The primary launch on frontman Andy Latimer’s personal Camel Productions imprint, Camel’s eleventh studio album, September 1991’s Mud And Desires, wasn’t only a sturdy comeback album – its creation marked the start of a renaissance for the stalwart Surrey prog-rockers.
Camel’s earlier studio outing, the Chilly Conflict-related Stationary Traveller, got here out in 1984, however after its succeeding reside album, Strain Factors – recorded that very same 12 months at London’s Hammersmith Odeon – the band drifted off the radar. Certainly, in the course of the late 80s, followers had been understandably involved by their prolonged radio silence.
Behind the scenes, nonetheless, enterprise, quite than the pleasure of making new music, occupied Andy Latimer’s ideas. A number of years elapsed whereas lingering authorized and management-related points had been ironed out, and, after Strain Factors, Camel and Decca – their label of 10 years – amicably parted methods, leaving Latimer and co free to signal a brand new deal.
Ultimately, nonetheless, Latimer made a extra radical transfer: promoting his London residence in 1988 and transferring to California, the place he constructed his personal studio, wrote a lot of the fabric for Camel’s subsequent album, and arrange his personal label to launch it.
Maybe influenced by his new environment, the tune cycle Latimer conceived was for an idea album evoking the spirit and themes of John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer (and later Nobel) Prize-winning 1939 novel, The Grapes Of Wrath. Later tailored for the silver display by director John Ford, this American traditional involved the plight of the Joad household: poor, US Nice Despair-era Oklahoma of us who mistakenly imagine California to be the promised land and thus relocate, solely to endure even larger hardship.
Impressed by these common themes, Latimer penned Mud And Desires: an introspective masterpiece, which – not like the comparatively concise, song-based Stationary Traveller – was primarily based primarily upon evocative instrumental music. Launched on 10 September 1991, the album consisted of 16 tracks, although quite a lot of these had been engaging, neo-ambient exercises, usually comparatively temporary and primarily illustrated by keyboards.
Followers thirsting for Camel at their virtuosic greatest, nonetheless, had been rewarded by the album’s 4 fully-fledged songs. The stirring “Go West” mirrored the Joad household’s optimism as they arrived in California, however by the point Mud And Desires hit the elegiac “Rose Of Sharon” (“What we gonna do when the baby comes?”), their hopes had fallen aside on the seams. Elsewhere, the seven-minute “End Of The Line” and the dramatic, shape-shifting “Hopeless Anger” contained flash and aptitude redolent of mid-70s Camel classics The Snow Goose and Moonmadness.
Although not a chart hit, Mud And Desires was effectively obtained and bought solidly, the impetus resulting in an emotional world tour whereby Latimer was joined onstage by a brand new keyboardist, Mickey Simmonds, and his trusty rhythm part, Colin Bass and Paul Burgess. The highlights of a Dutch present on this tour had been later captured for an additional dynamic reside album, By no means Let Go, which strengthened the impression that Camel was most positively again in enterprise.
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