?/?/71 Record review: Love, A Kind of Hate Story (Capitol)

He has that guttural, saw-edged, 60-cigarettes-a-day voice which can really sell a song. But despite choosing a fine selection of pop material from Bee Gees' Gotta Get a Message to You to Rare Bird's Sympathy to Peter Saarstedt's Where Do You Go To My Lovely, the cynical, careworn voice is not quite convincing. (**)

7/4/71 Record review: Love, A Kind of Hate Story (Capitol)

There is such a thing as the grain of a song. Although a great deal can be done with any song, to the extent that two versions are almost unrecognisable as the same root, a singer can place so much stress on his own vocal arrangement that he goes across the grain. Tim Rose balances precariously between inflicting irreparable harm and novel interpretation. He tackles the Bee Gees' I've Gotta Get a Message to You and Peter Saarstedt's Where Do You Go To My Lovely with his characteristic gutsy approach. His arrangements are heavy on instruments, allowing them to complement his voice without drowning it. Particularly striking is the bass line on I've Gotta Get a Message to You and the piano on Dim Light a-Burning. Equally impressive is the lead guitar work on Where Do You Go To My Lovely. There are no credits on the sleeve, but careful attention should give a clue to the musician involved on this track. (A.M.)

26/1/74 Record review: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away (Single, Dawn)

There's something quite manic about the acute urgency in Tim Rose's cracked bluesy rasp, an air of forboding which only helps to add to the desperate atmospheric mood. Working from the same hard manual as Poor Ols Joe's With a Little Help From My Friends, El Rose lets it bleed profusely while the ponderous Spooky Toothed rearguard action supplied by Gary Wright doesn't let up for one moment. Whether it becomes the hit it deserves or sinks with all hands onboard, this record must be seriously regarded as one of the few definitive Beatles interpretations.

26/1/74 Record review: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away (Single, Dawn)

Yes, the old Lennon-McCartney opus, and it is the old Tim Rose, still plodding along, world-weary as ever, with all the troubles of the planet on his shoulders. Crossed in love again. What would he do if he was happy? I mean he almost succeeds in making Tim Hardin sound like John Denver. Quite a powerful performance, with a vigorous production by Gary Wright. There's yet another version of If I Were a Carpenter on the B side, a song which has been recorded by almost everyone but Black Sabbath.

10/7/74 Cutting: Tim Rose Hides Away

Tim Rose, now resident in Britain, is to release his first album in two years on November 8. Produced by Gary Wright and entitled Tim Rose, the album release coincides with his performing selected dates around the country in November and December. A single, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, has been released from the album.

21/7/74 Record review: Tim Rose (Dawn/Playboy)

In 1968-69, CBS was the label - it was the era of "underground", The Rock Machine, and other, now half-forgotten flights of fancy, with albums from Laura Nyro, Electric Flag, Taj Mahal, Al Kooper, S & G, Big Brother, Flock, P G & E, Chicago, etc.

Among those I still treasure is Tim Rose's Through Rose Coloured Glasses, a collection of mainly original songs, sung in a voice that sounded as if it had come up through a cheese grater instead of a throat. So it was with some expectation that I donned the headset and zeroed into the first track, which proved to be It Takes a Little longer, a kind of sing-along single affair that you can forget if you want to.

The serious stuff starts with You Can't Keep Me, featuring Rose in Morning Dew mood, just acoustic guitar and those world-worn tonsils wrapped around the kind of goodbye song you shouldn't play if you're feeling completely brought down.

Then, there's the flailing, Cocker-like Hide Your Love Away and, best of all, an atmospheric If I Were a Carpenter on which the backup band - Gary Wright (keyboards), Archie Leggett (bass), Mick Jones (guitar) - really gel, though drummer Bryson Graham is inclined to be over-busy.

Of the rest, I have a preference for Crying Shame, a Wright original that sounds as if it might have been written for Jagger to stomp around and Goin' Down in Hollywood, a kind of rocker's eye view of Dory Previn's Mary C Brown.

A good enough album, then, recorded originally - believe it or not - for Hugh Hefner's Playboy label. If Pye had provided a free Bunny with each copy, I might have waxed even more enthusiastic! (Fred Dellar)

18/5/75 Record review: The Musician/7:30 Song (Single, Atlantic K 10667)

Nice to hear the beautifully broken voice of the Morning Dew man back again after a long lay-off. Song ain't that strong, though.

18/5/75 Record review: The Musician (Single, Atlantic)

Morning Dew still hangs over the shoulders of Tim Rose, who offers a punchy ballad that grows on you after a few plays, but doesn't really cut much ice as a potential single hit. His throaty voice skirts over a full production with some tasteful acoustic guitar holding the track together, but there's no discernable hook to catch the ear of the chart.

18/5/75 Record review: The Musician (Atlantic)

Tim Rose's career has not been remarkable for its consistency. He's best remembered, of course, for two songs popularised during the latter half of the last decade - Morning Dew and Come Away Melinda. Nothing since has been associated so strongly with him. This new collection brings little to the meandering course of his career. Its unevenness must, in part, be attributed to the fact that it was recorded in four different studios by three producers (Jonathon Rowlands, Hugh Murphy and Rose himself, who handled the production of Neil Young's Old Man). The presence of a nucleus of proficient musicians - including Tommy Eyre (keyboards), Ray Martinez (guitar), Dave Charles (drums), B J Cole (steel guitar) and either Paul Cobbald or Roger Sutton (bass) - ensures that the album at least stands up.

