
music and movement from the 101 Spirits of Solomon - came
together due to a combination of;
a) Zoot's boredom at being promoted by EMI as - in his own
words - "the white James Brown",
b) the influence of his bosom buddy,
boozer-turned-Geordie-mystic Eric Burdon, and c) the ingestion
of certain illegal chemical substances.
White robes and instrumentation, together with what was
widely regarded as the best light show in town, meant that
Dantalian's Chariot raised the underground's ecstasy count at
clubs like Middle Earth and UFO, but sadly the only release
during their nine-month existence was the single The Madman
Running Through The Fields.
Written by Zoot and his guitarist, future Police guitarist
Andy Summers ( or 'Somers' as it was at this time) Madman employed
many of the stylistic devices that conspired to make English
acid pop such a mesmerising beast - schizoid lyrics, tempo
shifts, in-jokes, fade-ins, fade-outs, backward tapes, dream
sequences, non-sequitur guitar runs, extraneous sound effects -
but remembered to add a magnificent song to the rampant studio
trickery to create a psychedelic pot-pourri of monstrous
proportions.
Still smarting from the disbanding of the relatively
lucrative Big Roll Band, EMI lost interest after the single's
release, leaving Zoot to raise enough money to support what was
becoming an expensive project.
The soul-based Direction label stepped in, but when they
rejected a proposed Dantalian's Chariot album, Zoot announced
that the group were finished, observing bitterly that
"people were too interested in my old Big Roll Band and
didn't really want to know about the new group. The trouble with
people in British pop is that they dislike progression. They are
always thinking in old terms and won't accept anything
new".
Andy Summers accepted an invitation to join The Soft Machine
for the duration of their American tour with Hendrix, but within
weeks he and Zoot had joined Eric Burdon in The New Animals,
whose October 1968 album Love Is included an extended
reworking of The Madman Running Through The Fields,
together with another song from Dantalian's Chariot's live
repertoire, Gemini.
|
