Fire and Water is the third studio album by English rock group Free. Unlike their previous albums Tons of Sobs and Free it was a huge success, reaching #2 in the UK charts and #17 in the American, making it the most successful Free album. This is largely due to the album containing the hit single "All Right Now" which they later played to a crowd of over 600,000 people at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival, which generated them huge publicity. To this date it is the only Free album to have seen a C...
Fire and Water is the third studio album by English rock group Free. Unlike their previous albums Tons of Sobs and Free it was a huge success, reaching #2 in the UK charts and #17 in the American, making it the most successful Free album. This is largely due to the album containing the hit single "All Right Now" which they later played to a crowd of over 600,000 people at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival, which generated them huge publicity. To this date it is the only Free album to have seen a CD reissue in America.
Recording
The album carried on the Fraser/Rodgers writing partnership that characterized the bulk of the Free canon, with five of the seven tracks being credited to them. The album was made very much with the intention of gaining the band a hit single: the band only had one song ("The Hunter" from Tons of Sobs) that would generate the ecstatic reaction they desired from an audience and they badly needed another. This commercialized ethos is immediately obvious: many of the tracks seem to be intended to be listened to individually rather than as a coherent whole and as such the relationship between the songs is less distinct than on the band's previous albums. The tracks are arranged in a fairly basic form of alternating fast songs with slow ones.
Like their previous album there is little that could be called hard rock such as their debut album had contained, with the album continuing the fairly lightweight soulful sound of their previous album. There are also no blues songs, that being a genre where the band had their roots. The production is considerably less polished than their previous album as Fire and Water had been produced by the band themselves, a fact that Island Records boss (and the producer of the last album) Chris Blackwell later regretted.
Reception
The album and single were both massive successes, catapulting the band to near-iconic status. Fees for live shows rose to £1000 (a considerable amount in 1970) and they began to be featured in mainstream music magazines. Commercial success brought with it accusations of "selling-out" which the purist Kossoff took badly: he took a defensive stance in one interview, stating: "Obviously 'All Right Now' is part of us, but it's a frivolous part, it isn't what we want to be remembered by. We're generally more serious" (quoted in Phil Sutcliffe's album liner notes).
Nevertheless, "All Right Now" is indeed what the band is remembered by; especially since it was remixed by Bob Clearmountain and re-released in February 1991, being discovered by a new generation of fans. Since then, it has frequently appeared on generic budget rock compilation albums. Free are somewhat regarded as a one-hit wonder in the USA and if it were not for this song it is doubtful how well any more of their catalog would be known.
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