Tempest in concert – recorded for the BBC In Concert series – March 16, 1974 – BBC Radio 1
Another band whose talent was considerable but whose lifespan was brief.
Tempest was active from 1972 to 1974. Its core members were Jon Hiseman on drums and Mark Clarke on bass. They released two studio albums before breaking up.
It gets a bit more complicated than that:
Hiseman and Clarke had played in Colosseum together and formed Tempest at the beginning of 1973.[2] For the band’s first, eponymous album (originally called Jon Hiseman’s Tempest), the line-up was completed by Allan Holdsworth on guitar and Paul Williams[3][4] on vocals and keyboards.
Later in Tempest’s brief history, they were joined by Ollie Halsall, who had played guitar with progressive rock band Patto. With two guitarists, the group played a number of shows beginning with a June 1973 show at Golders Green Hippodrome, London, which was broadcast by the BBC and later released as a bootleg erroneously entitled Live in London 1974.[5] By the time a second album was recorded, 1974’s Living in Fear, Tempest was down to a trio, consisting of Hiseman, Clarke, and Halsall; reportedly Holdsworth didn’t want to play alongside a second guitarist.[6] The band broke up soon after.
In 2005, a double CD anthology was released entitled Under the Blossom which featured remastered editions of the two studio albums, two previously unreleased studio tracks from the Living in Fear era and the BBC live recording of the June 1973 concert at Golders Green with the two guitar line-up.
Even though this concert is also from Golders Green in London, it’s the later concert (March 1974) where there only three members are featured and shortly before they broke up.
Still, enough to make you scratch your head and ask why.
