Thoughts on a Grey Day / winter seasons of the soul

Long loved this album title and record cover (the shot was taken by John McVie) , but never listened to the music until now.

The image has a powerful English-nostalgia effect, memories of walking to school through fog or mist

But the Bare Trees cover photo could easily have been taken in California

The fog in the Bay Area is something else. I once approached San Francisco in a taxi from the airport, which is further inland. As we drove along, getting steadily nearer to the coast, I could see tentacular plumes of low-lying mist  creeping up the creek beds - the fog was able to extend further inland on lower ground than the main mass of its miasma could reach. An eerie sight - the fog tendrils seemed to be the sinister vanguards of a larger occupying army, stealthy prehensile auguries of an all-subsuming formlessness.

All along the California coast, right down to San Diego way, you can get fog at certain times of day or year. I remember staying once in a hotel in Torrey Pines and the Englishy flashback thrill of seeing the adjacent golf  course completely shrouded in grey, visibility drastically reduced, the normal sunbright clarity of rolling green vistas muffled and bleached…

It's also been misty morned here in LA recently. Which I've noticed because I seem to be waking up at 5.30 AM or 6 AM no matter when I go to bed. This happens in old age, right?

The record? Well, it's post-Peter Green and pre-Buckingham/Nicks, the inbetweeny years, the hitless years (Green-era FMac actually had way bigger UK hit singles than the later, poppier phase). So it's got this kind of amiable, washed-out, bluesy quality, not unlike Climax Blues Band. 

Actually what it reminds me of is Wishbone Ash - pleasant but inessential. 

Perhaps the thematic of misty greyness in the title and image was suggested by the music's indistinction.

I say "hitless" - but until the Buckingham/Nicks era this was the only Fleetwood Mac record to sell a million in America. I guess it's very Frampton-like blandness helped on FM radio.

However there is the remarkable track at the very end.  

from Fleetwood Mac wiki: 

Aileen Scarrott, credited as Mrs Scarrott, was a resident of Headley in Hampshire where Fleetwood Mac lived between 1971 and 1974. She was featured reciting her poem Thoughts On a Grey Day on the band's 1972 album Bare Trees.

She was born Aileen Katie Mary Huggett in 1904 at Eastbourne in Sussex. At the time of the recording she was married to Harry Scarrott, the third marriage for both of them. Harry had lived in Headley for at least forty years beforehand. Her previous marriages were to Alfred F. Cager at Brighton in 1935 and Charles E. Smith at Willesden, London in 1947.

She died in 1984 at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.

The recording of Ms. Scarrot's poem "Thoughts On A Grey Day" that was used for the Bare Trees album was actually read by Mick Fleetwood who was trying to sound like a sweet old lady.

I wonder if that last bit of contradicting info is really true? If so, it's a bloody good impersonation of a dear frail old lady. 

Some other versions of the cover have a faint mauve tinge to them

Ah, there's a back cover with a similar sort of wintry image

Pix taken recently by local photographer Martin Rance in the area of West Herts I grew up and still have ties. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bunch of suggestions in the comments, and via email, as to other blurry, muzzy covers

Seventeen Seconds is the one where I'm kicking myself: 

About the audio contents of The Cure's album, I recently mused the following:

The aspects that Nick Kent (original NME reviewer of the album) finds frustrating - the vagueness, the tentativeness, the foggy pensiveness,  a sense of things being withheld, emotional indeterminacy - are exactly the  qualities of the album I find intriguing and attractive.

I feel like it's a record that could only come out of English suburbia...   (Crawley is almost exactly the same distance from London as my hometown Berkhamsted is, just on the other side of the metropolis).

Yet having said that, the atmosphere sometimes puts me in mind of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

Because of my life experience it inevitably conjures Home Counties memories of  listlessness-as-bliss... mystical mundanity...

A Thursday afternoon in an unseasonably damp, overcast August. Poor visibility, light drizzle muffling the sense of distance. 

A much more recent group - Lo Five, from the Wirral -  taps into similar states of suspended-from-Time mystic listlessness. The greyscale sound of releases like The Geography of the Abyss always makes me think of  rivulets of rain streaking the windows of a coach... drizzle so faint it almost hangs in the air rather than fall to the ground and that creates a reduced-visibility effect, foreshortening the landscape  and making it seem like it's disappearing into formlessness 

"Bare trees" reminded me of some self-help books I spied recently in a UK book store, based on the concept of wintering - how to get through fallow seasons of the heart and mind. 

The top one by Katherine May was the best-seller that started the trend, seemingly. They all have the same generic style of artwork

The follow-up from May shifts to a spring-like vibe while still acknowledging the exhaustion idea

This one seems to be more literal - winter in the weather / climate sense rather than winter of the soul

I wonder what pearls it contains

 Wrap up warm? Drink soup? You can't beat a hot water bottle.  Roast chestnuts. Crumpets are nice....