The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Caravan
- Released
- 25 July 1975
- Album
- Sixth studio album
- Original tracks
- Seven
- Side two centre
- The six-part Dabsong Conshirtoe
- Producer
- David Hitchcock
Why it matters
A democratic lineup makes Caravan sound newly polished
Cunning Stunts is the first Caravan studio album in which Mike Wedgwood is fully integrated as bassist, writer and lead singer. He had replaced John G. Perry in July 1974 and crossed the United States with the band before these sessions were complete. By 1975, his contribution was not a supporting adjustment: Lover and Welcome the Day give the first side two distinct songs and his voice also carries material by David Sinclair and John Murphy.
The album redistributes authorship more widely than For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night. Pye Hastings writes two of the five first-side songs, Wedgwood writes two, and Sinclair with lyricist Murphy opens the record and dominates side two with The Dabsong Conshirtoe. Geoff Richardson closes the LP with a compact rag. Caravan sounds like a band of multiple centres rather than one writer surrounded by arrangers.
Production is unusually polished. Electric piano, organ and Mini Moog are carefully separated; Wedgwood's fretless bass and layered vocals soften transitions; Richardson moves among viola, violin, flute and guitars; strings and brass enter selected songs and suite movements. Yet the clean surface does not eliminate progressive scale. The eighteen-minute Dabsong contains six named stages and preserves abrupt changes of texture inside its finish.
That tension makes the album historically useful. It sits between the orchestral concert project and the more song-based Blind Dog at St. Dunstans, capturing Caravan at the point where accessible studio craft and long-form composition still receive equal space.
1974–75
Wedgwood enters after Perry and David Sinclair settles in
Caravan spent much of 1974 touring the lineup formed around For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night. John G. Perry left in July to pursue work that included Quantum Jump, and former Curved Air bassist Mike Wedgwood took his place. A fifty-date American tour helped turn the replacement into a working band member before the next album was finished.
Early work on the record began under the prospective title Toys in the Attic. When Aerosmith used that title, Caravan chose another of its characteristic verbal jokes: Cunning Stunts. The change is more than trivia because both titles point toward performance, display and the album's fascination with putting on a show.
Sessions resumed at Decca's Tollington Park studio in February 1975, continued intensively from 18 to 21 March and ended in May. David Hitchcock produced. The band was already performing The Dabsong Conshirtoe and Welcome the Day during the February tour, and a 21 March BBC concert captured the suite months before the LP appeared.
David Sinclair was again a permanent-looking member during the project, contributing his first major share of Caravan writing in several years. He decided to leave in June and completed prior commitments before Jan Schelhaas replaced him. Cunning Stunts therefore preserves both the apparent stability and the immediate impermanence of this lineup.
The Wedgwood lineup
Three lead voices and an expanded instrumental vocabulary
Wedgwood adds a brighter lead voice and a bass style that can move from firm pop foundation to fretless glide. Lover uses his softer phrasing for intimacy; Welcome the Day gives him a more energetic setting; The Show of Our Lives and parts of the Dabsong place his voice inside another writer's theatrical frame.
David Sinclair has the widest keyboard palette of his Caravan catalogue to this point. Piano can establish song harmony, electric piano smooths the first side's polished surface, organ restores sustained weight and Mini Moog provides a more sharply contoured lead. The Dabsong lets those identities become successive characters rather than one continuous keyboard wash.
Richardson's multi-instrumental range is equally important. Viola remains his signature, but flute, violin and both acoustic and electric guitars allow him to change the ensemble without an outside player. His closing rag then gives him a small authored space after Sinclair's enormous suite.
Hastings is less compositionally dominant but still anchors the band's recognisable guitar and vocal personality. Coughlan makes the polished arrangements move with Caravan's characteristic elasticity, while Jimmy Hastings's brass work enlarges two Dabsong sections without converting the entire album into orchestral rock.
Sound and construction
Studio finish outside, restless suite mechanics inside
The first side favours clarity and separation. Vocals sit forward, keyboard timbres are carefully distinguished and the rhythm section supports concise structures. This finish gives The Show of Our Lives a theatrical glow, Stuck in a Hole a brisk edge and Lover a broad romantic space.
No Backstage Pass is more exposed. Acoustic guitar and strings reduce the band's weight, allowing Hastings's travel-worn lyric to occupy the foreground. Welcome the Day reverses that restraint through firmer bass, congas and a rhythmically direct chorus.
The Dabsong Conshirtoe treats polish as a way to clarify complexity. Each of its six movements has its own register and pace: piano and voice can yield to brass, odd transitions, keyboard-led momentum or a sustained closing development without turning the side into an indistinct collage.
