Before Elaine Paige, before Patti LuPone, there was Julie Covington.  The singer/actress was the first to sing the role of Evita in the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical, introducing “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” on the 1976 concept album and scoring a No. 1 single in the U.K. the following year with the song.  Musical theatre aficionados might also know Covington from her roles in Godspell and Guys and Dolls or even another concept album, War of the Worlds.  But Covington also recorded some enthralling pop music, including an elaborately-produced collection in 1971 called The Beautiful Changes.  The album has been unavailable in the CD format since a 1999 reissue went out of print, but the Cherry Tree label has revived and resuscitated this captivating piece of early-seventies baroque pop.

The opening lyric of the original LP went, “With just a word, a single sign of care, with just a touch, I could have been beguiled/But circumstances never smiled, because the magic wasn’t there.”  The magic actually was there for Covington, though, from a very young age.  Covington found her niche on the stage while attending school, and as early as 1966 met a young musical director named Pete Atkin, who would play a pivotal role in The Beautiful Changes.  So would Clive James, a director who worked with Covington in a 1968 production of Strictly for Kicks.  After performing everything from Shakespeare to Kurt Weill in various venues around the United Kingdom, Covington made a name for herself as both an actress and a singer.  She sang with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and on David Frost’s television program.  In 1971, the same year EMI’s Columbia label would release The Beautiful Changes, Covington starred in the West End production of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell.

For her debut solo album, Covington joined her friends, the team of Atkin and James, as well as producer Don Paul.  Covington had already recorded two privately-pressed LPs of the songwriters’ work, and Paul was taken with her demo of the song “The Magic Wasn’t There.”  Paul negotiated for EMI to release an album of almost entirely Atkin/James compositions sung by Covington, and so The Beautiful Changes was born.  Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, the elaborately-arranged album was designed to show off all sides of the vocalist’s talent.  Though the lyrics are frequently impressionistic, the singer’s emotion brings out their many colors.  Along the way, the album touches on numerous styles.

Hit the jump for more, including track listing and order link!

In her liner notes, Julie Covington recalls that “The Magic Wasn’t There” may have been “part of a plan to write a musical,” and the song’s theatrical roots shine through.  The same goes for “Ice Cream Man,” a piano-driven song with chords that recall the sound of early-seventies musical theater, too; think Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell.  She’s equally at home on the restrained, wistful folk of “If I Had My Time Again” with lovely flute and sitar accompaniment by Lyn Dobson, and most bizarrely, the brassy and bawdy blues of the Porter Grainger composition “He Just Don’t Appeal to Me.”  This competes with “The Original, Original Honky Tonk Night Train Blues” as the most offbeat track on Beautiful Changes!  “Night Train Blues” has an appropriately country feel but a tongue-twisting, rapid-fire lyric.  Covington masters it, perhaps calling on her experience with vocalese group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

The touching “Winter Kept Us Warm” is just one of the songs that deserved a wider airing; another is “Queen of Lights,” one of the album’s up-tempo offerings.  The lyric is virtually impenetrable (“Each ear will be a tilting dish/For listening to the light draw near/From stars retreating year by year/That whisper, ‘You shan’t have your wish’”) but the song and arrangement, with electric guitars alongside a string section, make it work.  At their best, the album’s lyrics can be conversational and direct as in the reflective “The Standards of Today”: “By all the standards of today/Like easy come and easy go and play it cool and keep it gay/We were in love the only way free can be/But do you realize what you meant to me?”

The enclosed 16-page booklet includes personal reminisces from Covington, Pete Atkin, Don Paul and orchestral arranger Don Fraser, as well as photographs and full lyrics.  Nick Robbins has remastered at Sound Mastering, and the stereo spread of the original mix is still effective.  The new edition preserves the original album sequence; two demos appended for the 1999 CD edition on See for Miles Records have been dropped.  The Beautiful Changes is available now from the Cherry Red label Cherry Tree Records and can be ordered below!

Julie Covington, The Beautiful Changes (EMI Columbia SCX 6466, 1971 – reissued Cherry Tree CRTREE011, 2012)

1. The Magic Wasn’t There
2. Ice Cream Man
3. If I Had My Time Again
4. He Just Don’t Appeal to Me
5. Winter Kept Us Warm
6. The Beautiful Changes
7. Queen of Lights
8. For Instance
9. The Standards of Today
10. The Original, Original Honky Tonk Night Train Blues
11. Don’t Bother Me Now
12. Friendly Island Song
13. My Silks and Fine Array