Hewson had made his first big musical mark in an ignominious fashion: he arranged the strings that broke up The Beatles. Just one very talented veteran session composer who knew his way around a stack of vintage synths well enough to pull off a album's worth of material by himself. Perhaps the masks were employed because "Rah" simply stands for Richard Anthony Hewsen and there was no band at all. When the single's success propelled the "band" into the pop TV circuit, they were forced to improvise their appearance. In 1977, the UK charts welcomed a really weird dance cut into their top 10: The Crunch, by the Rah Band. Producer, Composed By, Keyboards, Synthesizer, Guitar, Bass - Richard Hewsonĭrums, percussion and brass recorded and the whole thing mixed at R.G. 2009, ) Percussion - Tony Carr, Harold McNair Quartet )Įngineer - John Madden ( ) ""I like RAH Band because the music is unique, it's sounds like aerospace, everything regarding future sophisticated technology."Īrtwork By - Gregory Lynn/ Artwork By - John Holmes ( )Īrtwork By - Splash Design For Andrew Archer Assoc.ĭrums - Barry de Souza (died in sept. "There’s an ear to detail, melody and arrangement which you often don’t find in these new “disco"releases." "The Rah band were fantastic, and still are to this day" Some traces of reggae and dub (and, in 'Woogie Boogie,' rockabilly) are found in some of the more creative tracks, and this is a more serious and artistic endeavor than those by artists such as Perrey."Totally underrated, the Rah Band should be put next to artists as Human League, Simple Minds, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet." Jazz fusion and disco influences criss-cross, as well as a slight layer of the kind of novelty associated with earlier electronic-based instrumentals done in hopes of cracking the pop market by the likes of Jean-Jacques Perrey. Much of the album presents basic early synth-pop riffs set to elementary dance rhythms, and these are often unmemorably cheesy, sometimes sounding like backing tracks that are missing the vocalist. (and was also a hit in several other countries, though not the U.S.), in other ways, the record sounds horribly dated at a few decades' remove. But while the title track got to number six in the U.K. In a limited sense, The Crunch & Beyond was ahead of its time, presenting instrumentals with dance rhythms centered around synthesizers. Though he had the help of a few musicians, the Rah Band's first album was pretty much the project of multi-instrumentalist Richard Hewson, most famous as an arranger of noted recordings on the Apple label by the Beatles, James Taylor, and Mary Hopkin.
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