Crescent Discs

National Health PLAYTIME

Previously Cuneiform Records Rune 145

Alan Gowen keyboards, John Greaves bass & vocals, Phil Miller guitars, Pip Pyle drums, with Alan Eckbert guitar on tracks 1, 3, and 4.

It’s more than 30 years since Hatfield and the North called it a day. After two breathlessly inventive albums, Dave Stewart, Pip Pyle, Richard Sinclair and Phil Miller imploded under the accumulating weight of teeming ideas, prodigious skill and a relentlessly whimsical sense of humour. Stewart, Pyle and Miller then materialised as National Health, still technically dazzling but more economical, squeezing more mileage from each musical idea and rationing the jokes. Sinclair’s place on bass was taken by Neil Murray, who soon changed tack and joined Whitesnake. He was replaced by John Greaves from Henry Cow.

Playtime documents the group’s final phase, with Alan Gowen at the keyboards following Stewart’s departure. Gowen had always been a significant presence in National Health, although cast as a guest on their first album and missing from the excellent Of Queues and Cures (1978). On Playtime the tact and effectiveness of his playing can be heard undiluted, in driving live performances that somehow sound freewheeling and loose-limbed, as the quartet bobs and weaves around those odd time signatures and changes of key that typified the groups intricate compositions. Four tracks capture them at a club in France in April 1979, augmented by a second guitarist, Alain Eckbert from Rock In Opposition group Art Zoyd. Another five were recorded for a university radio station in Pennsylvania, and were eventually rescued from the studio’s trashcan. Digitally cleaned and poli8shed , this is Nation Health stretching out, having fun and sounding just great.

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