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Various Artists: The Butterfly Ball (DVD)

The Butterfly Ball is a charming if somewhat dated musical film from 1975. Based on a 1973 children's book published by Jonathan Cape Ltd. called "The Butterfly Ball and Grasshopper's Feast", which contained a collection of poems by William Plomer that were illustrated by Alan Aldridge, the idea for the film was instigated by Roger Glover (who had just left Deep Purple) and producer/director Tony Klinger (The Kids Are Alright). The live production was staged and filmed at London's Royal Albert Hall, and featured a large cast of guest musicians and dancers, as well as Vincent Price as narrator. Glover was able to get most of the musicians who participated in the studio recordings of this project to be featured in the stage act (no Ronnie James Dio unfortunately), among them Twiggy, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, David Coverdale, Jon Lord, John Lawton, Mickey Lee Soule, Tony Ashton, Eddie Jobson, and many others.

Again, while much of the costumes and settings are rather cheesey and dated, there are some good performances here, especially from the band itself, which consisted of Jobson on soaring violin, drummer Les Binks (Judas Priest), bassist Mo Foster (Jeff Beck), guitarist Ray Fenwick (Gillan), and Lord on Hammond, among others including horns and various keyboards. The music overall is a mix of pop, soul, funk, and hard rock, with a little psychedelic thrown in for good measure. The most impressive vocal performances have to be John Lawton (Uriah Heep/Lucifer's Friend), Glenn Hughes, and Ian Gillan, although Gillan and even David Coverdale are fairly subdued for the most part. What's distracting is that there are many sequences of ballet, battle, and scenes of actors in animal costumes edited into the concert footage, so in most cases you can't watch whole songs without something unusual popping upon your screen. Legend has it that this basically ruined the film upon its release, as audiences were more interested in seeing the musical performances and not all the other nonsense, which really isn't well done. There's a great extended jam session called "Watch Out for the Bat" which sees everyone out on stage together (Jobson literally SMOKES here on violin!) which is probably worth buying the DVD for.

So, if you are a fan of any of these artists, despite the lackluster non-musical portions of this film, The Butterfly Ball is still a worthwhile purchase.

Added: May 4th 2006
Reviewer: Pete Pardo
Score:
Related Link: Music Video Distributors
Hits: 2403
Language: english

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