But there is a fundamental lack of cohesion, stemming both from the uncertainty of the production and the unsuitability of much of the material. There are four original compositions here, all of which are fairly attractive - though only The Day I Spent With You is at all memorable - and adequately performed. The remaining six tracks offer no consolation at all. Bobby Charles' Small Town Talk is given in indifferent, almost lethargic reading and Young's Old man is curiously produced, with too much emphasis on Cobbald's fuzz bass. The title track is rescued by some spirited guitar from Martinez and a powerful but restrained vocal from Rose. That the second side, essentially a suite of songs devoted to the well-worn theme of estranged lovers, is at all successful is a tribute to Rose's ability to invest the most lightweight material (John D Bryant's Now You're a Lady, for instance) with an unexpected degree of emotion. Tim Moore's Second Avenue, with some excellent guitar from Andy Summers, is another example of this quality and is, perhaps, the album's outstanding track. That even this should pall after more than three or four plays is, however, a sad indication of the overall standard of a rather poor record.

20/7/77 Cutting: Q & A

What has happened to Tim Rose? He was such a promising artist with Morning Dew and Come Away Melinda but seems to have disappeared - Andrew Bevan, Leicester.

He spent two years in exile thinking about music and deciding which way he wanted to put himself across. Towards the end of 1973, he felt ready to record again and was looking for the right producer when he met Gary Wright on a trip to Europe. They got on well and began to sift through old and new material. Tim invited Gary to produce an album and this was made with musicians from Spooky Tooth at the Olympic Studio in London. The result is Tim Rose on Pye, described as "an album that reflects the gut-bucket rock singer rather than a heavy folkie."

1/10/86 Cutting:

Would you buy stocks and securities from this man, assuming you'd even consider buying them from anyone in the first place? It may seem unlikely, but Wall Street can be a strange place it seems. Remember that three weeks ago, Thrills lamented the absence from the recording scene of one Tim Rose, whose 1967 classic Hey Joe has recently been covered by Nick Cave on the Kicking Against The Pricks LP? Well, David Rubinson - producer of such Rose petals as Morning Dew and the aforementioned track - writes from San Francisco to report that the not-so-tiny Tim is very much alive and well, selling as a broker on the New York market. Quite a worldly pursuit for a one-time student priest and leading light in the singer-songwriter galaxy of the late 60s. (Burke and Hare)

16/11/96 Gig review: Half Moon, Putney

"Hardin? Buckley? ... Oh, Tim Rose! Isn't he dead?" The singer, inextricably linked with a dim distant Greenwich Village scene, humbly pokes fun at himself with the TV company so keen to tell his story. A camera eagerly follows his every move around the venue. They've got the right guy, sure enough, and Tim Rose is genuinely touched by the interest in his first UK show in 20 years. He's giving it another shot after years lost to Wall Street and Desolation Row.

With a one-off rasp teetering between warmth and aggression, Rose lends the gentlest song an edge, the harshest a certain sensitivity. Nick Cave ambles on for Long Time Man and later Hey Joe and even the Bad Seed knows he's in the presence of the original Murder Balladeer here. Hey Joe, written as a duet but rarely awarded that treatment,, breathes new life with Cave questioning and Rose as confessor. When Rose, kept company throughout by the fellow acoustic guitar of Dave Clarke, previews a tune about the protagonist happily kept by his wealthy woman, any ideas that age has mellowed him are cast away.

This looming figure - black suit, red handkerchief, tinted shades, long-slicked grey hair and winning smile - takes a third of his set from a 1967 LP. He's hard to equate with the cigar-crunching dude on its sleeve, but that voice is mercifully the same. The post-nuclear Come Away Melinda is aired twice out of necessity, and received rapturously both times, but Morning Dew is the highlight. Stripped down, it retains all its power, a hell of a fine thing for anyone to hang a reputation on.

Verdict? Definitely not dead. (James Robert)

2003 CD Review: Snowed In

Tim Rose's surly baritone was a suitably scourging late-'60s presence on apocalyptic protest songs such as Come Away Melinda and the classic Morning Dew, but there were fewer opportunities for prophets of doom in the hedonistic '70s, and he soon slipped from view.

Cover versions by Nick Cave and Robert Plant revived interest decades later, and Rose made a return to performance in the mid-'90s, recording three more albums before finally succumbing to cancer in 2002, leaving behind the material that comprises Snowed In, a collection of murder ballads (Hanging Tree, Down In The Valley and a re-recorded Long Time Man), loser's laments (I Need Saving, So Much To Lose) and reflections on life's vicissitudes (Come What May), some co-written with producer Colin Winston-Fletcher.

Best of all is Winston-Fletcher's title track, an atmospheric monologue about enforced solitude set to evocative sheets of synthesiser, which makes good use of the grizzled, weather-beaten tones that had secured Rose voiceover work on '80s commercials. An intriguing new departure, it was sadly a style discovered too late to affect his career. (Uncut)