The record
At a glance
- Artist
- Curved Air
- Released
- September 1971
- Album
- Second studio album
- Original tracks
- Eight
- UK album peak
- No. 11
- Hit single
- Back Street Luv — UK No. 4
Why it matters
The hit and the epic occupy the same divided record
Second Album captures Curved Air at its strongest commercial moment. Back Street Luv reached number four in Britain, while the LP peaked at number eleven and remained on the chart for six weeks.
The hit does not define the whole record. Five concise-to-medium Way compositions occupy the first side, while Monkman answers with two short pieces and the nearly thirteen-minute Piece of Mind.
That division makes authorship audible. Way favours violin-led melody, character and direct emotional situations; Monkman uses keyboards, VCS3 and sectional development to question stable form.
Sonja Kristina prevents the sides from becoming separate demonstrations. Her voice can sound intimate, streetwise, theatrical or disembodied, and her lyrical contribution gives Way's music a recognisable human centre.
The album matters because accessibility and experiment do not appear as opposites. Its most immediate single and its most ambitious long-form composition share a record whose identity depends on both.
1971
A rapid follow-up written under touring pressure
The follow-up to Air Conditioning arrived less than a year after the debut. Touring left limited time to develop most of the new material on stage before recording.
Ian Eyre replaced Robert Martin on bass and became a co-writer of Back Street Luv. Sonja Kristina, Darryl Way, Francis Monkman and Florian Pilkington-Miksa retained their established roles.
Sessions took place at Island and Morgan studios in London. Curved Air and Colin Caldwell produced, with Caldwell also engineering.
The LP order formalised a compositional boundary: side one belongs to Way's material, with Kristina and Eyre contributing to songs; side two consists of Monkman's three works.
Young Mother had roots in the pre-Curved Air group Sisyphus, but the remaining programme was largely new. The contrast between a developed older piece and rapidly assembled material helps explain the record's varied density.
Back Street Luv entered the UK singles chart in August 1971, before the album's October chart entry. Its twelve-week run gave Curved Air a public profile none of their later singles matched.
Band and studio
A new bassist inside the original instrumental triangle
Kristina shapes the side-one characters through vocal stance as much as text. Young Mother is urgent, Back Street Luv guarded and physical, and Puppets increasingly theatrical.
Way's violin is both lead instrument and arranger. It can double a vocal curve, cut across a groove or sustain a line while keyboards alter the harmony beneath it.
Monkman's VCS3 is unusually prominent on Young Mother, even though Way wrote the piece. That cross-side participation shows that composer division did not mean instrumental absence.
Eyre gives the record a more settled low end and contributes directly to the hit. His bass makes Back Street Luv's compressed tension danceable rather than merely abrasive.
Pilkington-Miksa moves between tight single rhythm and long-form navigation. Piece of Mind depends on his ability to make changes feel connected without disguising their edges.
Zinovieff's electronic credit belongs to a record already treating synthesis as composition, not novelty. Electronic timbre becomes a structural voice alongside violin and guitar.
Sound and construction
VCS3 motion, electric violin and a widening second side
Side one favours defined songs but not plain arrangements. VCS3 glides, electric violin, guitar and vocal phrasing keep verse-and-chorus forms in continuous motion.
Young Mother opens at full chromatic colour, while Back Street Luv reduces that vocabulary to an unforgettable descending pressure and clipped rhythmic frame.
Jumbo and You Know create the album's most reflective space. Rather than repeat the single's attack, they let melody and changing instrumental emphasis carry uncertainty.
Puppets restores scale at the end of side one, using staged contrasts to turn manipulation into something heard between instruments.
Everdance and Bright Summer's Day '68 shorten Monkman's method before Piece of Mind enlarges it. The listener encounters movement, memory and finally an extended journey through multiple states.
The production is clearer and less raw than the debut. That focus benefits the compact songs, while the finale deliberately tests how much contrast the soundstage can hold.
Track guide
Eight distinct forms from young desire to cosmic scale
Young Mother
Way's opener evolved from earlier Sisyphus material and arrives already rich in internal movement. Kristina's lyric places youth and motherhood inside conflicting freedom and responsibility.
Violin and VCS3 move around the vocal rather than merely supporting it. Electronic curves make emotional instability physical.
The song's six-minute span allows instrumental pressure to gather without losing the human situation at its centre. It announces a more controlled studio sound while retaining the debut's appetite for unusual combinations.
Back Street Luv
Way, Kristina and Eyre compress desire, distrust and urban toughness into the band's most successful single. The missing letter in Luv signals directness rather than romance polished for respectability.
Bass and drums create a tense, danceable circuit; violin and keyboards add flashes of unease around Kristina's low, commanding delivery.
The arrangement wastes no gesture. A hook, a texture change and a vocal turn each arrive before familiarity can settle.
Its UK number-four peak demonstrates that Curved Air's strangeness could work inside a three-and-a-half-minute form.
Jumbo
The title suggests exaggerated scale, but the song is more inward than the name implies. Kristina sings through a shifting emotional space rather than a public narrative.
Way's melody lets violin and voice share long curves while rhythm instruments maintain quiet propulsion. Placed after the hit, it refuses to duplicate Back Street Luv's compression and gives side one room to breathe.
You Know
Way builds a direct address around recognition that remains incomplete. Repetition sounds like an attempt to establish connection, not proof that it already exists.
Piano and violin frame Kristina more gently than on the two opening tracks, while guitar colour keeps the surface unsettled. Its restraint prepares Puppets by making manipulation and theatrical control feel like a sharp change of scale.
Puppets
Kristina and Way turn external control into stage imagery. The puppet metaphor allows questions of agency to become visible without naming one political or personal controller.
