Trivia / Henry Cow

• Creative Differences: Henry Cow are a fairly rare example of a band that genuinely broke up because of these. Some of the members were definitely more hard-left and ideological than others (Cutler and Hodgkinson were more on the ideological end, Frith on the other end) and the whole band no longer felt that they shared the same vision for the group. Ironically, it was Cutler and Frith who went straight into a collaboration in Art Bears. The group members remained friends (which doesn’t usually happen with this trope) and continued to work with each other on projects over the years.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Coupled with Self-Deprecation. The extensive liner notes in the 40th Anniversary Boxed Set feature extended contributions from basically every former member of the band, and Fred Frith admits that the band's practice of subjecting every last decision to endless group discussion probably wore them down in the end, and definitely prevented some pieces of music from being as good as they might otherwise have been. Georgina Born also notes that, although in her time with the band it was split evenly between men and women (Frith/Hodgkinson/Cutler, Cooper/Krause/Born), the men tended to behave as though they constituted a majority. In general, however, this is downplayed; although Born later gave up music for academia, she valued her time in the band as an essential part of her education.
  • In Benjamin Piekut's 2019 biography of the band, Henry Cow: The World Is A Problem, Fred Frith observed that on reading Henry Cow's public statements years later, his main reaction was to think what a bunch of "humourless bastards" they were. He has since observed that while he admires the book, he felt it overemphasised the seriousness of the band and missed a lot of their humour and "surreal escapades".
• Promoted Fangirl: Annemarie Roelofs was in the audience for one of their shows when band members entered the audience while still playing. She had her trombone on her, so she got it out and started playing along. They were so impressed that they invited her to join the band for its last shows, and she plays on their final album.
• Troubled Production:
  • The entire first side of their first album Legend had been recorded and mixed and was in the can, when the album's assistant engineer Mike Oldfield was given the job of making a master copy. Unfortunately, he pressed the wrong button and accidentally erased the whole thing, so the band had to record it all over again.
  • The band's final album, so troubled that, in a way, it broke them up. Internal relationships within the band were not very happy, and Cutler was having difficulty writing lyrics for the longer pieces. Since they didn't have enough material for the album, Cutler volunteered to write some shorter pieces, which other members of the band then set to music. The band recorded them, but then continued to disagree with itself about whether or not they were right for Henry Cow. Eventually it was decided that although the shorter songs weren't bad, they still weren't Henry Cow, whereas the longer ones were. Frith, Cutler and Krause were eager to do something with the song-based material, but this conflicted with the band's collective insistence on total commitment, so they collectively decided that the band was apparently breaking up. What was going to have been Henry Cow's fifth album ended up as most of the first Art Bears album Hopes and Fears, the rest of which was recorded by Frith, Cutler and Krause a couple of months later, while Henry Cow completed its final concerts and then used the longer pieces and new material in a totally different final album, Western Culture.