Quintessence

Track	Album
Midnight Mode	In Blissful Company
Notting Hill Gate	In Blissful Company
Giants	In Blissful Company
High On Mount Kailash	Quintessence
Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Gauranga	Quintessence
The Seer	Dive Deep
Epitaph For Tomorrow	Dive Deep
Cosmic Surfer	Self
Wonders Of The Universe	Self
Sea Of Bliss	YouTube

In a fish-and-chip shop basement in Ladbroke Grove, sometime in 1968, six young men from six different countries set about doing something nobody in British rock had quite attempted: building a band around the sustained drone of Indian classical music rather than the chord changes of Western pop. Phil “Shiva” Jones (Australia) on vocals, Ron “Raja Ram” Rothfield (Australia) on flute, Richard “Shambhu Babaji” Vaughan (America) on bass, Jeremy “Jake” Milton (Canada) on drums, Allan Mostert (Mauritius) on lead guitar, and Dave “Maha Dev” Codling (Leeds) on rhythm guitar. Jimi Hendrix had a flat one street over. Pink Floyd were rehearsing somewhere nearby. The neighbourhood smelled, by all accounts, permanently of patchouli and the particular optimism of people who are quite certain they are about to change the world.

For a while, they were not wrong to think it. Within weeks of forming, Chris Blackwell and Muff Winwood walked into a Quintessence rehearsal with a chequebook and a promise of complete artistic freedom, and Island Records had itself a band that played fifteen-minute ragas built on the alap-jor-jhala structure of Indian classical music, with a frontman who had taken a Sanskrit name from his guru and meant every syllable of it. By 1971 they had sold out the Royal Albert Hall, played both of the first two Glastonbury Festivals, performed to 100,000 people at the Holland Pop Festival, and shared bills with Pink Floyd, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Santana and Black Sabbath. Jimmy Page came to their shows. Pete Townshend came to their shows. Jim Morrison, by way of Doors producer Paul Rothchild, apparently owned every record they made.

And then, with a U.S. tour booked to launch at Carnegie Hall in 1972, the band turned it down, holding out for a better deal. Island dropped them in disappointment. Months later the original lineup dissolved when Raja Ram, who held licence control, let go both the singer and the co-songwriter who had defined the band’s sound. It is one of rock’s tidier ironies that a band named for the fifth element, the essence beyond earth, air, fire and water, could not survive the most ordinary element of all.

What got left behind, across three studio albums for Island and a fourth for RCA, was some of the most fully committed East-West fusion British rock ever produced — long-form, trance-inducing, entirely sincere, and still, fifty-odd years on, sounding like almost nothing else from the period. Here are ten places to start.

1. Midnight Mode (In Blissful Company, Island Records, 1969)

The drone at its most hypnotic, and the clearest statement of what this band was actually for. Producer John Barham — who would go on to bring the same Eastern sensibility to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass — slows the tambura down almost imperceptibly partway through, so the whole track seems to sink half a register without anyone quite noticing it happen. This is the sound of a band working out, in real time, that a single sustained tone could do something a chord change never could.

2. Notting Hill Gate (In Blissful Company, Island Records, 1969)

The most accessible thing on the debut, and a useful entry point for anyone whose idea of “Indian-influenced British rock” begins and ends with a sitar solo bolted onto an otherwise conventional pop song. This one earns its influences honestly. It works equally well as a three-minute single and as a far longer meditation, depending entirely on the listener’s patience and the state of mind they bring to it. Here’s an updated version of Notting Hill Gate by Shiva Jones:

3. Giants (In Blissful Company, Island Records, 1969)

The album’s extended improvisation, following the alap-jor-jhala arc more or less to the letter: a slow, unmetered opening statement, a gradual introduction of pulse, and a climbing, increasingly urgent jhala that arrives at its peak with a feeling of inevitability rather than engineering. Listen for the moment the band slides into the jor section without any announcement at all. They simply arrive there, the way a tide arrives.

4. High On Mount Kailash (Quintessence, Island Records, July 1970)

The breakthrough album’s title-establishing opener and the song that took the band to UK No. 22, a genuinely remarkable chart placing for a track built on devotional repetition rather than verse-chorus structure. By this point the band had stopped sounding like an experiment and started sounding like a fully formed idiom of their own.

5. Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Gauranga (Quintessence, Island Records, July 1970)

Named for the fifteenth-century Bengali saint Sri Chaitanya, whose ecstatic devotional practice helped carry the Hare Krishna mantra to the wider world, this is Quintessence at their most directly liturgical — chant as rock song, rock song as chant, the two genuinely indistinguishable by the song’s end. It shouldn’t work as well on a turntable in a London bedsit as it apparently did. It does anyway.

