The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Caravan
- Released
- 5 October 1973
- Album
- Fifth studio album
- Original tracks
- Seven
- New colours
- Viola, synthesizer and arranged winds
- Producer
- David Hitchcock
Why it matters
A replacement lineup becomes a recognisable Caravan
For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night proves that Caravan could survive the loss of Richard Sinclair and Steve Miller without pretending nothing had changed. Pye Hastings and Richard Coughlan remain, but the rhythm section, melodic foreground and keyboard balance are all rebuilt. John G. Perry supplies a more direct bass foundation and supporting voice; Geoff Richardson makes viola a permanent band colour; David Sinclair returns first as a guest and restores the organ attack associated with the earlier records.
The album is also an unusually concentrated statement of Hastings as writer. He provides the songs and most of the closing sequence, moving between muscular road-tested riffs, compact romantic writing, acoustic jazz inflections and bawdy humour. The result is not a return to the pastoral equilibrium of In the Land of Grey and Pink. It is brighter, heavier and more outward-facing, shaped by a band that had recently toured far beyond its Canterbury base.
Its seven-track architecture gives the change room to unfold. The linked Memory Lain, Hugh and Headloss establishes the new lineup at full scale; shorter songs test different kinds of economy; Be Alright and Chance of a Lifetime form a second joined pair; the final medley expands Caravan again through viola, cello, winds and orchestral arrangement. Pop instinct and progressive construction are not separate sides of the record but alternating tools.
1972–73
Six unsettled months produce a durable new formation
After Waterloo Lily, Richard Sinclair and Steve Miller left to work with Phil Miller and Pip Pyle in the group that developed into Hatfield and the North. Hastings and Coughlan reorganised Caravan around Geoff Richardson, initially recruited as a viola player, with Derek Austin on keyboards and Stuart Evans on bass. That lineup toured Europe and then Australia and New Zealand, but its album sessions stopped when Austin and Evans departed.
John G. Perry joined on bass and vocals in February 1973. With no permanent keyboard replacement in place, Caravan invited David Sinclair back for the renewed sessions. The resulting core—Hastings, Richardson, Sinclair, Perry and Coughlan—was joined selectively by guests including Rupert Hine on ARP synthesizer, Frank Ricotti on congas, Jimmy Hastings and a larger wind group, and Paul Buckmaster on electric cello.
David Hitchcock produced sessions made across Tollington Park, Chipping Norton and Decca's West Hampstead studio. The long, interrupted development matters because the finished album is not the work of the transitional Austin-Evans group. Its 2001 expansion later exposed roughly twenty-five minutes from that abandoned phase, allowing listeners to compare two answers to the same personnel crisis without confusing the earlier recordings with the seven-track LP.
The fifth-album ensemble
Viola and a new bass voice surround the returning organ
Richardson is not used as decorative string sweetening. His viola can double a line, answer the guitar or introduce a wiry acoustic edge between rock rhythm and chamber colour. Because it belongs to a permanent member rather than an external orchestra, the instrument becomes part of Caravan's everyday grammar.
Perry changes the low register after Richard Sinclair. His bass often reinforces the harder riffing with less vocalised movement, while his backing vocals widen Hastings's choruses. The distinction is audible without turning either bassist into a standard against which the other must fail: this repertoire asks for a different kind of weight.
David Sinclair's return is recognisable but not nostalgic. Hammond organ again provides sustain and fuzzed intensity, yet piano, electric piano and synthesizers enter a broader arrangement than on the original quartet albums. Hine's ARP parts further complicate authorship of the electronic surface, especially in the opening sequence and Be Alright / Chance of a Lifetime.
Coughlan holds the changing ensemble together. His playing can drive the clipped hard-rock sections, loosen under Hastings's acoustic songs and support the metre changes of the finale. The guests enlarge particular tracks rather than creating a permanent big band: the dense wind writing of the opener and Buckmaster's electric cello at the end frame a more compact five-piece centre.
Sound and construction
Hard riffs, elastic songs and an orchestrated final ascent
The record opens with its widest palette. Memory Lain, Hugh / Headloss combines guitar and organ weight with a wind arrangement that introduces flute, clarinets, saxophones, trumpet and trombone. The massed colour does not make the piece symphonic in the conventional sense; it punctuates a rock ensemble whose riffs are deliberately blunt and physical.
Hoedown keeps the forward motion but compresses it into a direct touring song. Surprise, Surprise then reduces the pressure, using a more open melodic frame and vocal warmth. These changes of scale are essential: the album would feel monochrome if every new lineup strength were expressed as another heavy riff.
C'thlu Thlu brings darkness through harmony, vocal atmosphere and gradual accumulation rather than through speed alone. Richardson's viola can sound unsettled against the electric instruments, while keyboard colour thickens the sense of enclosure. The Dog, the Dog, He's at It Again answers with buoyant acoustic-jazz motion and a chorus whose polished ensemble delivery sharpens the lyric's deliberate indecency.
