Helpful Soul - A Thousand & One Nights (CD)

Original release 1969
Re-issue 2009

Junio Nakahara - lead vocalist and slide guitar
Gene Shoji - lead guitar
Charles Che - bass
Eiichi Tsukasa - drums

The career of the Helpful Soul was a real case of wrong place, wrong time - for they hit their blues stride just as heavy blues was becoming hard rock, and graduated to heavy rock too late to capitalise on even that brief fad. However, they recorded one outstanding track, the ten-minutes-plus of Peace For Fools, which appeared on their otherwise bog-standard blues dirge debut LP. This track in itself separates them from all Japanese blues bands for it is a Kim Fowleyan masterpiece of Jim Morrison mystical doggerel/truly possessed nihilist genius. Unfortunately, leader Junio Nakahara was so inspired by witnessing a performance by Blues Creation, when his band supported them at the Too Much Festival, that he was soon after driven to change his own name to Tstomu Ogawa while his band became known as ... Too Much.

Julian Cope