The Nice biography
The Nice were an English progressive rock band from the 1960s, known for their blend of rock, jazz and classical music. Their debut album, The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack was released in 1967 to immediate acclaim. It is often considered the first progressive rock album. The Nice are also a forerunner of the much more widely known Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
The Nice consisted initially of keyboardist Keith Emerson, bassist/vocalist Lee Jackson, drummer Brian Davison, and guitarist David O'List, more commonly known as "Davy". The band took their name from Steve Marriott's slang term for being high, a term he used in the song "Here Come the Nice". Marriott originally wanted to give the name to a band he was producing, called The Little People. Andrew Loog Oldham took it upon himself to rename The Little People Apostolic Intervention, and dubbed the Emerson, Jackson, Davison, O'List group "The Nice". Emerson's autobiography Pictures of an Exhibitionist suggests that the name originated with a suggestion from P. P. Arnold. The reference to "being high" is not mentioned, instead a routine by hipster/comic Lord Buckley is quoted.
History
The band was formed in October 1967 by Andrew Loog Oldham with soul singer P. P. Arnold, The first album by The Nice was recorded throughout the autumn of 1967, and in October of that year they recorded their first session for John Peel's
Top Gear. Early work tended toward the psychedelic but more ambitious elements soon came to the fore. The classical and jazz influences manifested themselves both in short quotes from Janacek (Sinfonietta) and in more elaborate renderings of Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" which The Nice called simply "Rondo", changing the meter from the original 9/8 to 4/4 in the process.
For their second single, The Nice created an arrangement of Leonard Bernstein's "America" which Emerson described as the first ever instrumental protest song. It not only uses the Bernstein piece (from West Side Story) but also includes fragments of Dvořák's New World Symphony. The single concludes with a child (who, according to Emerson's biography, is P. P. Arnold's three-year old son) speaking the lines "America is pregnant with promise and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable." The new arrangement was released under the title "America (Second Amendment)" as a pointed reference to the US Bill of Rights provision for the bearing of arms. In July 1968, the British music magazine, NME, reported that the band had asked their record label, Immediate Records, to withdraw a controversial poster advertising the single. It pictured the group members with small boys on their knees, with superimposed images of the faces of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King on the children's heads. The band's spokesperson said "Several record stores have refused to stock our current single .... the Nice feel if the posters are issued in America they will do considerable harm".
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