You Are Hereby Cordially Invited To Attend The Butterfly Ball

Some of the more obscure albums to feature here on One Buck Records I stumble onto by accident - following an artist or type of music by a thread. Some I find lthe old-fashioned way ike you would find here - on blogs, in articles, in user comments. And some albums I stumble onto, well, just like that. Take The Butterfly Ball by Roger Glower & Friends. Had never heard of the thing, had never heard a thing from it. Then, one day riding in the car, "Love Is All" came on the radio - and I'm pretty sure it's only a radio song over here in France - and my wife said something like "Mais c'est le chanson de la grenouille!". The frog song? What the hell? (Cheap joke: If it's running on French radio, doesn't it automatically turn into a frog song?) It turns out when something goes wrong on live television on French national TV, they - and we're talking about the late Seventies and early Eighties here - they didn't put up a test screen or some sort of sign apologizing for the incident, no the French had something much better, they had la grenouille who sang "Love Is All". They had this: 

So, my wife knew the singing frog, but not necessarily any other critters that make up the cast of The Butterfly Ball, or indeed that very event or musical album. And so I got her The Butterfly's Ball for an upcoming birtday. This album is - very Seventies. It could probably have come out only at that time, and definitely only in Great Britain. There is this very specifically British type of whimsy that drives the project that seems impossible to imitate. I mean the idea itself sounds sufficiently daft: Making an album out of a children's book of drawings. Alan Aldridge's The Butterfly Ball And The Grasshopper's Feast had some accompanying verse by poet William Plomer (who died before publication), but Glover - free from obligations in Deep Purple and just at the start of his career as a producer - was tasked to bring the tale into a musical form. 

Glover wrote the whole album - some co-written with Eddie Hardin, as well as with Ronnie James Dio and Mickey Lee Soule - , played a varoiety of instruments on the recording, including guitar, piano, bass, and percussion. And while he contributed some backing vocals, for lead vocal duty he went through his roloscope and found a ton of help. The three aforementioned collaborators take leads, as well as new Deep Purple members David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, and a couple of others. On the female side of things, we get his wife Judi Kuhl, Helen Chapelle and Liza Strike. And of course we're going out, fittingly, with a children's choir.

While the album is a work that is supposed to work as a whole, but the obvious highlight here is the aforementioned "Love Is All", obviously influenced by the Beatles "All You Need Is Love", a happy singalong that was the first song finished for the project. Though credited to Glover & Friends on the single, lead vocals are by Ronnie James Dio. The track made number one in the Netherlands and Belgium and, as explained above, became very popular in France during fill-ins, the became a full-fledged smash on rerelease in 1991 after it was featured in an ad. Other highlights include the folk-ish "Sitting In A Dream", delicately sung by Dio, and the rollicking "Sir Maximus Mouse", sung by Eddie Hardin. This is the complete version of the album, including "Little Chalk Blue" with lead vocals by Urias Heep's John Lawton, which was issued ten months after the album to promote the concert of The Butterfly Ball that finally took place in December 1975. 

So, this is a true oddball little thing, with more than a touch of British music hall shining through here and there in this 'rock opera', which is not that surprising considering such song titles as "Saffron Dormouse And Lizzy Bee", "Old Blind Mole", "Dreams Of Sir Bedivere" and "Watch Out For The Bat". But then again, you're not coming here for mainstream stuff, do ya? So, get in touch with your inner child, join the animals of the forest in their preparation for the titular event and let yourself get carried away to the land of the silly and the whimsical, the land of The Butterfly Ball.