Recorded in 1970, Released in 1973

Between 1 June and 15 July 1970, three musicians from Birmingham recorded an album called Lemmings at Europa Sonor studios in Paris. It did not reach shops until May 1973, on a French label, after the majors who wanted it in 1970 had let it go.

By the time anyone could buy the record, the moment it was made for had passed. That delay is the reason it sounds like nothing else from the period.

Birmingham, then out

Bachdenkel came out of the remains of a group called U No Who and left England for France in 1969. Not a tour. A relocation, on the theory that there was more room to work over there than in a British scene already crowded with bands doing the same thing.

The band was Colin Swinburne on vocals, guitar and keyboards, Peter Kimberley on vocals, bass and piano, and Brian Smith on drums and percussion, with Karel Beer producing and managing. They were right about the room and wrong about everything commercial that followed from it.

Three sides of an album that had two

Lemmings was conceived as a three-sided record. That is usually treated as collector folklore, and it is not. The band's own session journal from Paris sets out the original three-sided running order, track by track.

Which tells you the frame of mind. Not a single, not a set of songs to promote. A shape that does not fit the format it has to be sold in.

Two major labels showed early interest and both walked away. No source gives a reason beyond the fact of it. What did the practical damage was money, specifically the unpaid studio time at Europa Sonor, which had run past twelve thousand pounds by the time anyone was ready to press anything. Philips in France eventually put it out, in May 1973, as two sides rather than three. The ambition got trimmed to fit a sleeve on the way to the shop.

Recorded in a vacuum

Here is the part that matters musically. Between recording and release, rock moved. Glam arrived. Progressive rock hardened into a genre with rules. The record made in the summer of 1970 came out into a market three years further on, made by a band living abroad and tracking none of it.

It has no fashion in it because it was sealed off from fashion by accident. That is not something a band can decide to do. It has to be done to them.

There are almost no reviews from 1973 to consult. The record arrived quietly enough that the press appears not to have noticed at all, which is its own kind of evidence.

The long tail

It kept resurfacing. The Initial Recording Company, founded by Beer, reissued it in Britain in 1978 with three missing tracks restored on an enclosed EP. A German CD followed in 1990. Grapefruit remastered the whole thing in 2022.

Nobody has ever documented how many copies Philips pressed in 1973. The numbers that circulate are guesses. What can be checked is the second-hand market, where original copies change hands somewhere around eighty or ninety euros, occasionally far more.

Why they end up on a shirt

The Bachdenkel tee is a winged skull. Old funerary iconography, the kind carved on eighteenth century headstones, which suits a band whose record arrived as a document of a moment already gone.

Almost nobody heard it. The people who did have spent fifty years telling everybody else. That is the whole definition of a cult record, and this one earned it by being three years late and one side short.

Related: the full catalogue.

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