John St. Field — Control (Cooking Vinyl COOK CD 131, 1975/1997, CD)

Mike Ohman reviews the Cooking Vinyl CD of Control (COOK CD 131) for Exposé, a magazine covering music “from the fringes”. He takes it to be a 1975 release put out only in Spain on the Movieplay label, and doubts it is of general interest to the magazine’s readers. The review does not say that St. Field is Jackie Leven.

The basic sound is electrified British-style folk – “not about to give Fairport Convention a run for their money, but nice” – with touches of blues, light rock and, on one track, space-rock; flute, sax, Farfisa and Moog supplement the guitars. Vocally St. Field oddly resembles Joe Jackson. Ohman finds only the ten-minute “The Problem” (most like Jethro Tull) and the short “Dune Voices”, a sound collage of filtered white noise and backwards voices, really interesting – probably the best track. Without the eminent label, he thinks, the album would have received little notice.