The following tour took Heep to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, Britain, the USA and Canada. “It’s true that Return To Fantasy was Heep’s best-selling album in the UK,” said Wetton, “but you cannot merely promote something in order to make it successful – it has to be there in the grooves.”
#URIAH HEEP THE WAY THAT IT IS TV#
Nevertheless, Bronze did a good job with the promoting and marketing (in Britain, some £10,000 was spent on TV advertising and £3,000 on radio).Ĭonsequently, it charted well. The rest of the songs, however, were distinctly below par. The title track was an instant hit with Heep fans. The first public offering from the Wetton line-up was 1975’s Return To Fantasy. “That was the beginning of the end of the whole thing, really.” “We weren’t replacing the bassist, we were replacing a very significant part of the band’s chemistry,” he said. For Hensley, however, there could never be a real replacement. Thain’s successor was former Roxy Music bassist John Wetton – a skilled writer and instrumentalist. We were all so busy dealing with our own problems that we couldn’t pay enough attention to helping Gary deal with his.” “I had become so involved in drugs that I really wasn’t in the best of shapes. “Personally, I didn’t cope with it very well at all,” Ken admitted. Just three months later, Thain’s girlfriend found him dead in the bath at his London home. Sadly, bass Gary Thain, his body already weakened by heroin, was becoming less and less reliable and the group were eventually left with little choice – he would have to be replaced. We suffered from burnout, perhaps without realising it.” “The fame seemed to become more important than the music.
“The great songs were becoming fewer and farther between,” said Hensley. However, in retrospect, many of the participants are less than thrilled with Wonderworld. It may have lacked the strength of its predecessor Sweet Freedom, but it certainly remained very much in the Heep mould. Management only listened to one person, which was Ken Hensley, and David felt upset by that.” Considering, Wonderworld emerged as a reasonable effort. He says: “While the rest of us were in it for the ride, started getting to David a bit. We still say it: give us a stage to perform on and nobody can beat us.”īut Box had also noticed that Byron’s ego was becoming out of control. “Ken could bring in a bareboned idea on acoustic guitar, we’d give it the Heep treatment and it’d take on a life of its own. “Our strength at the time was that we could make anything sound great,” stressed the guitarist.
Trying to hold it all together was almost impossible." “Ken spent most of the time in his room crying and David was just on this unbelievable bender. “It was a bloody nightmare,” recalled Mick with a wistful shake of the head.
0 kommentar(er)
