Kew. Rhone. is a concept album by British bass guitarist and composer John Greaves, and American singer-songwriter and guitarist Peter Blegvad. It is a song cycle composed by Greaves with lyrics by Blegvad, and was performed by Greaves and Blegvad with vocalist Lisa Herman and others. The album was recorded in Woodstock, New York in October 1976, and was released in the UK in March 1977 by Virgin Records, credited on the front cover to "John Greaves, Peter Blegvad and Lisa Herman", but on the record label as "John Greaves and Peter Blegvad". It was issued in the US in 1978 by Europa Records.
Blegvad's lyrics on Kew. Rhone. are filled with "anagrams, palindromes and other verbal games".
An enhanced CD version of Kew. Rhone., issued by Voiceprint Records in 1998, included an interactive multimedia track entitled "Kew. Rom.". The album was a critical success, but failed commercially; AllMusic called it "an unfortunately neglected masterpiece of '70s progressive rock."
Background
John Greaves, from the English avant-rock group Henry Cow, and Peter Blegvad, from the German/English avant-pop trio Slapp Happy, first worked together during the merger of the two groups in England in 1974. Slapp Happy and Henry Cow recorded their first collaboration album, Desperate Straights in late 1974, and the song "Bad Alchemy" from the album was Greaves and Blegvad's first collaborative songwriting effort. After the two groups recorded their second album, In Praise of Learning in early 1975, the merger ended and Blegvad moved to New York City. There Blegvad spent the rest of the year earning a living as an illustrator, which included drawing backgrounds for Peanuts animated films. In March 1976 Greaves left Henry Cow and joined Blegvad in New York City to start work on Kew. Rhone. Virgin Records, Henry Cow and Slapp Happy's record label at the time, funded the project. Greaves had begun composing fragments of the song suit in 1974 while still with Henry Cow. The song "Kew. Rhone." evolved from a piece Greaves wrote called "York" that was performed by Henry Cow in the early 1970s, but never recorded.
Greaves and Blegvad spent three months working on Greaves's compositions. Blegvad wrote "surreal" lyrics that were filled with "anagrams, palindromes and other verbal games", and illustrated them with explanatory pictures and diagrams that later appeared on the album's record sleeve, "to be used in conjunction with the words". Some of the songs on the album are not fully comprehensible without reference to these pictures. At the time Blegvad had begun experimenting with cartooning, an activity that later led to him doing a weekly comic strip for The Independent on Sunday called Leviathan, and he was fascinated with the relationship between text and image.
Blegvad said that he and Greaves deliberately created a gap between the words and the music to make the album more interesting. "To [understand] the words you almost have to stop the record and read them, referring to the illustrations on the sleeve." Blegvad also said in an interview that he created experimental and confusing lyrics as a way of coming to terms with Greaves's complicated music, which he found difficult to play.
When Kew. Rhone. was ready to record, jazz musicians Michael Mantler and Carla Bley offered the use of their Grog Kill Studio in Woodstock, New York. Mantler and Bley also played on the album, along with avant-garde jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille, vocalist Lisa Herman and others. Virgin Records released "Kew. Rhone." in the UK in March 1977.
Greaves and Blegvad next worked together on each other's solo albums, Greaves' Accident (1982) and Blegvad's The Naked Shakespeare (1983), but did not record an album under their names again until Unearthed in 1995. They also participated in several bands together, including The Lodge (1987–1989) and The Peter Blegvad Trio (with Chris Cutler).
Kew. Rhone.
The album cover is a reproduction of a painting by Charles Willson Peale entitled Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806–1808). The song it illustrates, "Seven Scenes from the Painting 'Exhuming the First American Mastodon' by C. W. Peale" interprets the painting with, according to Peter Blegvad, "a brazen disregard for the painter's original intent." It is a song about "the perils of being named or defined" and describes a world in which "definition is acquired as liberty is lost". This "naming" is referred to again in the Romanian proverb, "Names are not the pledge for things, but the things for names" that appears in the song "Twenty-Two Proverbs".
