Before he joined Roxy Music, guitarist Phil Manzanera played in the early seventies progressive rock band Quiet Sun. Also consisting of future Matching Mole bassist Bill MacCormick, keyboardist Dave Jarrett, and future This Heat drummer Charles Hayward, the band didn’t last past 1971, just in time for Manzanera to enter the Roxy fold. During a Roxy break in 1975, however, the guitar slinger, already recording his first solo album Diamond Head, reconvened Quiet Sun (as well as his erstwhile Roxy bandmate Brian Eno and journalist Ian MacCormick) in order to record their best tunes. The results were released in 1976 as Mainstream. Sadly, Mainstream got lost in the shuffle of the seventies prog rock glut and the impending rise of punk and new wave. Now the album has been resurrected, given a new mix and mastering job, and re-released just in time for its fifty-first anniversary.
It was definitely worth the effort. Sitting somewhere between the composition-oriented fusion of bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the melodic, virtuoso fury of early King Crimson, Quiet Sun made music that boggles the minds of music nerds, while still being easy to groove on. Check out Jarrett’s “Bargain Classics,” an urgent rush of guitar and keyboard textures and tricky rhythms initiated by Hayward’s introductory percussion piece “Trumpets With Motherhood.” Jarrett also wrote the two-partner “RFD” and “RFD,” the first a misty ballad and the second a punchy rocker. As well as composing the painterly “Trot,” Manzanera opens the LP with “Sol Caliente,” folding the guitarist’s Colombian roots (on his mother’s side) into the arrangement and giving the otherwise traditionally progressive tune a limber, danceable feel. Rhythm, specifically the always challenging 5/4 beat, also figures heavily in Hayward’s “Rongwrong,” the semi-classically flavored epic that closes the original LP. MacCormick contributes the record’s fiercest blazer, its snarling aggression deliberately undercut by the goofy title “Mummy Was An Asteroid, Daddy Was a Small Non-Stick Kitchen Utensil.”
The new edition also includes “Teflon Kid,” which serves as a dreamy coda. Mainstream is as fine a progressive rock album as any released in the 1970s, and deserves to be remembered as much more than a Roxy Music offshoot.
