Colored Skies [Full album] - Welcome to the fold

The Music Colored Skies sits in that rare, dangerous pocket where blues grit and progressive ambition collide without either one blinking first. The album opens with a swagger — thick, funky guitar riffs drenched in light overdrive, sitting on top of a drumkit that sounds like it was recorded in a concrete room with the doors shut. The kick drum and bass guitar are practically one organism, locked so tight they breathe together. Rhodes electric piano ghosts through the mid-range on every track, comping in the spaces the guitar leaves behind Then there's the voice. Lead vocalist Ray Colston delivers every line with a sly, sardonic theatricality — smug in the best possible way, like a man who already knows how the story ends and finds it privately amusing. Confident. Slightly menacing. The kind of voice that makes you feel like you're the one being watched. The Backstory Colored Skies formed in Birmingham in 1974 when guitarist Declan Marsh tracked down vocalist Ray Colston — formerly of the cult psychedelic outfit the Clockwork Flamingos — in a Digbeth pub and talked for four hours straight. Colston didn't agree to anything that night. He called three weeks later. They built the band quietly — adding drummer Pete Adeyemi, bassist Clive Sutton, and keyboardist Judith Farr — and spent the next two years rehearsing in a damp warehouse and playing the Midlands pub circuit. Too funky for the prog crowd. Too cerebral for the blues purists. Nobody knew where to put them. Manager Gerald Holt caught them on a Tuesday night in Coventry in 1976 and signed them on a handshake. Their debut Strange Latitude (1977) went nowhere commercially and became a cult record on college radio in the Netherlands and the American Midwest. Welcome to the Fold was recorded in three weeks in the winter of 1978 at Crow Lane Studios, Wolverhampton. The sessions were tense. Released March 1979 on Synforge Records to near total commercial silence. That summer Colston left — no meeting, no explanation, just a note on the mixing desk. This is what they left behind.