From Heaven to Hell

I needed to buy a new deodorant stick this week. This might sound like a fairly straight forward thing to do but, as I have an allergic reaction to almost all commercially available smellies, I am reduced to buying Ammonium Alum crystals off the internet. This, of course, gave me a good excuse to fill out my Amazon order with CDs to take advantage of Supersaver Delivery (well, that was my excuse anyway). I thought I'd have a break from the Jazz so I went for a couple of disks that, at first sight, would appear to be poles apart.

The first selection I went for were some works by Gustav Holst. Holst's Planets Suite is one of the most popular orchestral works of the 20th Century and even the most modest classical music collections will tend to have a copy. My copy is conducted by Simon Rattle and it is an excellent performance from 1980 which is only let down slightly by the effects of early digital recording. However, despite a classical music collection of several hundred disks, that is the only work by Holst I have. I suspect that is the case for most people. I have heard the odd recording on Radio 3 of his other works but I suspect that most people know nothing else by him. I thought I'd put that right.

I went for a Decca "British Music Collection" set containing 2 disks and 10 works. The first disk contains mainly choral pieces and are mostly performances conducted by his daughter: Imogen Holst. The first two works show an interest in Indian culture, Rig Vida is a series of songs translated from Sanskrit and set to a female choir with harp backing, whereas Sávitri is actually an entire chamber opera in one act. It's notable that Holst seems to have written much of his work for female voices and small-scale orchestras. In fact, Holst was a teacher at an all-girls school in London so this may have been more out of expediency rather than preference but the effect is very pleasing. The Seven Part Songs and Evening Watch carry on in much the same vein but the closing piece on the first disk, Fugal Concerto, is a much brighter sounding neo-classical work which is very melodic to the point of sounding twee.

The second disk contains mainly orchestral works and is probably closer in style to The Planets. However, it starts with the St Paul's Suite which is a melodic work which he wrote specifically for his students to perform. The next three pieces show more of what Holst was capable of, The Perfect Fool is a suite of works taken from a failed opera whereas Egdon Heath is a tone poem based around the life of Thomas Hardy. It is meant to portray the writer walking across the barren landscape and it works very well. The next piece is another choral work, The Hymn of Jesus, which was written just after The Planets and is based upon apocryphal gospels and the disk ends with Moorside Suite - something of an anomaly as it is a piece written for a brass band but shows another side to the composer's talents.

I suppose the question I am left asking is why is Holst really only remembered for the one work? Many of the performances on these disks are at least as good as his magnum opus but, possibly, they don't quite have the obvious astrological imagery of The Planets' seven movements. The technical innovations of The Planets made this the must see event of the day. I think, also, that had Holst lived beyond 1934 he would have benefited from the newly arrived market for film scores. Maybe it's none of these things. The world of Classical Music can be a fickle beast.

I still needed a couple of pounds worth to fill out the Amazon order and one of their recommendations caught my eye: Iron Maiden - Somewhere Back in Time. Iron Maiden was a band that I really liked in the early to mid 1980s. I saw them live at the Liverpool Empire around this time (it may have been the Powerslave tour - I seem to recall that the T-shirt cost more than the ticket and that was under £5) but I rather lost interest in them after 1990 and, as I only have their albums on vinyl, it's ages since I listened to anything by them. I had a quick look around and they didn't seem to have anything better in terms of a compilation album so I added this to the order.


Somewhere Back in Time was released a couple of years ago and was intended to promote their World Tour - rather than back in the day when a tour would promote an album. It contains their "Best of" tracks from the 1980s period I liked and it's not hard to see what I liked about them - solid rock performances and decent tunes. It's also interesting to look back on them with older eyes. I think the first thing that stands out is that, despite them seeming raw and edgy at the time, they now sound decidedly old school. It's also very noticeable how much of a debt they owe to the twin guitar sound of Thin Lizzy - although without Phil Lynott's sense of Irish mysticism. Additionally, their lyrics stand out as "of a theme"; they largely borrow from literature, poetry, films, historical events and so on but there is very little of "them" in there. Bruce Dickinson's singing is impassioned and it's all intelligent stuff but there is no emotional or political involvement in the songs with the exception of the anti-nuclear 2 Minutes to Midnight and the empathy with native American peoples in Run to the Hills.

As for the choice of songs, at first I couldn't fault this album; until, that is, that I noticed that there are no songs from the first two albums featuring original singer Paul Di'Anno. Three of these early songs are represented in live form: Iron Maiden, Wrathchild and the technically brilliant Phantom of the Opera but this means that great tracks like Prowler, Running Free, Sanctuary and Drifter are all missed out. Also, I noticed that there was only one track from the Piece of Mind album. Having said that, there is nothing that is on the album that doesn't deserve to be there. It's the mark of a great band that, when struggling to whittle down to a "best of" album, the chop has to fall somewhere - and it's also evidence that they could really do with coming up with a definitive anthology of their whole career.

It does seem, at first, a bit odd to be buying both Holst and Maiden together but, even in the 1980s, I listened to both. It's an odd thing but many Heavy Metal fans seem to appreciate a bit of classical, possibly more to the bombastic end of things, but someone who likes the Iron Maidens of this world will often be partial to a bit of Wagner, Beethoven, Bach or Berlioz. As I was looking up the old Maiden albums on Wikipedia, I noticed that they actually used Holst's Mars from the Planets Suite as their entrance music on their most recent tour - from Heaven to Hell in one swift move.