6. The Seer (Dive Deep, Island Records, 1971)

The final Island album found the band pushing the trance-rock arrangements further out than ever, and this is the most expansive thing on it: long, patient, unhurried, content to let a single idea breathe for as long as it needs to. By Dive Deep, Quintessence had largely stopped trying to convince anyone of anything. They were simply doing the thing they did, at length, and trusting the audience to come along.

7. Epitaph For Tomorrow (Dive Deep, Island Records, 1971)

A more troubled, more urgent piece than most of the Dive Deep material, and a reminder that for all the band’s reputation as gentle cosmic mystics, there was genuine intensity underneath the incense. The contrast between this and the more becalmed tracks elsewhere on the album says a good deal about the range the band had quietly built by 1971.

8. Cosmic Surfer (Self, RCA, May 1972)

The first and only album recorded away from Island, made under real pressure as the original lineup’s internal tensions reached their breaking point — and somehow the best-known song the band ever produced. Leaner than the Barham-produced work, more direct, less interested in orchestral colour and more interested in simply landing the song. It would be revived decades later on the Beauvert collaborations and remains the one Quintessence track a casual listener is most likely to already half-know.

9. Wonders Of The Universe (Self, RCA, May 1972)

Recorded as the band was visibly coming apart, this one carries an ambition that the circumstances of its making do nothing to diminish. There’s a particular kind of record that sounds like a band fighting to hold a vision together against everything working against it, and this is one of those records. Self is not the polished triumph the Island albums were, and that is rather the point of it.

10. Sea Of Bliss (Shiva Phil Jones YouTube channel, 2024–present)

Not a Quintessence track in any technical sense, but the place this list has to end, because it is the same idea, fifty-five years and one continent later. Shiva, now well into his seventies, performing spoken word over a sustained Indian tampura drone – the identical instinct that drove Midnight Mode in 1969, now stripped down to voice and breath and one note, held. The short-form Sea of Bliss and Stanzas of Nirvana series have between them passed two million views. The instrument changed. The note didn’t.

THE LINEUP
Phil “Shiva” Jones — lead vocals, keyboards
Ron “Raja Ram” Rothfield — flute
Richard “Shambhu Babaji” Vaughan — bass
Jeremy “Jake” Milton — drums
Allan Mostert — lead guitar
Dave “Maha Dev” Codling — rhythm guitar

THE ALBUMS
In Blissful Company (Island, 1969)
Quintessence (Island, 1970) — UK No. 22
Dive Deep (Island, 1971) — UK No. 43
Self (RCA, 1972)

Quintessence’s discography divides cleanly into the John Barham-produced Island years — orchestral, patient, fully given over to the alap-jor-jhala logic of Indian classical structure — and the single, leaner RCA album made as the band was already starting to come apart. Both eras have their case to make. The Island records are the purer expression of the band’s original idea; Self is the sound of that idea under real pressure, which is its own kind of interesting.

There is an obvious final question hanging over any account of this band, and it is worth asking plainly: what happens to a group that plays the Royal Albert Hall, gets covered by ten different music papers in a single year, and counts Jim Morrison among its admirers, and then turns down Carnegie Hall? Quintessence never really got the chance to find out what came after that decision, because six months later there was no more Quintessence to find out with. What they left behind across four records and three short years stands on its own regardless — a genuinely odd, genuinely sincere attempt to build a rock band out of meditation rather than rebellion, at a moment when almost everyone else in the room was reaching for the opposite.

The photos on this page are from Phil “Shiva” Jones’ private collection and featured here with permission.

“This gives a glimpse into what Quintessence was like live.  Basically, on fire! Spacey chords under the flute solo, and a strange flute sound transitioning into the song. Then during the song, I belted out a Hammond organ leading into a build up section where my heavy vocals come in. It’s one of my favourite Quintessence songs. It’s on the ‘Dive Deep’ album.” Shiva Jones

“This is one of my favorite versions of Orangatango. There are several versions floating around but this one is the closest to how I wrote it. The Monkey Song was the original title. This was recorded in L.A. back in 1997 and hadn’t been heard in 27 years due to problems with the record label.” Shiva Jones

‘Cosmic Surfer’ by Philip F. Marks

Quintessence Wikipedia Page

Quintessence website (with photos)

Phil “Shiva” Jones discography

‘After Quintessence – The Complete Kala Recordings 1973’

A brief glimpse of Quintessence at the first Glastonbury Festival 1970

Phil Jones and the Unknown Blues

The Phil Jones Band (c1975) live on Sydney radio station 2JJ and remastered in 2025. Phil Shiva Jones (lead vocals), Stephen Housden (lead guitar), Mal Wakeford (drums), John Kemp (rhythm guitar), Funky Phil Lawson (bass). Stephen and Mal were both in the Little River Band.

Read more about our contributor, Philip F. Marks, author, musician, visual artist, here.

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