An English avant-garde rock group, founded at Cambridge University in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. An inherent anti-commercial bias kept them at arm's length from the mainstream music business, enabling them to experiment at will. They remained in existence for 10 years and produced a body of music that was challenging, provocative and influential for years to come.
Recognising their mutual open-minded approach to music, the two began performing together, playing a variety of musical styles, including 'dada' blues and 'neo-Hiroshima'. Henry Cow's first concert was to support Pink Floyd at the Architects Ball at Homerton College, Cambridge in June 1968.
In October 1968, Henry Cow expanded when they were joined by Andy Powell (bass guitar), Dave Attwood (drums) and Rob Brooks (rhythm guitar). They performed with this line-up until December that year when Frith, Hodgkinson and Powell split off from the rest of the group and became a trio. Powell at the time was studying music at King's College under Roger Smalley, the resident composer, who was influential in Henry Cow's early development, exposing them to a variety of new music from bands and musicians like Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa.
It was at this time that Henry Cow began challenging themselves by writing music they could not play, then using it to teach themselves to play the instruments. As a trio, with Frith on bass guitar, Powell on drums and Hodgkinson playing organ, Henry Cow performed at a number of gigs on the university calendar.
In April 1969, Powell left and the band reverted to a duo again, with Frith playing violin and Hodgkinson on keyboards and reeds. In October 1969, they persuaded bassist John Greaves to join the band, and with the services of a couple of temporary drummers and then Sean Jenkins, Henry Cow performed as a quartet for the next 8 months.
In May 1971 Martin Ditcham replaced Jenkins on drums, and with this line-up they played at several events, including the Glastonbury Festival alongside Gong in June 1971.
Ditcham left in July 1971 and it was not until September that year that the drummer's seat was filled again, this time by Chris Cutler. Henry Cow then settled into a permanent core of Frith, Hodgkinson, Cutler and Greaves and relocated to London where they began an aggressive rehearsal schedule.
Henry Cow recorded a John Peel session for BBC Radio 1 in February 1972 and later went on to record another session in October that year and a further three sessions between 1973 and 1975.
In April 1972 Henry Cow wrote and performed the music for Robert Walker's production of Euripides' The Bacchae. It was during this time that Geoff Leigh joined on woodwinds and Henry Cow became a quintet.
In July 1972, the band performed at the Edinburgh Festival and wrote and performed music for a ballet with artist Ray Smith and the Cambridge Contemporary Dance Group at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was Smith who later did the "paint sock" art work on three of Henry Cow's LP covers.
Back in London, they started to organise a series of concerts and events under the names Cabaret Voltaire and Explorers' Club at Kensington Town Hall with invited guests, including Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Ivor Cutler, Ron Geesin, David Toop and Ray Smith. For the first time, Henry Cow started getting some attention from the rock press and the then emerging Virgin Records label, with which they signed in May 1973.
Within two weeks of signing the contract, Henry Cow began recording their debut album Leg End (also known as Legend) at Virgin's Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. To promote its new signing, Virgin organised a UK tour for Henry Cow and Faust, who had also just signed to the label.
During this tour, Henry Cow began preparing music for an unorthodox and provocative play, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Some of this music was used on their next album, Unrest.
During a tour of The Netherlands in December 1973, Leigh left the group. Looking for more unusual instruments to draw them further away from standard rock and jazz, Henry Cow asked classically trained Lindsay Cooper (oboe, bassoon) to join.
With hardly any time to rehearse, they returned to The Manor in early 1974 to begin recording Unrest. It was during this time that they became acquainted with Slapp Happy, a quirky avant-pop trio of Peter Blegvad (guitar), Anthony Moore (keyboards) and Dagmar Krause (vocals), who had just completed their first album for Virgin.
In May 1974 they were on tour again around England and Europe with Captain Beefheart. It was during this tour that they decided to ask Lindsay Cooper to leave and fulfil their last outstanding concert obligations (a tour of the Netherlands) as a quartet.
