(3 / 5)
Some sweet guitar licks on this decent album from John Fiddler’s Medicine Head. If Clapton, JJ Cale, Peter Green et al are your bag, then maybe this should be on your radar.
“Heartwork” offers 10 new songs in the blues and blues rock genre from Medicine Head’s mainstay, singer and guitarist John Fiddler, the band’s sole original member.
The album is the follow-up to the popular “Warriors Of Love” long player, the first Medicine Head album for a decade.
Medicine Head are best remembered for their # 3 chart hit “One & One Is One” in ’73, and the album of the same name. The band formed in 1968 with the core of John Fiddler and harmonica player Peter Hope-Evans [who met at art college in Stafford], gigging in the Midlands and discovered by BBC radio DJ John Peel. Urged by John Lennon, Peel signed them to his record label Dandelion Records.
Lennon, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Manfred Mann championed the band, and John peel declared their 1968 track “His Guiding Hand” a classic, and it was included in his famous “Record Box”.
Medicine Head released three albums on Dandelion, with Peter Hope-Evans leaving and returning to the band during that time. Debut album, 1970’s “New Bottles, Old Medicine” was recorded in two hours.
The band followed that with the single, “(And The) Pictures In The Sky” and the sophomore album, “Heavy On The Drum” in 1970, produced by The Yardbirds’ Keith Relf. After their third album, “Dark Side Of The Moon” in 1972 – they used that title before Pink Floyd – Medicine head signed to Polydor.
They then released their 1973 hit “One & One Is One” – 13 weeks in the chart – and the same-titled album, and the follow-up album “Thru’ A Five” gave them more hits with “Rising Sun” and “Slip and Slide”. Soon after that the band became a duo again, and dropped the album, “Two Man Band” in 1976. The next year, Peter left for a final time.
John has carried on the name Medicine Head with shows and recordings, with Peter’s blessing, with 2011’s “Fiddlersophical” and then “Warriors Of Love” before February 2024’s pleasing offering “Heartwork”.
Words: Les Howard
(1 / 5) ‘Dull Zone’
(2 / 5) ‘OK Zone’ (3 / 5) ‘Decent Zone’
(4 / 5) ‘Super Zone’
(5 / 5) ‘Awesome Zone’
