The Magic Circle

For British rock bands in the early 1970s, a sneering, patronising review in US magazine Rolling Stone was considered something of a badge of honour. In it, Led Zeppelin’s self-titled debut album was dismissed as “dull”, “redundant” and “prissy”. The “clubfooted” riffs on Deep Purple In Rock were seen as evidence that these “quiet nonentities” lacked “both expertise and intuition”. Black Sabbath’s first album was labelled “inane”, “wooden” and “plodding”, the band that became the most influential in the history of heavy metal written off as “Just like Cream! But worse.” Rolling Stone’s most scathing notice, however, was about Uriah Heep’s debut album, 1970’s Very’Eavy, Very’Umble: “If this group makes it,” wrote one Melissa Mills, “I’ll have to commit suicide.”

Today Uriah Heep guitarist Mick Box can afford to look back and laugh. A candidate for the most chipper man in rock’n’roll, the 73-year-old cheerfully admits that he’s “never been one to listen to critics too much”. “It’s difficult to care about criticism about what your band is lacking when you’re being called back on stage for five encores every night,” he points out with a hearty chuckle.

Inspired by a love of The Kinks, the Small Faces, The Who and Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Walthamstowborn Box formed his first band, The Stalkers, in the mid-60s while still a teenager. By the time Bobby Moore hoisted the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft at Wembley Stadium on the evening of July 30, 1966 when England won the World Cup, The Stalkers had become Spice. At some point late in 1969 the band caught the attention of influential manager/producer/publisher Gerry Bron. It was at Bron’s insistence that the youngsters changed their name once more, to Uriah Heep, an’umble, obsequious character in Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel . Bron then installed the group in Hanwell Community Centre in West London to assemble songs for album.