The record
At a glance
- Artist
- The Pretty Things
- Released
- June 1970
- Album
- Fifth studio album
- UK label
- Harvest SHVL 774
- Producer
- Norman Smith
- Original guitarist
- Vic Unitt
Why it matters
The Pretty Things replace linear story with two opposed environments
Parachute follows S.F. Sorrow without attempting another life story. Its coherence comes from contrast between suburban or rural retreat and the city’s sophistication, appetite, danger and loneliness.
The original British LP makes that contrast physical. Side one groups its opening movements into medleys and continuous transitions; side two gives five songs more individual space.
Later digital indexing commonly lists thirteen titles, but the Harvest LP used nine principal bands: four on side one and five on side two. Both descriptions can be accurate if movement names and vinyl indexing are kept separate.
The album is the first Pretty Things LP without founding lead guitarist Dick Taylor. Vic Unitt plays guitar on the album, Skip Alan returns on drums, and Phil May, Wally Waller and Jon Povey carry the writing, vocal and instrumental continuity.
May and Waller write nearly the entire programme together. The title track is the exception, credited to May and producer Norman Smith, making the producer part of the album’s final compositional statement.
The writing moves from miniatures to long forms. The Good Mr. Square and She Was Tall, She Was High exist inside a suite, while Cries from the Midnight Circus and Sickle Clowns receive more than six minutes to develop.
Parachute reached number 43 in Britain, an improvement on S.F. Sorrow’s failure to chart. That modest success did not create durable commercial stability, but it disproves the claim that the album was entirely unnoticed.
Its reputation has sometimes been inflated by the repeated story that Rolling Stone named it album of the year. Contemporary year-end documentation contains no such accolade; the record needs no invented prize to justify its standing.
Abbey Road, 1969–70
After Dick Taylor, a new lineup returns to Abbey Road
Dick Taylor left after S.F. Sorrow, and Vic Unitt joined from the Edgar Broughton Band. Twink also departed, while earlier drummer Skip Alan returned.
Before completing Parachute, the changed group worked on recordings with Philippe DeBarge. Those sessions circulated privately for decades and are not part of the Harvest album.
The Pretty Things also continued anonymous library and soundtrack work as Electric Banana. That parallel activity helped sustain the group but should not be folded into Parachute’s track list.
Recording ran from September 1969 into April 1970 at EMI Studios, Abbey Road. Norman Smith again produced, with Tony Clark engineering and Nick Webb assisting.
Harvest issued Parachute in Britain in June 1970 as SHVL 774. The original gatefold runs about forty-one minutes.
The first side’s printed structure can create modern counting confusion. Scene One contains three named movements, and In the Square / The Letter / Rain is another three-part sequence; later releases often index each movement separately.
Hipgnosis designed and photographed the gatefold. Its front image visually stages the album’s tension between industrial city and overgrown nature.
Parachute reached number 43 on the British album chart. Despite positive contemporary notices, the group temporarily disbanded before returning with Freeway Madness in 1972.
The Parachute lineup
May and Waller lead a five-person studio band
May’s vocal role is less tied to one protagonist than on S.F. Sorrow. He moves among observation, satire, desire and alarm, giving each environment a different human pressure.
Waller is the album’s principal structural partner. His bass, guitar, voice and May-Waller writing credits connect the short first-side scenes to the broader second-side forms.
Povey’s keyboards and harmonies help transitions feel composed rather than pasted together. Organ colour can suggest domestic order, carnival distortion or nocturnal unease depending on context.
Unitt enters a catalogue associated strongly with Taylor but does not simply imitate him. His guitar supports thicker ensemble writing and the harder expansion of Cries from the Midnight Circus and Sickle Clowns.
Alan’s return changes the rhythmic profile after Twink’s Sorrow work. He holds fast medley transitions together and sustains the longer second-half passages without reducing them to a single groove.
Smith preserves the band’s studio ambition while giving instruments more open early-seventies weight. His co-write on the title track makes the producer’s relationship to the album unusually visible.
May and Waller’s dominance does not make the record a duo performance. Povey, Unitt and Alan determine how vocal compositions become layered band arrangements.
Pete Tolson appears on later bonus singles, not the original LP. Edition credits must not replace Unitt with the guitarist who joined afterward.
Suite and songs
Medley compression, hard-rock expansion and choral detail
Scene One opens as a composed entrance rather than a conventional standalone song. The Good Mr. Square and She Was Tall, She Was High move through character, social surface and desire without requiring silence between them.
In the Square, The Letter and Rain form another three-part flow. Public space contracts into private communication, then weather transforms the emotional setting.
Miss Fay Regrets stands apart as a compact character study. Its restraint is important after two medleys; the album proves it can focus without abandoning thematic continuity.
