Arabian Nights
When it was released in 1975, Scheherazade And Other Stories divided critics with its sprawling title track and concept. As Renaissance’s unusual sixth album heads towards its 50th anniversary, it’s been lovingly remastered, expanded and reissued via Esoteric. Longstanding vocalist Annie Haslam recalls the story of its inspired creation.
Words: Mike Barnes
Renaissance’s Annie Haslam connects with the playful spirit of Scheherazade.
PRESS/RENAISSANCE ARCHIVES
“It sounds weird, but when I sang it I felt like I was going somewhere else.”
In 1974, Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who had been more readily associated with the Sunday tea-time chart rundown on Radio 1, showed his true prog colours on his Saturday afternoon show.He played blasts of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus to herald a track by “the very royal ELP”, and then championed Camel’s The Snow Goose, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s 10-minute version of Bob Dylan’s Father Of Night, Father Of Day from Solar Fire, and another mini-epic: Mother Russia by Renaissance, from their album A Turn Of The Cards that had been released that May.
The song, written by guitarist Michael Dunford and lyricist Betty Thatcher, was based on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. As the group’s singer Annie Haslam says, with that sort of subject matter “it’s going to be a big song”, and the drama was accentuated by keyboard player John Tout quoting The Bells Of Moscow by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Such was the ambitious mood of the time that Dunford then began working on a stage musical based on the story of Scheherazade collated in One Thousand And One Nights. In it, a cuckolded sultan is so convinced of the infidelity of women that he weds a new virgin every day and, to ensure they never betray him, has them executed the following morning. When it’s Scheherazade’s turn, she tells him a story every night but leaves it unfinished, which so intrigues and beguiles the sultan that ultimately he spares her. On the 1,001st night, when she tells him she has no more stories, he marries her.