Be Alright / Chance of a Lifetime is a joined song sequence rather than a miniature instrumental suite. Its first half places memory and material anxiety inside a broad rock arrangement; the second opens into a sunnier refrain. Keyboards and backing voices make the transition feel like a change of emotional weather.
The final medley expands the band most decisively. L'Auberge du Sanglier establishes a reflective entrance; A Hunting We Shall Go converts viola and rhythm into pursuit; Pengola redirects the motion; Mike Ratledge's Backwards is absorbed as a borrowed melodic episode; the reprise returns the hunt with accumulated orchestral force. The arrangement is progressive because its identities remain audible inside continuity.
Track guide
Seven tracks move from road music to a five-part hunt
Memory Lain, Hugh / Headloss
The two Pye Hastings sections form a substantial opening statement. Memory Lain, Hugh begins with purposeful guitar, organ and bass movement, while the wind ensemble makes the new Caravan sound larger than the five names in its permanent lineup.
Headloss tightens the rhythmic attack and turns private escape into a repeated vocal release. The transition demonstrates the album's method: connected parts are defined strongly enough to register, but performance momentum matters more than a theatrical seam.
The title's wordplay and the music's bodily force pull in opposite directions. Caravan remains witty, yet the opening refuses to live entirely in the relaxed pastoral register associated with its best-known predecessor.
Hoedown
Hoedown is road music about leaving to play, carried by a compact riff and a collective invitation to sing. It treats touring as immediate action rather than distant mythology.
The straight-ahead surface still depends on arrangement: organ pressure, viola colour and a rhythm section designed for forward impact. Its brevity clears the large opening architecture without dropping the album's energy.
Surprise, Surprise
A remembered encounter gives the album its gentlest turn. Hastings moves through recognition, separation and the persistence of memory without forcing the song toward one fixed explanation.
The melody carries more weight than instrumental display. Perry and Coughlan keep the pulse light enough for vocal phrasing to lead, while keyboard details open small spaces around the refrain.
C'thlu Thlu
The forest narrative moves from a distant voice to pursuit and enclosure. It is the record's clearest self-contained scene, using fear as dramatic progression rather than as a general album concept.
Dark keyboard harmony, sustained viola and forceful drums create pressure below Hastings's vocal. Jill Pryor's additional voice adds another human presence to a song concerned with unseen presences.
Its spelling evokes Lovecraftian horror without requiring the track to retell a particular story. Caravan uses the reference as atmosphere and motion, then leaves the threat unresolved.
The Dog, the Dog, He's at It Again
Hastings wraps sexual innuendo and a mock challenge to censorship in one of the album's most inviting melodies. The contrast is structural: sweetness makes the lyric's mischief more obvious, not less.
Acoustic-jazz inflection, rounded bass and carefully stacked voices reconnect the rebuilt band to Caravan's lighter touch. Richardson's presence helps keep the arrangement distinct from an imitation of the Richard Sinclair era.
Be Alright / Chance of a Lifetime
Be Alright begins with recollection and questions the value assigned to money. Its reassurance is not passive; the arrangement gradually pushes the repeated title toward something the band has to make true.
Chance of a Lifetime turns that inward argument toward sunlight, individual choice and shared singing. The joined sequence moves from unease to possibility without pretending the two states are unrelated.
Hine's synthesizer and the permanent keyboards enlarge the second half, while the rhythm section preserves the song basis. The pair is a bridge between the concise middle of the album and the instrumental scale of its ending.
L'Auberge du Sanglier / A Hunting We Shall Go / Pengola / Backwards / A Hunting We Shall Go (Reprise)
Perry's L'Auberge du Sanglier takes its title from a guest house in Albi used by the band on French tours. The opening's reflective pace makes place and memory the threshold to a largely instrumental sequence.
A Hunting We Shall Go introduces the recurring pursuit figure. Richardson's viola gives it a taut, physical identity, while Coughlan turns repeated motion into a route through changes of instrumentation.
Pengola redirects the suite without stopping it. The ensemble treats transition as composition, allowing a new figure to alter the listener's sense of destination.
Backwards borrows Mike Ratledge's theme from Soft Machine. The melody enters the medley as a contrasting clearing rather than a detached cover, then becomes part of the larger movement.
The reprise restores the hunt and adds the weight of John Bell and Martyn Ford's arrangement, conducted by Ford. Electric cello, strings and band do not erase the earlier sections; they make return itself the climax.
Songs, not one plot
Movement, appetite and comic unease without one story
For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night is not a narrative concept album. Its songs share motion, appetite, memory and escape, but the traveller in Hoedown, the pursued figures in C'thlu Thlu and the speaker of Surprise, Surprise do not belong to one plot.
