Renaissance are a progressive rock band. The original line-up included two former members of the Yardbirds, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty, along with John Hawken, Louis Cennamo and Relf’s sister Jane. They intended to put “something together with more of a classical influence”. Renaissance was born, and the band released a studio album in 1969, and another in 1971. Subsequently, John Tout replaced Hawken on keyboards, followed by a period of high turnover of musicians until the “classic line-up” of Annie Haslam, John Tout, Michael Dunford, Jon Camp, and Terry Sullivan was established, although none of them were in the original band. They were assisted with lyrics on many songs from Cornish poet Betty Thatcher-Newsinger.
Their fourth album Ashes Are Burning was released in 1973. Though the band were trying to transition to a more acoustic sound, Andy Powell of the group Wishbone Ash, was brought in for an electric guitar solo on the final track “Ashes are Burning”, which became the band’s anthem piece, extended to almost twenty minutes with a long bass solo and other instrumental workouts. The album became the band’s first to chart in the US, where it reached No. 171 on the Billboard.
Shortly after the album’s release, Michael Dunford returned as (acoustic) guitarist, completing what most fans regard as the classic five-piece line-up, which would remain together through five studio albums. The band played their first US concerts during this period, enjoying success on theEast Coast in particular, which soon resulted in a special orchestral concert at New York’s Academy of Music in May 1974. Soon Renaissance would choose to concentrate on the US market, as the UK press virtually ignored them.
The next album was Turn of the Cards released in 1974. With a larger budget, the album went from folk-flavoured to a more dark, lush, orchestral rock sound. One of the album’s songs, “Things I Don’t Understand”, which clocked in at 9:30, was Jim McCarty’s last co-writing credit with the group (although it was actually in the band’s live repertoire for years). A lengthy tribute to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, called “Mother Russia”, closed out the album, with lyrics inspired by his autobiographical novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Turn of the Cards was first issued in the United States in August 1974, where it reached No. 94, some months before an official UK release. It remained in the Billboard 200 for 21 weeks. Although Renaissance’s fan base was relatively small, its following was heavily concentrated in the large cities of the northeast US. The album was eventually released in the UK in March 1975.
It was soon followed by Scheherazade and Other Stories, released on both sides of the Atlantic in September 1975. The album, whose second side was taken up with the epic tone-poem “Song of Scheherazade” based on stories from One Thousand And One Nights, peaked at No. 48 in the United States. There is “no musical connection to the well-known classical work Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov”, but the track does have a recurring six-note motif that alludes to that work.
Although commercial success was limited during this period, Renaissance scored a hit single in Britain with “Northern Lights”, which reached No. 10 during the summer of 1978. The single was taken from the album A Song For All Seasons (a No. 58 album in the US), and received significant airplay in the US on both AOR and on radio stations adapting to a new format known as “soft rock”.
