Music Arcades: Various: The Famous Charisma Box

I've been looking forward to this coming up on these pages, to give me an excuse to get it out. It's an extraordinarily large boxed set, 350mm by 300mm by 40mm, so the only way it will fit in my cupboard is laid flat, with lots of other boxed sets on top of it. That's one reason that I rarely get it out. Another being that it's an extraordinary hotch potch of a collection with little on it that is sufficiently compelling to overcome the physical barriers to playing it. (It was also really quite expensive, and I would never have bought it for myself, but I put it on my Amazon wishlist, and my dear mother very generously got it for me for Christmas 2002.)

All this may sound uninviting and not very good value for money. But, having just listened to all five hours of it in one day, I found much of it had a timeless charm, and (with the possible exception of the fourth CD) was not as stodgy to listen to as some 70-minute single CDs seem to be. Let me try and explain why that is.

The Charisma label, in this telling, was effectively one of the serious hobbies of Tony Stratton-Smith, along with his racehorses, his biography of a martyr nun, and (later on) film company. The only thing holding together the roster of recordings was Strat's eccentric taste. Even that seemed to desert him (or perhaps he was already focusing elsewhere) in the final few years in the early '80s that make up the mostly grim fourth CD in the box, aptly named "The Terminal Years". And perhaps he was also motivated by largesse, patronage and friendship in supporting some releases of decidedly limited appeal. How else would you explain not just the solo album spin-offs not just by the less charismatic members of Genesis, but by ex-members of The Nice, Lindisfarne, and Julian Lennon?

It doesn't help that the tracks by which the likes of Tony Banks and Steve Hackett are represented are far from their mediocre best (yes, 25 years ago, I listened to whole albums by those guys). The music of the early '70s is being rehabilitated these days, but there are a few tracks on the second CD that could seriously blight the reputation of any era. But in amongst these are songs like your old favourite, Lady Eleanor by Lindisfarne, rare early Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator at their most listener-friendly, obscure-but-interesting Dylan covers by Bell & Arc and Link Wray (!), a bit of Bert Jansch, an early Michael Nyman soundtrack, reggae from Gregory Isaacs and Prince Far I, and a steel drum version of Don't Leave Me This Way.

Amazingly, the real gems are on the spoken word CD. Following the old ~~class~~ taste wars of the Magdalene JCR, I have an abiding hatred of anything to do with horse racing, but Peter O'Sullevan's story about Lester Piggot gives it a sense of pathos not to say heroics. John Betjeman reading The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel is dazzling. There's a (spoken) song by R.D Laing! And ten minutes of sub-Alan-Watts instruction in meditation. All spliced between Monty Python sketches and Viv Stanshall interruptions.

It adds up, via rather suspect arithmetic that only a turf accountant would condone, to a hagiography of an endearingly unsaintly man.