★★★★☆
All but ignored on its release in 1972, but since held up as a masterpiece of British folk, Bright Phoebus is an album that captures the romance and mystery of everyday rural life. Wishing to move on from singing traditional English ballads with their family band the Watersons, brother and sister Mike and Lal wrote songs such as The Scarecrow, imagining the titular bag of rags as a sentient being wishing for love, and Red Wine and Promises, on which a drunken woman collapses in the street, “flat on me back in the rainbow rain”, while belligerently rejecting help from passers-by.
There is a stark, windswept beauty to Fine Horseman, a fairytale-like reverie on lovers riding across the moors, and tragic longing to To Make You Stay, a dreamlike tale of hiding a man or woman away from the world to possess them entirely.
Bright Phoebus ends with its cheering, singalong title song about the wonders of the early morning sun, breaking the spell of an album that elsewhere possesses an eerie, ancient, flinty mood. Evoking the strangeness lying just below the surface of convention, Bright Phoebus is an absolute one-off. (Domino)