Here come The Nice

IN THE future, history exams may well include this topic: "The Nice, brilliant. ELP, awful. Discuss." For the uninitiated, the two bands are linked by the presence of virtuoso keyboardist Keith Emerson; but where ELP seemed largely grandstanding, crass and overstated, The Nice were thrilling, a bit weird and somehow deeply subversive.

They came together in the first instance as the backing band for soul singer PP Arnold, but soon commanded the stage for themselves in no uncertain fashion.

It's safe to say that no one had seen anything like them before, as Emerson combined jaw-dropping musicianship with circus-style stagecraft, wrestling a full-sized Hammond organ across the boards while sticking daggers into its keys.

By mid-1968, the terrific, bubbling psychedelia of their debut album The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack was starting to give way to Emerson's loftier classical music ambitions. That way, inevitably, madness lay: but initially, the notion of taking something well-respected and comparatively innocuous, then turbocharging it by ramming firecrackers up its fundament, was an inspired one.

America finds The Nice tearing into Leonard Bernstein's much-loved West Side Story centrepiece like pack animals: a blistering, pant-wettingly exciting performance rivalled only by their pell-mell run at Rondo.

So what if Lee Jackson couldn't really sing; so what if Keith Emerson was destined for a future during which he and good taste were frequently at loggerheads; on their day, The Nice were unmatchable, and America is the sound of that day.