WIGWAM

WELL, THIS IS a weird one and no mistake.

Here I am about to write an article on a band I know virtually nothing about beyond what they've recorded - and all in an attempt to get you interested enough to go and hunt for their albums, when I know perfectly well you won't find them available anywhere in Britain.

On the other hand, perhaps this article might speed up the process of getting a British label outlet for them. Hope so.

The group's name is Wigwam.

If you're curious about Continental rock music - Scandinavian in particular - then you'll probably have come across me mentioning them before, usually in tandem with remarks about their friends and colleagues Tasavallan Presidentti. Both bands are from Finland, but whereas Jukka Tolonen's group has toured Britain four times and can be fairly described as a Known Quantity, Wigwam have never, to my knowledge, taken a step out of their homeland in any professional capacity.

And this is a truly frustrating state of affairs, mes amis - because acquaintance with their music via the albums I've obtained from Helsinki over the past year has convinced me that, not only are they a superior band to the nevertheless inventive and entertaining T. Prex, but they're also currently the most intriguing group in existence outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not about to out-Faust myself over Wigwam. For a start, there's absolutely nothing in common between the two bands, and Faust (as it once was) stands taller in my estimation than this Finnish quartet only in that the German players created something almost totally original and unique, and Wigwam's derivations - at least at the beginning - are fairly easily decoded.

These days, however - particularly with their most recent record "Being" - it's a different bunch of bananas altogether, and their sound'd be almost impossible to "place" for someone unfamiliar with their previous development.

In fact, it was hearing "Being" that finally kicked me into trying to do justice as a listener to the Wigwam albums that had previously come my way. So I might as well kill two penguins with one sledgehammer and let you in on the secret while I'm working it out myself.

WIGWAM ARE (from left to right in the picture) Jukka Gustavson, Jim Pembroke, Ronnie Osterberg, and Pekka Pohjola.

Gustavson plays organ, piano, and electric piano and shares the lead vocals with Pembroke, who co-writes most of the band's material with him, adding the occasional bits of extra piano, plus odd little puffing sounds on an Echo Super Vamper harp. Both Gustavson and Pekka Pohjola (bass, violin, and yet more keyboards) are fine musicians and - if their harmonic sophistication and expert grasp of orchestration is anything to go by - classically-trained.

Osterberg just plays drums. I say "just". Without any ostentatious flash, he's a consummate percussionist in the jazz-rock realm The Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt was exploring three or four years ago. You hardly notice him guiding the others through tough time and tempo changes, but the sort of propulsive energy Wigwam exude when they're hitting a regular groove is clearly down to that subtle snare and ride-cymbal work.

But enough of the personnel jive.

I DON'T KNOW how long Wigwam have been going. There are no dates on any of their albums (all issued by the Helsinki company Love Records) and no hand-out material on the band seems to exist, beyond what one can glean from the remarkably sparse liner-notes.

If they're anything like Tasavallan, they've been playing together for five or six years, amateur and pro, and probably began recording in about 1971.

Jim Pembroke, an English expatriate from (I think) Hull, went over to Finland to seek his musical fortune in the late Sixties and met up with the other three in the country's capital - most likely at one or other of the small discotheques which stand in lieu of rock venues there.

The first fruit of their collaboration was the album "Hard 'n' Horny", a mysterious item featuring a languid pre-Raphaelite maiden on the front-sleeve and nothing whatsoever - not even track-listings, on the back. Even more peculiar, considering the title (which seems to promise some sort of unholy fusion between Jean Sibelius and Black Oak Arkansas), was the music within.

Side One consisted of a bunch of Gustavson compositions, plus one, "633 Jesu Faglar", by the then bass-player Matts Hulden. It was not an auspicious start, being mainly rather stiff, self-conscious jazz avantgardeisms interlarded with plaintive and wobbly Gustavson vocals in Finnish (which ain't particularly pretty to listen to, sung rock-style).

Side Two was devoted to a sequence of linked songs by Pembroke with the over-all title of "Henry's...", the hero of the lyrics. This was interesting: highly hummable tunes in a strange off-minor harmonic setting, out of which spun casually loony words in the manner of a mildly psychedelic Spike Milligan.

This geezer obviously had something going for himself.

BY THE ISSUE of the second album, "Tombstone Valentine", it was clear that Pembroke was something of a minor pop genius - and, now that Hulden had left to be replaced by Pohjola, the group was ready to respond to this daft English influence with some daft Finnish influence.

Actually, the influence most readily perceptible at the time was Traffic, in particular Stevie Winwood. Jukka Gustavson was manifestly deeply impressed by the whole Winwood vibe - and, luckily enough, endowed with enough ability to absorb this foreign strain without distorting his own personality.

So confident was he, in fact, that he owned up on the album's second track ("In Gratitude"): "I won't worry, if you think I'm a thief/I won't jeer you, if you call us imitators /Cos I have known all the time what I'm doing/And I promise you that it's all done for Stevie" ... these charmingly ingenuous lyrics being delivered in a voice the very Siamese twin of the Winwood soul-whine. (More Traffic influence crops up on Pembroke's "Captain Supernatural", a barely disguised off-spin of "Forty Thousand Headmen".)

