Budgie Hagerstown MD

Budgie

Budgie

MCA Records, 1971

REVIEW BY: Roland Fratzl

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 09/24/2002

Budgie is one of the best forgotten hard rock bands of the 70's,period. Even forgotten might be a bit of an exaggeration since theynever managed to gain more than cult status, particularly in theUS. For years now I've been obsessed with discovering more and morebands who were at the cutting edge of hard rock/heavy metal duringits infancy in the early 70's, after all, Black Sabbath, LedZeppelin and Deep Purple couldn't possibly have been the only heavybands at the time.

Indeed they weren't, and at their peak, Budgie's music easilyrivaled that of the giants of the genre I just mentioned. Why theynever gained even an ounce of the popularity of lesser bands likeUriah Heep is one of rock's great mysteries...they were stable,superb musicians, wrote killer tunes, and churned out a slew ofgreat albums for many years, so what happened? They were a highlycreative band with an original sound, and most refreshing of all isthat a good deal of the music is not cliched 70's rock.

Think Black Sabbath meets Rush in a way, with bizarre songs like"Crash Course In Brain Surgery" (a song from this debut record thatwas strangely included on the cd release of their fourth album, In For The Kill, instead). If you're a fan of hard rock, youshould love these guys...Metallica have covered a few of theirsongs, and that's probably the only reason anybody even knows aboutthem anymore; that's how I first heard of them too. It's time thatthe world finally embraced this unfairly neglected pioneeringband.

The Welsh trio comes blasting out of the gates in their bid toclimb to the throne of heavy superstardom with this immenselypowerful self-titled debut, released in 1971. You know thatpatented really low, downtuned sludgy guitar tone unique to theearly Black Sabbath albums that's thunderously fuzzy?? It's allover this record! Was Tony Iommi moonlighting or something? Nope,that would be the other Tony, Tony Bourge, on lead guitar. RayPhilipps on drums and Burke Shelley as bassist/vocalist/frontmanrounded out the original line-up.