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Below, you'll see the beginning of a chapter from Camel On Track. Nude (1981)
Personnel:
Andrew Latimer: guitars, vocals, flute, koto, keyboards
Colin Bass: bass, vocals
Andy Ward: drums, percussion
Additional musicians:
Mel Collins: flute, piccolo, saxophones
Duncan Mackay: keyboards
Jan Schelhaas: piano on 'The Last Farewell'
Chris Green: cello on 'Drafted'
Gasper Lawal: percussion on 'Changing Places'
Herbie Flowers: tuba on 'The Homecoming'
Produced at: Abbey Road Studios by Camel, Tony Clarke and Haydn Bendall Engineer: Tony Clarke
Release date: 31 January 1981
Running time: 44:45
Current edition: Esoteric Recordings ECLEC 2159
Highest chart places: UK: 34, USA: Did not chart
Nude is a full-on return to form, always ranked highly in the fans' Camel hall of fame. Unlike Breathless and I Can See Your House From Here, the album is all of a piece stylistically and sees Camel replanting their melodic roots.
Nude is, of course, Camel's first concept album since The Snow Goose. Properly, I understand from a Japanese acquaintance, pronounced 'Noo- duh', on first listening, buyers might have been a little befuddled by the lack of content relating to bare skin, but Noo-duh it is. Musically, Nude points
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the way to the direction Latimer would head once he and Susan Hoover struck out on their own. It's an extended composition based on historical fact and not, as with The Snow Goose, on fictional characters. It was Hoover who pitched the story to Latimer, and he bought in immediately, saying on CV: (AUTHOR GUIDE NOTE: CV is a DVD of interviews, and had previously been introduced by the author, so more detail in the attribution is not needed again.)
Like Snow Goose, it was easy again for me to do as it has a story, characters, different things that happen in the plot. I find that very easy to do writing- wise; you get a very clear picture if the story or the emotion or whatever you're trying to do is strong.
To recap on that story, Nude – or Hiroo Onoda, to use his given name – was a Japanese army intelligence officer who, through missed communications, was unaware that WWII had ended, and believing that the war was ongoing continued, along with three compatriots, guerrilla operations on the Philippines island of Lubang. Although in October 1945, he and the others read a dropped leaflet stating that Japan had surrendered, they ignored the content believing this to be propaganda. By 1972, the last of his cohort was dead after a shoot-out with local police, and Nude was alone.
Eventually, after nearly 30 years in hiding and subsisting on the land, with occasional forays into villages to steal food, he met another Japanese, Norio Suzuki, who had made it his mission to find Nude. Australian public broadcaster, ABC, interviewed Onoda in 2010, where he said:
This hippie boy Suzuki came to the island to listen to the feelings of a Japanese soldier. Suzuki asked me why I would not come out.
After a month of to-ing and fro-ing, with Nude refusing to surrender without official orders from a superior officer, the Japanese government eventually located his commanding officer from WWII, who flew to Lubang and presented him with the necessary orders.
I'll cover what happened after Nude's return to Japan in the track-by-track breakdown. Importantly, bear in mind that Hoover used quite a bit of artistic licence story-wise, as her narrative has Nude alone on the island from the word go. This shouldn't detract from the music, though.
Moving to the recording, after a run of Top 40 albums, even without that coveted hit single, Decca decided to throw the dice and put significant money behind the effort. So, it was that for their eighth album that Camel finally made it to the Shangri-La of studios – Abbey Road, home of The Beatles, Dark Side Of The Moon and Al Stewart's Year Of The Cat. On CV Andy Ward said of the facility:
Recording at Abbey Road was a dream come true ... the engineers were superb.
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And, also on CV, Latimer also remembers the time fondly:
We were in the canteen and then Paul McCartney came and sat at our table
and started drinking tea with us – so you try to be normal, but it's difficult.
A change of studio also brought yet another change of producer, this time Haydn Bendall who was the incumbent chief engineer at Abbey Road, working alongside Tony Clarke, who was best known for producing The Moody Blues from 1966 to 1979.
In case you were wondering, yes, you read the personnel listing above correctly: Latimer plays keyboards on Nude; who knew he had it in him? Duncan Mackay takes lead keyboard duty covering for Watkins and Schelhaas, who were unavailable for the sessions due to other commitments. Schelhaas, however, did manage to contribute to one track, playing piano on 'The Last Farewell'. Returning to Mackay, he had played keys for Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, 10cc and then Kate Bush on her first three LPs, so he was a great fit. Ward and Bass, of course, remained the rhythm section.
In addition to the core band, Mel Collins rejoined in the studio accompanied by the handful of minor contributors listed above.
The accompanying Europe-only tour was a sell-out, spanning January to April 1981, ending with a second 'by popular demand' appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon.
Apart from the Hammond work – which is all Mackay – and Schelhaas' named contribution on 'The Last Farewell', due to Latimer's keyboard credit, it's hard to unpick exactly who is playing what on the album. So without access to the studio logs, unless the player is obvious, I'm not going to speculate.
One final observation: it's notable that Latimer doesn't at any stage in the composition, stray into any Japanese musical tropes, and for this, he is to be applauded. It would have been easy to overdo the koto or to include some wadaiko drums or nokhan flutes, but instead, he lets the story stand on its own. Nude is a better work for it.
'City Life' (Latimer, Hoover)
Japan is at war, and the 20-year-old Nude is living in Tokyo but has not yet been called up. He muses over the direction his nation is taking and hankers after the past, when the country had more traditional values.
Starting off with a sort of 'reverse lullaby' comprising Bass's fretless bass over synth arpeggios, the vocals soon arrive and then the pace changes as Ward joins in with a steady driving beat mirrored by some chirpy electric piano, the effect nicely calling to mind someone waking up and hearing the bustle of the city outside. Over a couple of verses, Bass and Latimer seamlessly share the singing duties and sound great together (you can hear Bass's slight lisp at times, which is a stamp of authenticity for his parts).
The bridge brings another change of tempo with a fun tambourine and drum exchange between left and right channels, leading into a classic Collins
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sax break, one more sung verse, and ending with a restrained solo from Latimer that's unusually far back in the mix. We're up and running, all systems 'Go'.
'Nude' (Latimer)
At 23 seconds long, this is the shortest track in the Camel catalogue. Apart from that claim to infamy, there's not much more to say: 'Nude' should properly be regarded as simply an outro to 'City Life', comprising as it does, nothing but some distorted synth, and logically should have been tacked on to that track. Puzzling.
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