Purchasers of
National Health's 1977 debut album might have looked at the band's lineup and figured that the group was
Hatfield and the North with a new bassist, but the back-story was actually more complicated. The band was originally conceived by keyboardists
Dave Stewart of
the Hatfields and
Alan Gowen of
Gilgamesh as a rather massive nine-piece aggregation. But this grandiose scheme arose precisely at a time when rock listeners and, of course, labels were turning away from progressive rock toward punk. Or, as
Stewart wrote in the liners to the 1990 East Side Digital comp
National Health Complete, toward "some of the most crass, simplistic, brutal, ugly and stupid music imaginable, in an atmosphere where an admitted inability to play one's instrument was hailed as a sign of genius...." Well, true enough, but
Stewart did pick "rock" as his art form, and rock has always been mainly for teenagers and twentysomethings, so maybe he should've seen punk coming. Plus, nobody likes a whiner. Anyway, back in the mid- to late '70s,
National Health would briefly fight the good fight against all that crassness, simplicity, brutality, ugliness, and stupidity. Prior to this debut album's release, however, the struggle proved sufficiently daunting to force a paring down of the initial
Stewart-
Gowen dream to a quartet lineup consisting of
Hatfields members
Stewart, guitarist
Phil Miller, and drummer
Pip Pyle, plus bassist
Neil Murray (later of
Whitesnake fame; go figure) -- with
Gowen relegated to guest status along with former
Northette vocalist
Amanda Parsons, Canterbury mainstay reedman
Jimmy Hastings, and percussionist
John Mitchell (of Nixon/Watergate fame; no, sorry, that was a different John Mitchell from a different country).