“What happened was that one of our crew was a keen horticulturist and lived in Cricklewood, North London. In the large back garden at his parents’ house, our crewman cultivated some green plants that grew incredibly high. Apparently, the seeds from these plants, when dried, crushed, and added to roll-ups or used in baking, have fantastic hallucinatory properties”. Drummer Ric Lee, in the 2002 liner notes for Ten Years After’s fourth studio album, explained where the name Cricklewood Green came from. It followed their third studio album, Ssssh, released in 1969.
By 1970, Ten Years After were on a very busy schedule, following the success they achieved at Woodstock a year earlier, including Alvin Lee’s staggering, explosive performance of ‘I’m Going Home’ before a mind-blown audience. ‘Love Like a Man’ was also a Top 10 UK single as the Woodstock movie was released in cinemas.
Looking at the body of work Ten Years After and the late, great Alvin Lee created, you can hear a blues-rock band adding extra color and pushing forward with real purpose. Originally released on the Deram label, Cricklewood Green isn’t just a powerful blues-rock album; as Nigel Williamson described it in the 2026 liner notes, it is the band’s “head album”.
This 2-CD set includes both the original album and a newly remixed live recording by Charlie Russell of Ten Years After’s second set at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on February 27, 1970. When you listen to Cricklewood Green, you hear the band drawing not only from British rock royalty, but also from boogie-woogie, swing, Chess-style textures, and progressive arrangements.
Recorded at the famous Olympic Studios for ten days, the album rewards close listening. There’s the boogie-woogie swing behind ‘Me and My Baby’, with its 12-bar shuffle, killer improvisational piano textures, and Lee channeling B.B. King while moving into jazz-like phrasing that recalls Wes Montgomery.
Listening to the seven-minute roar of ‘Love Like a Man’ immediately brings to mind Jethro Tull’s Stand Up period, as Alvin leans into the band’s bluesier roots, continuing where Ian Anderson had left off on ‘A New Day Yesterday’. It also has a prog-rock vibration, with its psychedelic, kaleidoscopic feel and organ, drums, bass, and guitars pulling you deeper into Alvin’s world.
Chick Churchill lays down incredible organ work that evokes Steppenwolf, Lee delivers spectacular fretwork on guitar, and the band follows in hot pursuit, creating vivid colorus that may surprise listeners who are only familiar with the hit single ‘I’d Love to Change the World’.
You can imagine Grand Funk Railroad listening closely to this album, honouring Alvin “Captain Quick Fingers” Lee’s work and tipping their hat to ‘Walk Like a Man’ from their seventh studio album from 1973 We’re an American Band, with Mark Farner laying down that hard-rock Flint sound and carrying Alvin’s mission forward.
But it’s the spaced-out introduction to ‘Sugar the Road’ that really establishes the band’s distinctive sound: powerful riffs, a revved-up feel, and Lee in full rebellious mode, singing about rejecting the advice he received from teachers at school. Then it’s off into the galloping, country-turned-epic battle of ‘Working on the Road’, driven by Lee’s drumming and Churchill’s propulsive organ work.
‘50,000 Miles Beneath My Brain’ finds the band dipping their toes into prog waters, proving they were more than just a blues-rock group. You can hear elements of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in its composition, before the album returns to its Americana, country-oriented feel with the ragtime atmosphere of ‘Year 3,000 Blues’. Bob Dylan, eat your heart out.
You can hear Lee channeling not only Montgomery but Django Reinhardt in his playing, pushing his guitar work toward a different jazz-informed approach before sending us into space with the ascending, folk-like organ ballad ‘Circles’ and the brutal awakening of impending doom in ‘As the Sun Still Burns Away’.
The live recording is where things get down and dirty. This wasn’t the first time the Fillmore East recordings had been released. They were issued back as a 2-CD set of the complete shows in 2001, but Russell’s mix of the second set puts you right in the room, hearing Ten Years After tear through not just songs from Cricklewood Green, but also material from Stonedhenge, their 1967 self-titled debut, Ssssh, Watt, and Undead.
From the blaring roar of ‘Love Like a Man’ to the band’s heavy assault on Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’, the set is a crowd-pleaser from start to finish. Then comes Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Can’t Keep from Crying’, with its Buffalo Springfield texture and psych-proto-metal edge, before the 11-minute Cream-esque hard-rock shuffle of ‘Steppin’ Out’ and the clapping, rolling charge of ‘I’m Going Home’ bring the Fillmore East to a standstill.
You can hear medleys of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ as Alvin scats, screams, and drives the performance exactly where he wants it to go. If Woodstock was the breakthrough crowd-pleaser, the Fillmore show is the one that turns explosive.
They close with a roaring take of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. Going back to the first disc, there’s the unreleased demo ‘Cricklewood Jam’, built on a Monk-like groove with hints of the Ramsey Lewis Trio and Montgomery-style phrasing.
The other two tracks, the revved-up, organ-driven roar of ‘Warm Sun’ and the psych-garage-rock of ‘To No One’, feel like they could have fit on the Nuggets compilation, with Ten Years After channeling The Who, The Move, and The Creation. How cool can they be? Very, very cool.
All in all, Cricklewood Green deserves far more recognition. It still holds up as one of Ten Years After’s finest achievements, and arguably the album that best captures the band at full stretch: fierce, inventive, and locked into a momentum that never lets up. It’s an album where the blues is stretched, bent, electrified, and pushed into something bigger, stranger, and more ambitious without ever losing its grit. More than just a hard-rock record, it’s a statement of intent from a band firing on all cylinders, with Alvin Lee leading the charge in a way that still sounds thrilling, vital, and loud enough to wake the whole street.
