I’m placing this here, as I wanted to make sure you see this, Bill. Rupert Hine has passed. Another amazingly talented individual gone, leaving us just a little bit less well off.
Prog Magazine noted it by re-running a 2015 article they’d run about Rupert. Wanted to call it out for a specific reason. Here is the article, and link to same:
Outer Limits: Rupert Hine
by Paul Lester (Prog) – July 31, 2015
Over the last 50 years, he’s worked with everyone from Camel to Chris de Burgh, he’s played a hit novelty single on Top Of The Pops and has even recorded with Doctor Who. But how prog is he?
Rupert Hine is one of the few prog rockers – even one of the few at the outer limits of prog – to have had a five-decade career, a Top 5 novelty hit single, been in a band with an alternative comedian, and produced artists as wide-ranging as Camel and Rush, techno pioneers Underworld and Doctor Who Jon Pertwee. He’s earned accolades from Sir George Martin, and received comparisons to the maverick UK greats: Peter Hammill, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Bill Nelson, John Foxx and Kevin Ayers, to name but a few.
“I remember buying his adventurous 1980s trilogy of albums at the time of their release,” reveals Tim Bowness. “I discovered him via an interview in Sounds, which compared his work to musicians I liked such as Peter Gabriel and Peter Hammill. At the time there were very few artists producing the sort of music Rupert and his engineer Stephen W Tayler were coming up with. The nearest comparisons were Gabriel’s 3 and 4, Hammill’s A Black Box, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming and, at a push, Bill Nelson’s Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam.”
He was a mid-60s mod, a late-60s hippie, an early-70s quirky glamster, a mid-70s prog jazz-rocker and an 80s avant-popster. He’s a regular musical Zelig.
“Zelig? I like that,” says Hine of Woody Allen’s fictional character who morphed throughout history depending on the company he kept, and the context. He also likes Prog’s other catch-all term for him. “Eccentric British songcraft? That’s good too.
.
Cherry Red/Esoteric are releasing this Rupert Hine set next month, a lovely way to celebrate his 75th birthday year and embrace his musical innovation and creativity. On the occasion of his 50th year in the music business, Bob Geldof said: "...knee deep in the industry...how did Rupert Hine encompass the entire age of British Rock and Roll from its very inception to its end, an extraordinary life...one entirely dedicated to music and creativity and not just his own...every fibre of his being throbs to some sort of secret musical note that only he had...what a kind man, what a career, what an artist, what a songwriter, what a profound musician...what an extraordinary musical thing he was..." Long may his work continue to inspire...