Cricklewood Green
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Album Summary
Cricklewood Green came to life in 1970 on Deram Records, standing tall as Ten Years After's fourth studio album — and brother, this band was on fire when they cut it. Produced by the band themselves, this record was born out of a period when Ten Years After had already shaken the foundations at Woodstock and were riding one of the most powerful waves in British blues-rock. Alvin Lee, Chick Churchill, Leo Lyons, and Ric Lee walked into those sessions with something to prove and everything to give, channeling the raw electricity of their live performances into a studio setting that managed to bottle that lightning without taming it one bit.
Reception
- The album achieved notable chart success in the United Kingdom, where Ten Years After commanded a deeply loyal following that showed up in the numbers.
- Cricklewood Green was received warmly by the rock press of the day, recognized as a confident and cohesive statement from a band that had earned its stripes on stages both sides of the Atlantic.
- While it did not cross over into the kind of mass commercial breakthrough that some of their contemporaries enjoyed, the album reinforced Ten Years After's standing as one of the premier blues-rock acts of the early 1970s.
Significance
- Cricklewood Green stands as a prime document of the British blues-rock movement at its most vital, with Alvin Lee's blistering fast fingerpicking guitar work cutting through every groove like a hot knife — this was a man playing with the spirit of the Delta and the voltage of the future all at once.
- The album reflects a band reaching into deeper songwriting territory, stretching beyond pure blues frameworks into something more expansive and personal, while never once losing the raw, sweat-soaked energy that made Ten Years After a phenomenon on the concert circuit.
- As a cultural artifact, Cricklewood Green captures the moment when the American blues tradition had been fully absorbed, transformed, and sent back out into the world through a distinctly British rock sensibility — a beautiful and powerful act of musical alchemy that defined an era.
Tracklist
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A1 Sugar The Road 151
3:46
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A2 Working On The Road 125
4:15
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A3 50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain 117
7:37
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A4 Year 3,000 Blues 105
2:17
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B1 Me And My Baby 169
4:12
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B2 Love Like A Man 109
7:13
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B3 Circles 136
3:55
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B4 As The Sun Still Burns Away 97
4:42
Artist Details
Ten Years After was a blazing British blues-rock outfit that came together in Nottingham, England back in 1966, led by the lightning-fingered Alvin Lee whose guitar work could make a grown man weep and shout hallelujah in the same breath. They rode the late sixties and early seventies hard, carving out a sound that was raw, electric, and deeply rooted in the American blues tradition, and they burned their name into rock history forever with that scorching performance of I'm Going Home at Woodstock in 1969 — a moment that stopped the world cold and showed everybody just how dangerous and beautiful a guitar in the right hands could truly be. Ten Years After may not have always gotten the headlines they deserved, but any serious lover of real, honest, hard-driving rock and roll knows that Alvin Lee and those boys were the genuine article, the kind of band that reminded you why music was worth living for in the first place.