Brass is structural rather than ornamental in Ben Karratt Rides Again and Sneaking Out the Bare Quare. Jimmy Hastings's arrangement creates blocks of colour that the five-piece can answer. Elsewhere, violin, organ and Mini Moog take over the work of contrast.
Fear and Loathing in Tollington Park Rag is an anti-climax by design. After eighteen minutes of layered studio construction, Richardson closes with a small, quick instrumental gesture. The album leaves the tailor's room through a side door rather than returning for one more grand curtain call.
Track guide
Five first-side songs, six Dabsong movements and a rag
The Show of Our Lives
David Sinclair and John Murphy begin with stage imagery: audience, curtain, spotlight and a performance that continues even when the room becomes silent. The song makes public presentation its subject before the album displays several different voices.
Wedgwood's lead gives the material a fresh centre. Layered keyboards and a carefully rising arrangement make the chorus feel ceremonial without losing Caravan's warmth.
As an opener, it frames the record as a show rather than a unified story. Each following song can occupy a separate scene while still belonging to the same programme.
Stuck in a Hole
Hastings compresses confinement into the album's most immediate rock song. The title is both situation and hook; forward rhythm makes the speaker's lack of movement sound deliberately paradoxical.
Wedgwood's bass and Coughlan's drums keep the arrangement lean, while Sinclair's keyboards add colour without opening a long instrumental detour.
Its single-minded structure provides useful friction after the broad opener. Caravan can now sound concise without treating concision as a reduced form of its art.
Lover
Wedgwood's first composition slows the side and places his voice inside a romantic arrangement. Fretless bass movement gives the harmony a fluid underside rather than merely holding roots.
Strings enlarge the song's emotional scale, but the vocal remains close and unforced. The result is polished without becoming anonymous adult pop.
Lover proves that the new bassist contributes a personal tone, not simply another energetic song. Its spaciousness makes the following acoustic restraint possible.
No Backstage Pass
Hastings turns touring distance and exclusion into a subdued first-person song. The backstage image connects it to the opening theatre, but here performance is lonely rather than celebratory.
Acoustic guitar and strings create one of the album's lightest arrangements. The absence of a large keyboard climax is the point: restraint lets vulnerability survive the polished production.
The song gives the first side an emotional interior. Its distinction from The Show of Our Lives prevents the recurring stage vocabulary from becoming repeated content.
Welcome the Day
Wedgwood returns with a firmer rhythmic song, using daylight and forward motion to lift the side from No Backstage Pass. His lead voice now sounds public and energetic rather than intimate.
Bass, congas, drums and bright keyboards make groove the arrangement's organising idea. Richardson adds colour without diverting the song from its direct course.
Placed before the LP turn, it clears the emotional and rhythmic field. Side two can begin its eighteen-minute construction without carrying unresolved weight from the ballad.
The Dabsong Conshirtoe
The Mad Dabsong establishes the suite's comic-serious tone. Piano, voice and ensemble gesture introduce a form whose title jokes about concerto scale while the writing genuinely pursues it.
Ben Karratt Rides Again brings brass into the foreground. Jimmy Hastings's arrangement gives the movement a processional identity, and the band answers the larger blocks with nimble rhythm.
Pro's and Con's changes the balance toward argument and contrast. Keyboard figures and changing accents make the pun audible as musical opposition without requiring a literal debate.
Wraiks and Ladders is the shortest turn, a compact connector whose distorted game title matches its role as an unstable climb between longer sections.
Sneaking Out the Bare Quare expands through brass, keyboards and ensemble movement. Its peculiar title accompanies music concerned with evasion and re-entry rather than a fixed narrative incident.
All Sorts of Unmentionable Things sustains the final development. Sinclair's keyboards, Richardson's strings and the rhythm section gather earlier contrasts into an ending large enough to complete the suite without summarising its jokes.
The Fear and Loathing in Tollington Park Rag
Richardson answers the Dabsong with just over a minute of authored release. The title relocates grand American countercultural language to Caravan's London studio surroundings.
Its rag-like motion is deliberately small after the suite. The instrumental tag clears the accumulated arrangement with wit and gives Richardson the last compositional word.
On editions that index the six Dabsong movements separately, this appears as track twelve; historically it remains the seventh and final band on the original LP.
Songs plus one suite
Performance, confinement and intimacy without one storyline
Cunning Stunts is not one narrative concept. The first side contains separate songs about performance, confinement, romance, distance and renewal. The Dabsong is a multi-movement musical construction, not a plot that retroactively absorbs those songs.
Performance is the most visible recurring idea. The Show of Our Lives celebrates the stage, No Backstage Pass shows its exclusionary reverse, and the fitting-room cover makes appearance a visual action. These connections create resonance without turning one speaker into a recurring character.
