Purchasers of National Health's 1977 debut album might have looked at the band's lineup and figured that the group was Hatfield and the North with a new bassist, but the back-story was actually more complicated. The band was originally conceived by keyboardists Dave Stewart of the Hatfields and Alan Gowen of Gilgamesh as a rather massive nine-piece aggregation. But this grandiose scheme arose precisely at a time when rock listeners and, of course, labels were turning away from progressive rock toward punk. Or, as Stewart wrote in the liners to the 1990 East Side Digital comp National Health Complete, toward "some of the most crass, simplistic, brutal, ugly and stupid music imaginable, in an atmosphere where an admitted inability to play one's instrument was hailed as a sign of genius...." Well, true enough, but Stewart did pick "rock" as his art form, and rock has always been mainly for teenagers and twentysomethings, so maybe he should've seen punk coming. Plus, nobody likes a whiner. Anyway, back in the mid- to late '70s, National Health would briefly fight the good fight against all that crassness, simplicity, brutality, ugliness, and stupidity. Prior to this debut album's release, however, the struggle proved sufficiently daunting to force a paring down of the initial Stewart-Gowen dream to a quartet lineup consisting of Hatfields members Stewart, guitarist Phil Miller, and drummer Pip Pyle, plus bassist Neil Murray (later of Whitesnake fame; go figure) -- with Gowen relegated to guest status along with former Northette vocalist Amanda Parsons, Canterbury mainstay reedman Jimmy Hastings, and percussionist John Mitchell (of Nixon/Watergate fame; no, sorry, that was a different John Mitchell from a different country).

1		Thermos Roads
2		Brujo
3		Borogoves, Pt. 2 [Excerpt from Pt. 2]
4		Borogoves, Pt. 1
5		Elephants

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