"Tombstone Valentine" was a remarkably self-possessed album, considering the isolation - both musical and technical - in which it was made, and half the credit for the clean production and clever programming must go to that extraordinary wandering loony, Kim Fowley, who'd apparently turned up in Finland a few weeks before recording was scheduled to start, sussed the band's talent, and taken them under his wing.

He shares half the composing credit with Pembroke on "Autograph", a very appealing pop song, and doubtless got off on the brief synthesizer freak-out, "Dance Of The Anthropoids", which occurs on Side One.

Pohjola made his composing debut with the poetically downbeat instrumental "1936 Lost In The Snow", and co-wrote with Pembroke a nutty little opus entitled "Frederick And Bill", which concerns the pugilistic preoccupations of British skin-heads.

But despite such bizarreities (and a jazz hangover of Gustavson's from the first album, called "For America", which is dreadful), "Tombstone Valentine" was basically a pop record and a pretty successful one in Finland. After its release, the band were generally considered the nation's Number Two outfit after Tasavallan Presidentti (and don't go off assuming the Finnish circuit's tiny enough to make such a distinction a foregone conclusion - the Helsinki jazz-scene is highly developed and the general standard of musician in both jazz and rock quite bafflingly excellent).

The band's third album, "Fairyport", was their first step towards independence of influence and of pop constraints. Simultaneously, two solo-albums by group-members emerged: one by Pembroke ("Wicked Ivory" under the typically off-the-wall pseudonym Hot Thumbs O'Riley) which was actually released here earlier this year, and one by Pohjola, called - ahem - "Pihkasilma Kaarnakorva".

This latter was an impressive all-instrumental venture featuring several wind-players (including Tasavallan's Pekka Poyry) and Pohjola himself on a multiplicity of instruments over-dubbed much in the manner of Zappa, whose influence can be felt in the writing and to whom casual homage is paid (dead polite, these Finns) on Pohjola's "Hot Mice", from "Fairyport".

While the others were away, Gustavson got down to his first bout of extended composition and came up with the four-part suite "Joined To Conscience" which covers one-and-a-half of "Fairyport's" four sides.

Though by no means a complete success, "Joined To Conscience" is still a fascinating piece, if only for the extraordinary structure it employs. The lyrics, as printed and sung (in English, courtesy of Matts Hulden's fluent translation), are in free verse, not stanzas. Imagine trying to set to music (say) a D. H. Lawrence poem without dissolving into chaos, and you'll understand Gustavson's achievement.

To handle this complex music, he had to evolve a more sophisticated vocal style, and began to employ a Black "melisma" technique to cope with the awkward line-lengths. This enforced fluidity stopped him sounding like Stevie Winwood's cousin and left him as Stevie Wonder's soul-brother (the resemblance is often quite freaky).

The rest of the album was taken up with a long song co-written by Gustavson, Pohjola, and Pembroke and entitled "Losing Hold" (which touches lightly on flash-rock, but slices any British band in that dubious field into thin strips); a whole string of delightful pop songs by Pembroke (including, notably, the melancholic "Lost Without Trace", the rocking Trafficish "How To Make It Big In Hospital", and the potential chart-shot "Rockin' Ol' Galway"); and a seventeen-minute "live" cut taken from a thunderous jam in the Hamis Club, Helsinki.

Those who possess the Sonet imprint of Jukka Tolonen's first solo-album will be familiar with the four-minute jam which closes the second side; it's clipped out of the same evening's rocking - and, if I tell you that Wigwam kept the best for themselves, you'll know how good the "Fairyport" jam is.

"BEING", the group's newest recording, is a departure from anything even their remarkable diversity has come up with before.

The Gustavson Method is here let loose over most of both sides and the results are extremely weird.

The lyric-sheet consists of large stretches of free verse, interspersed with brief, pointed Pembroke stanzas, and surreal political diatribes.

The tone is militant Socialist ("Working men in all countries let us unite/in vengeance for the time has come to/annihilate the bourgeoisie and suck the/rest up ... towards peace and happ/iness on Earth towards the most/ethical and natural state and system/in the world, comrades!") but the music's light-years from the stuff political rock-groups have employed before.

Stevie-Wonder-on-a-trip meets the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg - and you can almost hear Gustavson's keyboard melt in the resulting heat.

The melody-lines he sings are so long and carry so many unravelling inflections that you could spend weeks trying to sing along without getting it right - and yet, somehow, it's still catchy.

I don't understand it.

There are so many original facets of this album that it's nearly impossible to draw back and say what's happening in general. If you can somehow lay your mitts on a copy, try the long electric piano solo on "Pedagogue" for size. Not to mention the bass-solo on "Prophet", and the way all concerned keep their cool in the climactic, emotional Pembroke number, "Friend From The Fields".

A truly bamboozling record.

IF THERE'S ONE aspect of Wigwam I'd isolate as of significance to anyone interested in two or more of the several roads rock's travelling at present, I'd say this band possess more in-depth talent and diverse creativity than any other I know of working their instrumental format.

World's Top Keyboard Trio (one additional singer, no extra charge) - how does that grab you?

You got to admit it, it's a good selling-line ...

... or would be if the neglect into which Wigwam have been so far cast had not finally swamped their spirit. Latest news is of a two-way split in the ranks - Pembroke and Osterberg departing with the name, Gustavson and Pohjola hanging around to form a new band.

Pity.

There's still the records.