Northern Lights — Renaissance
What’s that you say? A fusion of progressive rock and folk music would never reach Number 10 in the UK Singles Chart? Well, I call as my first witness “Northern Lights” by Renaissance, which did exactly that in 1978.
I know that blend of musical styles sounds like an odd mix, but trust me this works beautifully…at least on this record — the fact that it’s the only hit single I can think of off-hand which successfully fuses those two very different styles probably doesn’t auger well for the genre as a whole.
In many ways, the mid to late-1970s were the best musical times. Since the birth of rock and roll a decade or so earlier the sound quality and the options open to you in the recording studio had developed considerably from the early days of rock and roll when the whole band was recorded at the same time while clustered around a single microphone.
But making records then was still a craft, requiring skill, expertise and judgement, unlike today when all you need to create a hit single is a MacBook Pro and some pre-programmed beats.
“Northern Lights” is a great example of this. It sounds really well crafted and although there is a little bit of studio trickery involved, most notably the multi-tracking on lead singer Annie Haslam’s voice, back in 1978 all this had to be done by hand.