Movement is the most persistent link. Roads, gigs, departure, pursuit and imagined release recur, matching a band whose personnel and geography had been in motion. Even the closing suite begins from a remembered French lodging before transforming travel into an instrumental hunt.
Pleasure has several faces. The Dog uses bawdy comedy; Chance of a Lifetime argues for inward freedom; the title itself turns an old phrase about things that go bump in the night into a visual and verbal joke. The album's humour is not filler around serious music—it is one of the ways Caravan manages seriousness.
The final suite changes the thematic burden from lyric to arrangement. Place names and titles supply prompts, but viola, recurring rhythm and the return after Backwards create the actual continuity. It should be heard as an instrumental design, not decoded as a secret storyline.
The sleeping figure
A nocturnal visual pun made literal
The title is a pun on the familiar phrase about things that go bump in the night. The full cover image answers the joke with a sleeping pregnant woman, turning suggestion into an immediately legible nocturnal scene.
That photographic directness differs sharply from Anne Marie Anderson's illustrated landscape for In the Land of Grey and Pink. The earlier sleeve invited exploration of an imaginary country; this one makes the title's bodily joke the whole visual proposition.
Original LP sequencing gives the package another frame. The wind-enlarged opening and orchestrated closing medley sit at opposite ends, while five more compact song structures occupy the route between them. A digital track list can obscure how deliberately those large arrangements act as bookends.
October 1973
The rebuilt group steps out under its own name
Deram released the album on 5 October 1973. It was Caravan's fifth studio record and the first completed by the Hastings, Richardson, Sinclair, Perry and Coughlan formation.
The album did not simply restore the original quartet after Waterloo Lily. David Sinclair's organ returned inside a lineup with a different bassist, a new permanent viola voice and more visible synthesizer and arranged ensemble colour. That distinction explains why the record can feel familiar and newly forceful at once.
The group soon carried this repertoire onto a larger stage. In October 1973 Caravan performed with an orchestra at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; the resulting Caravan and the New Symphonia appeared in 1974. The studio album's orchestral finale had already demonstrated that the rebuilt band could support that expansion.
Toward New Symphonia
The hinge between classic Caravan and its later lineups
For Girls has endured as the key studio document of Caravan's 1973 reconstruction. It preserves Perry's only complete studio-album role in the band and establishes Richardson as a long-term provider of instrumental colour.
A Hunting We Shall Go became especially durable in concert. Its recurring rhythm, viola lead and capacity for expansion made it adaptable to orchestral performance and later live lineups, while Memory Lain, Hugh / Headloss, Hoedown and The Dog also remained useful stage material.
The record occupies a hinge in the catalogue. It follows the jazzier Steve Miller period of Waterloo Lily but does not restore Richard Sinclair's songwriting balance; it precedes Cunning Stunts, where composition becomes more evenly distributed again. Here, Hastings's writing provides unity while the new personnel supply difference.
Its legacy is therefore not a claim that Caravan returned unchanged to a golden formula. The stronger achievement is that a disrupted band found another coherent identity—one capable of hard rock, polished song, chamber colour and an extended instrumental finale on the same LP.
Which edition?
Separate the original seven from the abandoned lineup
Begin with the original seven tracks. Memory Lain, Hugh / Headloss and Be Alright / Chance of a Lifetime should retain their internal joins, while the five titles of the finale belong to one uninterrupted medley.
The 2001 bonuses are unusually valuable because they document the Derek Austin and Stuart Evans lineup that began the project. Hear them after the album and treat the contrast as personnel history, not as discarded movements from the final sequence.
The US mix of the opening pair and the alternates No! / Waffle and He Who Smelt It Dealt It expose how arrangements and titles developed. They illuminate decisions already completed on the LP rather than supplying a preferred replacement.
A Hunting We Shall Go also rewards comparison with Caravan and the New Symphonia and Live at Fairfield Halls, 1974. The studio medley's careful orchestration becomes a form that can stretch under concert pressure.
A listening path
Follow the new instruments before following the jokes
- First pass: Play the seven original tracks in sequence and leave every internal transition intact.
- Second pass: Follow Richardson's viola from ensemble colour to the engine of A Hunting We Shall Go.
- Third pass: Compare David Sinclair's organ and Hine's synthesizer against Perry's new bass foundation.
- Then continue: Move to Caravan and the New Symphonia to hear the 1973 band negotiate a full concert orchestra.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night catalogue and credits — Universal Music / Decca
- Caravan catalogue analysis — Calyx
- Caravan history — Calyx
- Caravan album and reissue chronology — Calyx
- Official Caravan discography — Caravan
- 2001 remaster track record — Universal Music release via Fnac