Cries from the Midnight Circus closes side one by expanding into darkness, spectacle and social unease. Guitar, vocal layers and rhythm accumulate across more than six minutes.
Grass begins side two with apparent pastoral release. Acoustic and vocal softness makes countryside attractive, but the album does not let retreat remain uncomplicated.
Sickle Clowns turns pastoral imagery toward menace. Its length gives riffs and harmonies time to become cyclical, making the countryside as capable of distortion as the city.
She’s a Lover restores direct physical energy. A tighter form and prominent rhythm section distinguish desire from the environmental debates around it.
What’s the Use compresses doubt into less than two minutes. The miniature works as a hinge before the title track rather than as an underdeveloped full-scale song.
Parachute ends with controlled uncertainty. The image promises rescue but depends on a mechanism opening at the right moment; the arrangement avoids a purely triumphant landing.
Across both sides, voices are architectural. Harmonies join sections, thicken refrains and make individual characters sound surrounded by social expectations.
The album moves between acoustic detail and hard electric impact without assigning one to country and the other to city. Each environment contains beauty and threat.
Track guide
Thirteen named movements across nine original LP bands
Scene One
A short threshold establishes the album as staged movement rather than a collection of isolated singles. Voices and instruments enter with deliberate economy, preparing the social miniature of Mr. Square. Its function is orientation: the listener steps into an environment already arranged by convention.
The Good Mr. Square
Respectability becomes character. Neat vocal writing and compressed form give Mr. Square an apparently stable outline, while the album’s surrounding transitions imply that stability may be performance. The movement introduces order before desire begins to disturb it.
She Was Tall, She Was High
Physical description lifts the suite out of social geometry. Harmony and melodic ascent make attraction expansive, but the movement remains bound to Scene One’s sequence. Desire does not create a separate world; it enters the square and alters its proportions.
In the Square
The second medley returns to public space with a more exposed sense of observation. Its concise arrangement establishes location so that The Letter can turn inward. The square functions as both meeting place and social frame.
The Letter
Communication becomes private and portable. The music narrows around words sent across distance, interrupting the public setting without fully escaping it. As the middle of a three-part band, it converts place into anticipation.
Rain
Weather dissolves the medley’s previous boundaries. Layered voices and flowing instrumental texture make rain emotional atmosphere rather than scenic decoration. The sequence moves from square to message to an environment that covers both sender and recipient.
Miss Fay Regrets
A named character receives the side’s most self-contained miniature. Regret is treated with melodic poise instead of melodrama, allowing implication to carry what the lyric does not explain. Her compact portrait contrasts with the anonymous crowd waiting in the midnight circus.
Cries from the Midnight Circus
The first side’s longest piece moves into nocturnal spectacle and social danger. Repeated guitar, layered voices and a sustained rhythm turn the circus into an environment of exploitation rather than entertainment. The album’s city side closes at its most crowded and least secure.
Grass
Side two appears to escape into open land. Acoustic space and warm harmony offer relief after the midnight circus, yet the song’s duration allows calm to feel chosen rather than automatic. Nature becomes an alternative whose adequacy still has to be tested.
Sickle Clowns
The countryside develops its own grotesque figures. A recurring hard-rock design and extended form turn harvest imagery into threat, complicating Grass’s promise. Escape from the city has not eliminated performance, violence or absurdity; it has changed their costume.
She’s a Lover
Direct desire breaks through the environmental argument with rhythmic force. The band keeps the song taut, letting voice, bass and guitar make attraction immediate. Its placement shows that personal appetite persists in both city and countryside.
What’s the Use
A short question interrupts momentum before the finale. The miniature does not solve the conflict between places; it strips the debate to doubt. Its brevity creates the sensation of looking down after the jump and before the parachute opens.
Parachute
May and Norman Smith close with an escape mechanism that may or may not work. The arrangement balances lift and apprehension, refusing a guaranteed landing. City and country remain imperfect options; the decisive image is the risky passage between them.
Two environments
Town and country, escape and the uncertain parachute
Parachute contrasts environments without assigning simple virtue. City sophistication contains sex, spectacle and squalor; countryside peace contains boredom and grotesque rural figures.
Squares recur as geometry and social order. Mr. Square and the public square suggest lives organised into visible, approved shapes.
Letters and rain alter boundaries. One carries private language through distance; the other covers public and private space alike.
The midnight circus is not ordinary entertainment. Its cries turn urban nightlife into a system where excitement and exploitation coexist.
Grass offers escape, but Sickle Clowns immediately challenges the pastoral ideal. Nature does not guarantee innocence.
Women appear as distinct figures rather than one swapped template: an admired tall woman, regretful Miss Fay and the physically immediate lover occupy different relations to narrator and place.
