The Trees (The Band) Edition

On album art, Hipgnosis, and Fairport Convention.

Dave Mandl (DM) is a writer, bassist, and photographer, and hosts the weekly radio show "It's Complicated" on WFMU. He's on Bluesky as ‪@dmandl.bsky.social‬ and Instagram as @dmandl.

Dave here. Folk-rock bands were coming out of the woodwork in the UK ca. 1970, emboldened by the success of the group Fairport Convention, and inspired by the mélange of traditional and new sounds (folk, album-oriented rock, near-Eastern and Indian influences) that were in the air of the time.

One of the seemingly countless outfits in this mold was the quintet Trees, who released two albums in their short lifetime, then essentially vanished, to be venerated in the ensuing decades only by collectors and folk-rock completists. In their time, the band appeared primed for success by any number of measures. They were signed to a major label (CBS); recorded both of their albums at Sound Technique Studios in London, the folk-rock temple where Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Pink Floyd, among many others, had also made records; and were produced by Tony Cox, who had worked with or would go on to work with a long list of artists that included Caravan, Yes, Family, and Irish folkies Tír na nÓg. But the usual set of intangibles—mostly, it seems, the pressures of being a full-time working group as well as some internal squabbles—conspired to scotch the young band’s career.

Why is this interesting?

Trees’ music holds up remarkably well today—well enough to have sparked something of a rediscovery, as well as a box-set retrospective.

The influence of Fairport, which Trees never made much of an attempt to hide, is ever-present. Trees departed from the widely emulated Fairport sound, however, by adding a decidedly harder edge to their songs, embarking on extended two-guitar jams, and venturing a bit further out into near-psychedelia than was the norm among their contemporaries. (They also incorporated dulcimer, mandolin, and 12-string guitar into their arsenal in creative ways, always managing to remain mostly on the rock side of the folk-rock divide, though they did incorporate such trad standbys as “Streets of Derry” and “Geordie” into their repertoire.)

The group’s musicianship was above par even by today’s standards, as heard in their extended instrumental excursions as well as their occasional use of non-standard rhythms and time signatures. Singer Celia Humphris displayed a surprising range, from a delicate near-whisper to a deep-throated near-yell.

It can be hard to identify the “better” of the band’s two releases because they’re so similar, and because both are so consistently good. But—I’m dead serious—what stands out about the second of the two, On the Shore (1971), is the cover, above, by the English album-art team Hipgnosis. In the history of rock album art, Hipgnosis more or less stands alone, having designed virtually all the most highly regarded covers of the ’70s and beyond: Houses of the Holy, Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon, 10cc’s How Dare You?, and hundreds of others. The firm virtually invented the modern album cover. And the cover of On the Shore—an eerie photo by Hipgnosis’s Storm Thorgerson, of a young girl on an English lawn—is, for my money, one of their most iconic. It’s so striking that I’d be willing to wager that it alone persuaded many shoppers who’d never heard of the group to spring for the album. People do judge books (and records) by their covers, and it’s hard to believe that this one failed to push On the Shore into the charts on its own. The first Trees album, The Garden of Jane Delawney (1970), is equally worthy of your attention, though I can’t say the same for its art. (DM)