In November 1974, Slapp Happy invited Henry Cow to be their band on their second album for Virgin. The result was Desperate Straights, an almost entirely Slapp Happy composed album that surprised everyone, considering how dissimilar the two groups were.
The success of this venture prompted a merger of the two bands. In early 1975 the merged group began rehearsing for In Praise of Learning in a freezing gymnasium. It was an arduous and extremely demanding time, something Slapp Happy were not prepared for, and it soon became apparent that the merger might not work. Nevertheless, they still went to The Manor and made In Praise of Learning together. But it was only after they started rehearsing with a view to performing live together that it became clear that their approaches were incompatible.
The merger ended in April 1975, when Anthony Moore quit and Peter Blegvad was asked to leave. However, Dagmar Krause, whose contribution had added another dimension to Henry Cow's sound, elected to remain, which effectively spelt the end of Slapp Happy as a band.
Having guested on both the Henry Cow/Slapp Happy albums, Lindsay Cooper rejoined in April 1975 and Henry Cow became a sextet and began preparing for what would become the most sustained and rigorous working schedule of their career: two solid years of virtually continuous touring in Western Europe.
While rehearsing for an upcoming tour of Scandinavia in March 1976, Greaves left the band to start working on a project with Blegvad and Krause withdrew due to ill-health. Committed to the tour, Henry Cow had to perform as a quartet (Hodgkinson, Frith, Cooper and Cutler) and adjust their music accordingly. They took the radical option and abandoned composed material completely in favour of pure improvisation.
In 1976 Henry Cow auditioned for a replacement bass player until they found Georgie Born, a classically trained cellist and improviser. She joined the band in June 1976 and their new compositions grew even more complex.
They returned to London in early 1977 and another merger took place with the entire Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong as The Orckestra. They played their first concert at the Roundhouse in London and then in an open-air theatre in Hyde Park, and went on to tour together in France, Italy and Scandinavia. At more or less the same time they set up Music for Socialism and its May Festival.
It had been three years since Henry Cow had performed more than one concert a year in their own country. In an attempt to break the apathy that seemed to be discouraging anyone from wanting to put them on, they tried to organise a small alternative tour themselves, but abandoned it after 11 concerts when they started losing money: clearly nothing had changed. Their contract with Virgin Records had now become a burden to both Henry Cow and Virgin: none of Henry Cow's records were licensed or distributed in the countries in which they spent all their time playing, and Henry Cow were not making any money for Virgin. Henry Cow needed to record again but Virgin (understandably) refused to give them studio time at The Manor. Eventually the Virgin contract was cancelled in October 1977.
By now Krause's health had deteriorated to such an extent that touring became impossible for her and she decided to leave the group, although she agreed to sing on Henry Cow's next album. The recording of this album was to begin in Switzerland in January 1978. However, arguments about the predominance of songs on the album led to these being released separately by Cutler and Frith, while the instrumentals would be released later by Henry Cow. But this decision spelled the end of the band.
Later that year Henry Cow returned to Switzerland, by then without Krause and Born, to record their last album, Western Culture, an instrumental. Henry Cow agreed to disband as a permanent group, but did not announce the fact immediately. They continued for another six months, creating a new set of material and revisiting for the last time all the places that had supported them over the years.
In March 1978 Henry Cow invited four groups from Italy, France, Sweden and Belgium to come to London and perform in a festival they had organised called Rock in Opposition or RIO. Throughout Europe, Henry Cow had encountered many 'progressive' groups which were staunchly independent and opposed to the established rock business, but determined to pursue their own work regardless. After the festival, RIO was formalised as an organisation with a charter whose aim was to represent and promote its members. RIO thus became a collective of bands united in their opposition to the music industry and the pressures to compromise their music.
Henry Cow's last concert was held in Milan in July 1978. In August they returned to the Sunrise studios to complete Western Culture after which the band officially announced their break-up in the press.
While it was generally thought that Henry Cow took their name from 20th century American composer Henry Cowell, this has been repeatedly denied by band members. According to Hodgkinson, the name was 'in the air' in 1968 and it seemed like a good name for the band. It had no connection to anything.