In 1974, Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who had been more readily associated with the Sunday tea-time chart rundown on Radio 1, showed his true prog colours on his Saturday afternoon show. He played blasts of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus to herald a track by “the very royal ELP”, and then championed Camel’s The Snow Goose, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s 10-minute version of Bob Dylan’s Father Of Night, Father Of Day from Solar Fire, and another mini-epic: Mother Russia by Renaissance, from their album A Turn Of The Cards that had been released that May.
The song, written by guitarist Michael Dunford and lyricist Betty Thatcher, was based on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. As the group’s singer Annie Haslam says, with that sort of subject matter “it’s going to be a big song”, and the drama was accentuated by keyboard player John Tout quoting The Bells Of Moscow by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
