Rod’s first four or five solo albums are spectacularly good. He was a great singer. They are all on this anthology, which I cannot recommend highly enough. who knew that Keith Emmerson played on his first album?
# Reason to Believe: The Complete Mercury Studio Recordings
Also there is a 4 or 5 disk set from Rhino of the Faces. Super good - I didn’t even know I liked them.
All good shouts, also he was the lead singer on Jeff Beck’s albums “Truth” and “Beck-Ola”. Those albums aren’t perfect, but I think important in rock history as I’m pretty sure they’re the template Jimmy Page used for Led Zep.
It’s kind of funny that a whole generation of people who’d have loved his stuff were put off listening to him by his disco tracks and love of tartan.
And as for Rod being a great singer, he had to be as Faces were supposed to be the replacement for Small Faces and Steve Marriott had a phenomenal set of pipes on him…
(they’re miming to playback, but that was par for the course in those days)
If anyone is unfamiliar, this is the man Paul Weller spent a lifetime trying to honour.
Ah, Mariska Veres! We were all so in love with her! (And with Earth& Fire’s Jerney Kaagman, of course) It is not very well known, that Mariska could play the organ, although I’m not sure if it’s her or possibly Cees Schrama who plays the organ on some of Shocking Blue’s records (“Send me a postcard” and “Long and lonesome road” for instance).
This may have been a bigger influence (May 1966) - yes, it’s the Small Faces doing a Willie Dixon number.
Yes, I think both bands were known as “ the Jefferson airplane of The Hague”.
Earth and Fire are completely unknown in the US, where I live.
back to some drumming 
the drum corps international world championships:
haha, yes, or course I have those jeff beck albums, and all the small faces and humble pie stuff I’ve even got the python lee jackson album where rod sings on one song. The one what was in that arty movie. Unfortunately never saw beck until “beck, bogart, and appice”, which was not one of his best bands.
Most small faces did not sound like that! So many good songs!
And, btw, of course marriot has replaced by rod AND ron, since he sang and played guitar.
In 1973 (+/- a year, I forget exactly) I was a student at NSCAD, and we had Charlemagne Palestine as a visiting artist. He had set up this installation in the Anna Leonowens Gallery (at the original location, with the high ceiling) with something like 6 synths scattered around, each in a box about the size of an apple crate, and each with its own speaker. He spent most of a day strolling around the gallery, listening, tweaking, more strolling, etc. Once he was satisfied he just left it running for a few days. It mostly sounded like the last 13 minutes of the video, just a super drone, but probably with a wider range of frequencies. Nothing fancy like sequencers.
Here’s the fun part - students were invited to bring their own sleeping bags and pillows to spend the night in the gallery, with the lights out, and the synths droning away. After a few hours of this, I could swear I heard complex melodies and angel voices. Sort of a sonic pareidolia, I suppose.
Yes, when I had a show at a local radio station I also called Shocking Blue “the Dutch Jefferson Airplane”. But Earth & Fire is more like King Crimson, with the use of the mellotron and all. The finale of their “Song of the marching children” uses the Mars motif from Holst’s The Planets and I think they borrowed the idea from King Crimson’s “The Devil’s Triangle”.
Ruby is the one: a typical song written by guitar player Chris Koerts, who died recently 
Really cool! It will take a while to listen to it all. Thanks for posting.
As an aside, this is the type of music that lead me to develop my Meander program in 1988 to give me more “hands” to play my several synths but primarily my Roland Alpha-Juno-2, Roland SoundCanvas and Kurzweil K200RS.
It is probably the Juno-60 leading me down memory lane 
Mellotron? What mellotron? This mellotron:
No Jerney Kaagman to distract the cameramen just a (wrong) CD cover.
Well, it may be the wrong cover, but I am very happy with this CD. It contains their two best albums: Song of the marching children and Atlantis. And look: it’s got Jerney Kaagman on the right, beautiful as always.
Something on Reddit reminded me of this - a real blast from the past: 1976
Ah, I only have the first album. Which I guess is more pop and less prog than the later ones.
“The last time I felt like this I was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire”
I love her version of this simon and garfunkle song. When I sold one of my 90’s LPs of hers the re-seller said (on the website) “frankly, we have been arguing here for years about whether this ever came out on LP, but clearly it did, and you can buy this mint condition copy for $250.00”
