Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )

The mythology is magical.  On June 23, 1971, Melanie was among the headliners at the Glastonbury Fayre – an underground celebration that morphed, a decade later, into what we now know as the Glastonbury Festival.

Some 12,000 people attended the week long event, there to witness now-legendary sets by David Bowie, Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, the Edgar Broughton Band, Quintessence, Traffic, Fairport Convention, Arthur Brown and more, all performing from the now-iconic pyramid stage.

But, Hawkwind co-founder Nik Turner recalled, it was Melanie who a lot of people were waiting for, as she climbed onto the stage from the front row of the audience, where she’d been sharing home-made beer with a party of bikers.

“There was a real buzz about Melanie being there,” Turner recalled. “Everyone adored her, and the whole site fell silent while she was on. Even the drummers stopped playing to listen.”

Indeed, in the years that followed her death in January 2024, several veterans of the festival have stepped up to pay their respects by recording fresh elements to the songs she left behind – Paul Rudolph of the Fairies, for example, and the great Terry Reid.

“Lay Down (Candles In The Rain),” however, is extra special, not only because it is one of Melanie’s best loved songs and biggest hit records, but also because she is joined by Nik Turner (flute) and Hawkwind bandmate Del Dettmar (audio generator) – both of whom witnessed her Glastonbury performance; and Alan Davey, a key member of the band through the 1980s and beyond.

Even more intriguingly, it is a version of the song as Melanie originally wrote it, before she added the “Lay Down” chorus that eventually titled the song and which, in the hands of the Edwin Hawkins Singers, stripped away the foreboding darkness that clung to Melanie’s original composition. 

There are few pop songs, after all, which open with a line like “we bled inside each other’s wounds”, and even Melanie admitted such a lyric was an unlikely candidate for the Top 10. Yet still “Lay Down (Candles In The Rain)” reached #6 on the Billboard chart, while covers have come from as musically far afield as Mott The Hoople and Meredith Brooks, Emilia Torrini and Australian star Max Sharan.

In the hands of Davey, Turner and Dettmar, however, the song is drawn even further from its “hit” incarnation, not only capturing the energies of Melanie’s original solo performance, but driving, also, into pure Hawkwind In Search Of Space territory.  If they’d dropped this into the set, maybe at the end of side two, nobody would have batted an eyelid.

Listen to it HERE, and it could easily have been taped 55 years ago, and it is so easy to imagine Nik, Del and Melanie, plus a passing rhythm section, sneaking into the on-site mobile studio, after the evening’s festivities were over, switching on the tapes and letting rip.  

They only had time to record one song. But what a performance it is!