The title metaphor makes escape conditional. A parachute is useful only after crisis and only if it opens, so departure cannot be confused with safety.
The album lacks S.F. Sorrow’s single protagonist, yet its recurring places and choices create conceptual unity. It is an environmental argument rather than a linear plot.
The first side’s connected form suggests people caught inside social flow; the second side’s separate long songs allow each possible escape to be examined more fully.
Harvest SHVL 774
Hipgnosis places a child between chimney and flower
Hipgnosis designed and photographed the original gatefold. A glowing child stands on a night road between an industrial chimney and an enormous flower, visualising the record’s opposed environments.
The figure’s outstretched hand does not identify a safe direction. City and nature occupy the same image, while the road and darkness make movement uncertain.
The inside gatefold carries a black-and-white group portrait with printed lyrics, joining public band identity to the album’s verbal construction.
Harvest SHVL 774 indexes the opening suites differently from many digital editions. Package and label information are therefore essential when counting original bands.
Later two-LP pairings with S.F. Sorrow place the records in productive dialogue, but Parachute’s Hipgnosis image and side architecture remain independent.
June 1970
June 1970: acclaimed, charting and still commercially fragile
Harvest released Parachute in Britain in June 1970 as SHVL 774. It peaked at number 43 on the UK album chart.
Contemporary Record Mirror and Billboard notices were positive, praising the group’s instrumental and vocal integration.
A persistent later story says Rolling Stone selected Parachute as album of the year. Reviews and year-end records do not substantiate that claim, so it is excluded from the guide’s factual assessment.
The genuine reception story is more interesting: critical enthusiasm and a chart placing still failed to create enough momentum to keep the band continuously active.
The album was later paired with S.F. Sorrow in Harvest packages, helping both records circulate as the group’s linked psychedelic-progressive peak.
Retrospective criticism often emphasises cohesion across many styles. That judgement is supported by the LP’s deliberate medleys, recurring environmental tension and carefully balanced sides.
The fifth album
A cohesive cult album hidden behind a false accolade
Parachute became a cult album through the durability of its writing and architecture rather than a documented contemporary award.
It demonstrates that the group’s ambition survived Dick Taylor’s departure. Unitt’s guitar and Alan’s return produce a different ensemble without reducing the band to May and anonymous backing players.
The album’s town-country opposition remains more ambiguous than a simple back-to-nature statement. Sickle Clowns is crucial because it prevents pastoral idealisation.
Its first-side medleys anticipate listening practices that later track indexing can obscure. Hearing thirteen files is not identical to hearing nine vinyl bands with internal movements.
The Hipgnosis cover has become inseparable from interpretation: chimney, flower, child and road summarise the album without dictating which direction represents rescue.
Later bonus editions document the transition from Unitt to Pete Tolson through non-LP singles. They extend personnel history but do not modify the 1970 album.
The record’s long-term standing beside S.F. Sorrow shows two different forms of coherence: one narrative and tragic, the other environmental and dialectical.
Parachute endures because it makes stylistic variety argumentative. Acoustic calm, hard riffs, character pop and choral studio work continually test what escape might cost.
Original programme
Original medleys before later single appendices
The original British LP uses nine principal bands while naming thirteen musical movements. Scene One contains Scene One, The Good Mr. Square and She Was Tall, She Was High. The second suite contains In the Square, The Letter and Rain. Miss Fay Regrets and Cries from the Midnight Circus complete side one.
Side two contains Grass, Sickle Clowns, She’s a Lover, What’s the Use and Parachute. Vic Unitt plays guitar on the album; Pete Tolson belongs to later bonus singles. Dick Taylor does not perform on the original album despite appearing in some broad database credit lists.
Later S.F. Sorrow pairings are reissues, not the original Parachute configuration.
A listening path
Hear side one as flow and side two as argument
- Play side one without gaps and treat the first six named movements as two connected bands rather than six unrelated miniatures.
- Notice how Miss Fay Regrets narrows the focus before Cries from the Midnight Circus expands into the side’s urban climax.
- Respect the side break before Grass; the apparent move into open country should feel like a new proposition.
- Hear Grass and Sickle Clowns together so the pastoral invitation and its grotesque correction remain connected.
- Use She’s a Lover and What’s the Use as physical assertion followed by compressed doubt.
- Let the title track end the album before any bonus single. Its uncertainty is the conceptual conclusion.
- Afterward, compare a later thirteen-track digital index with the vinyl labels to understand how presentation changes perceived form.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Parachute tracks, credits and album review — AllMusic
- Current Parachute programme — Spotify
- Label digital credits and programme — Qobuz
- The Pretty Things lineup and catalogue history — AllMusic
- Parachute release, track and sleeve history — JazzRockSoul
- Original Harvest programme and pressing data — Discography archive