The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack
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Album Summary
The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack was the debut long-player from The Nice, a British outfit that came roaring out of the late 1960s London scene with fire in their bellies and something to prove. Released in 1968 on Immediate Records — that glorious, chaotic label run by Andrew Loog Oldham — the album was produced by John Pantry and captured a band absolutely crackling with youthful ambition. Keyboardist Keith Emerson, bassist Lee Jackson, guitarist David O'List, and drummer Brian Davison pooled their names into that wonderfully cryptic title, and what they laid down in the studio was a collision of jazz, classical sensibility, rock aggression, and pure psychedelic nerve. The record announced to the world that something new and untamed was breathing in British music.
Reception
- The album was warmly received in the UK, where The Nice had built a devoted following through incendiary live performances, and it charted respectably on the British charts, helping establish the band as serious contenders in the progressive and art-rock underground.
- Critics of the era recognized the album as something genuinely adventurous, though some found its eclecticism difficult to categorize — a complaint that, in retrospect, reads more like a compliment than anything else.
- The record helped cement the band's reputation as a live-wire, intellectually ambitious group, and its blend of classical influence with rock energy was noted as forward-thinking by the more perceptive voices in the late-1960s music press.
Significance
- The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack stands as one of the earliest and most fully realized statements of what would become progressive rock, with Keith Emerson's classical-influenced keyboard work on tracks like 'Rondo' pointing directly toward the genre's future.
- The album's fearless blending of rock energy with jazz phrasing, orchestral ambition, and psychedelic texture made it a foundational document in the conversation about where rock music could go when its practitioners refused to accept any ceiling on their imagination.
- Tracks like 'War And Peace' and 'Cry Of Eugene' demonstrated that a rock band could engage with weighty, even philosophical subject matter without losing visceral power, helping to establish the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that progressive rock would carry through the following decade.
Tracklist
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A1 Flower King Of Flies 94
3:56
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A2 The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack —
2:47
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A3 Bonnie K. —
3:22
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A4 Rondo 176
8:25
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B1 War And Peace 146
5:13
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B2 Tantalising Maggie 158
4:30
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B3 Dawn 87
5:07
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B4 Cry Of Eugene 76
4:30
Artist Details
The Nice were a groundbreaking British progressive rock outfit that came together in London back in 1967, led by the brilliant and classically trained keyboardist Keith Emerson, whose wild, knife-stabbing, Hammond organ-abusing stage presence made audiences absolutely lose their minds. These cats fused classical music, jazz, and psychedelic rock into something nobody had ever quite heard before, essentially laying the foundation for what the whole prog rock movement would become in the years that followed. Though they only burned bright for a few years before Emerson went on to form the legendary Emerson, Lake and Palmer, The Nice left behind a legacy that proved a rock band could reach for the symphonic heavens and actually grab hold of something real.