The album also explores access: being stuck, being admitted, addressing a lover, welcoming a day, sneaking out. Those verbs move between enclosure and release. The music mirrors them through polished song boundaries on side one and porous movement boundaries on side two.
Wordplay remains Caravan's defence against pomp. The album title, Dabsong movement names and closing Tollington Park joke keep the eighteen-minute scale from becoming solemn proof of importance. Humour is embedded in structure, not pasted over it.
The tailor's room
A fitting-room scene dresses the verbal prank
The title is a spoonerism, continuing Caravan's preference for verbal jokes that reward a second reading. Before hearing a note, the listener encounters language slipping its respectable surface.
The front photograph stages a fitting-room scene: a man models a bold diamond-patterned suit before mirrors while another figure attends to fabric. Costume, reflection and adjustment extend the record's interest in performance and presentation.
The visual does not illustrate the Dabsong movement by movement. Its stronger connection is to the album's public surface: a polished new outfit is being fitted while the wearer and room remain slightly comic.
The LP division completes the idea. Five clearly cut songs present the ensemble's new voices on side one; side two devotes nearly all its space to one six-part work, followed by Richardson's tiny rag. The package contains both tailored order and a hidden excess.
July 1975
A July album shaped on the road before release
Cunning Stunts appeared on 25 July 1975 as Caravan's sixth studio album. The official album contains seven banded tracks, although later digital releases often expose the six Dabsong movements as individual indexes.
The band had already tested major material in concert. The Dabsong and Welcome the Day appeared in February set lists, and the BBC recorded an approximately nineteen-minute Dabsong at London's Paris Theatre on 21 March. The suite was therefore performance repertoire before listeners received the studio sequence.
Caravan's official history records two American tours around this era and notes particularly strong import sales in San Francisco. That transatlantic activity fits the album's smoother studio profile without proving that accessibility alone determined its writing.
Critical response has remained divided between listeners who miss the rougher early ensemble and those who value the record's warmth, vocal range and production. The useful fact beneath that disagreement is audible: Cunning Stunts deliberately gives polish and compositional variety more weight than any earlier Caravan LP.
Before Blind Dog
David Sinclair's large return and immediate exit
The Dabsong Conshirtoe is the album's longest-lived claim on Caravan's progressive catalogue. BBC and tour recordings preserve both complete and shortened forms, showing that the six-movement architecture could be adapted rather than merely reproduced.
Wedgwood's creative integration is the other major legacy. He writes two songs, sings across several authors and gives the rhythm section a new low-register personality. Blind Dog at St. Dunstans would retain him while replacing David Sinclair with Jan Schelhaas.
For David Sinclair, the album is both return and endpoint. His writing again occupies the large-form centre of a Caravan studio record, yet he left immediately afterward. No Backstage Pass and the opening show's imagery gain extra historical resonance without needing to be read as coded explanations of his decision.
Cunning Stunts remains a hinge between eras: too compositionally ambitious to be reduced to pop, too carefully finished to resemble the original quartet's looser warmth, and too democratically written to repeat Hastings's control of For Girls.
Which edition?
Choose between one suite track and six movement indexes
The original LP treats The Dabsong Conshirtoe as one track containing six named movements. Separate digital indexes are useful for study, but first listening should remain uninterrupted.
The 2001 additions follow Fear and Loathing. The alternate Stuck in a Hole compares a finished concise song with another take; Keeping Back My Love documents an otherwise unused 1975 recording later reworked; For Richard comes from the 1974 Fairfield Halls performance.
Do not mistake the live For Richard for part of the Cunning Stunts sessions. It expands the disc's historical value but belongs to older composition and a different concert document.
For the Dabsong's stage life, compare the March BBC performance with the studio recording and the shorter Nottingham Polytechnic version from December 1975. The same architecture changes length and emphasis as the lineup moves toward Jan Schelhaas.
A listening path
Begin with the singers, then map the Dabsong
- First pass: Hear the original two sides, keeping all six Dabsong movements continuous.
- Second pass: Identify Wedgwood, Hastings and the shared suite vocals before following instruments.
- Third pass: Map Sinclair's piano, electric piano, organ and Mini Moog as separate dramatic voices.
- Then continue: Move to Blind Dog at St. Dunstans to hear Wedgwood remain while Schelhaas replaces Sinclair.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Caravan official biography — Caravan
- The Dabsong Conshirtoe official recording archive — Caravan
- Caravan catalogue analysis — Calyx
- Caravan 1974–75 chronology — Calyx
- Cunning Stunts track and personnel record — AllMusic
- Dabsong movement sequence — Repertoire Records via Apple Music
- 2001 Decca edition sequence — Decca via Spotify