Piano, electric violin and rhythm section shift between measured passages and more forceful ensemble statements. The arrangement repeatedly asks who is directing whom, with instrumental answers interrupting vocal certainty. As side-one closer, it enlarges Way's songcraft without crossing into Monkman's thirteen-minute method.
Everdance
Monkman opens side two with movement as a permanent condition. The compact piece is rhythmic and airborne, using violin within a different compositional logic.
Kristina's vocal rides the pattern rather than acting as a dramatic character portrait. Its freshness matters structurally: the change of writer is audible, but the album does not begin its second half with an abrupt lecture in complexity.
Bright Summer's Day '68
The date fixes memory to a particular summer without explaining every event. Brightness is filtered through hindsight, making recollection less secure than the title first suggests.
Monkman keeps the form concise, using keyboards and guitar to colour the vocal's backward glance. Its economy creates a deceptive calm immediately before the album's longest and most demanding piece.
Piece of Mind
Monkman's nearly thirteen-minute finale turns consciousness into a sequence of unstable rooms. Its title plays on peace and fragment: a portion of mind may not provide peace of mind.
The opening establishes a measured vocal argument before instrumental sections change tempo, density and perspective.
Guitar, VCS3, violin, bass and drums take alternating responsibility for direction. No single timbre remains the permanent guide.
Kristina returns as an element inside the architecture rather than a narrator standing outside it.
The long development fulfils possibilities that the first seven songs keep compressed. It closes the album by expanding difference, not reconciling its two writers.
No continuous story
Relationships, movement and mind without one plot
Second Album is not a concept record. Its eight situations do not share characters, chronology or one governing story.
Connection is repeatedly attempted and disturbed. Young Mother balances roles, Back Street Luv joins attraction to suspicion, and You Know tries to make recognition mutual.
Control shapes Puppets and Piece of Mind at different scales. One uses theatrical bodies moved by strings; the other asks whether consciousness can direct its own changes.
Movement supplies another link. Everdance treats motion as continuity, while Piece of Mind travels because stillness cannot contain its argument.
The writer split gives the sequence coherence without pretending uniformity. Side one tests human relationships through Way's melodic drama; side two moves toward Monkman's abstract interior.
John Kosh's rainbow
A rainbow returns the band name to its source
John Kosh designed the sleeve and Peter Howe created the photography. Its rainbow refers to Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air, the composition from which the band drew its name.
Different editions vary the presentation, but the rainbow remains the visual constant. The apparently generic title is therefore tied back to a specific musical ancestry.
Colour behaves like the record's instrumentation: separate bands remain visible while forming one arc. That parallel is interpretive, not a claim that Kosh diagrammed the side division.
The package is less technologically radical than the debut picture disc. It makes identity, rather than manufacturing format, its main visual subject.
The breakthrough single
Curved Air's commercial high-water mark
Warner Bros. released Second Album in September 1971. It entered the British album chart on 9 October, reached number eleven the following week and accumulated six chart weeks.
Back Street Luv entered the singles chart on 7 August, peaked at number four and remained for twelve weeks. It is Curved Air's only UK Top 40 single.
The hit gave the LP an accessible doorway, but Piece of Mind quickly became the main evidence for listeners interested in the band's long-form fusion.
Critical response has remained divided over the contrast between compact first-side writing and the finale. That disagreement often measures expectations of progressive rock more than execution.
Commercially, the album came close to matching the debut's number-eight peak while producing a much larger single. No later Curved Air studio release repeated that combined reach.
A split identity
More than the album around Back Street Luv
Back Street Luv remains the band's signature recording, carried by Kristina's delivery as much as its instrumental hook.
Young Mother and Puppets demonstrate that Way's side contains more than a hit plus supporting songs. Both use extended arrangement to complicate direct subjects.
Piece of Mind has become the album's progressive counterweight, preserving Monkman's interest in electronics, formal scale and unstable consciousness.
The explicit side division anticipates Phantasmagoria, where Way and Monkman again occupy contrasting territories. On Second Album the boundary is especially clear because the hit sits so near the start and the epic at the end.
Its legacy lies in refusing a choice between single and suite. Curved Air's most public and most exploratory impulses are held in productive tension.
Which edition?
Keep the eight-song architecture visible
Start with the eight original tracks and stop after Piece of Mind. Archive performances belong after the side-one/side-two argument has completed.
Use Young Mother to assess separation among VCS3, violin and vocal. Back Street Luv should retain bass weight without obscuring its compact keyboard details.
Piece of Mind needs stable dynamics across quiet transitions and ensemble peaks. A flattened master makes its sections sound appended rather than developed.
The 2018 Esoteric set adds BBC recordings after the remastered album and includes a DVD component. These performances document the live vocabulary around the period.
No track makes Second Album an instrumental release. Kristina's voice is a primary structural instrument throughout all eight original pieces.
A listening path
Hear the two writers before joining the halves
- First pass: Hear the LP in order and treat the side break as a change of composer, not of band.
- Follow the hit: Compare Back Street Luv's economy with the changing scale of Young Mother and Puppets.
- Follow Monkman: Let Everdance and Bright Summer's Day prepare the vocabulary of Piece of Mind.
- Follow Kristina: Hear her move from character and confrontation toward memory and interior architecture.
- Join the halves: Return to the VCS3 in Young Mother and hear how it anticipates the finale.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Curved Air official discography — Curved Air
- Second Album chart record — Official Charts
- Back Street Luv chart record — Official Charts
- Second Album programme and credits — MusicBrainz
- Second Album credits — AllMusic
- Second Album digital catalogue — Apple Music
- Second Album specialist release history — Strawberry Bricks
- Second Album expanded edition — Esoteric Recordings