The Full Story of Family, the English Rock Band from Leicester, 1966 to 1973

How an English Rock Band Came Out of a Leicester R&B Group

Before Family there were The Farinas, who played the Leicester circuit from 1962 and released two singles, “You’d Better Stop” and “I Like It Like That”. They were a blues band, and by 1966 they had run out of road. The same players regrouped, spent a short period calling themselves The Roaring Sixties, and then took a one-word name on a producer’s suggestion: Kim Fowley thought their clothes made them look like mafiosos, said the word “family”, and it stuck. The family band that came out of that room kept the R&B foundation and started pulling everything else in on top of it.

The first lineup was John “Charlie” Whitney on guitar, sitar and keyboards, Harry Ovenall on drums, Ric Grech on bass, cello and violin, Jim King on saxophone, harmonica and piano, and Roger Chapman singing. That instrument list is the whole story of why this English rock band never sounded like the others: a violin and a saxophone sitting where a second guitar would normally be.

They worked the London clubs - The Marquee, The 100 Club - and did not have to wait long. Within months, producer Jimmy Miller and manager John Gilbert had them a singles deal with Liberty Records. Ovenall left almost immediately: he could see the band drifting from R&B towards psychedelia and he disagreed with how the group was being run. Rob Townsend took the drum stool and kept it for the rest of the band’s life.

Family and the Turn into Progressive Rock

The first single, “Scene Through The Eye of a Lens / Gypsy Woman”, came out in 1967 and went nowhere. Then came a deal with Reprise and, in 1968, Music in a Doll’s House. It reached No. 35, the reviews were excellent, and it is one of the first records anybody described as progressive rock. Chapman brought blues phrasing; Grech and King filled the arrangements with violin, cello, saxophone and harmonica; “See Through Windows” ran long solos, echoing vocals and studio effects through it, and “Mellowing Grey” kept a folk undertone underneath.

Months later they were on the Royal Albert Hall stage, supporting Tim Hardin on a bill with Pink Floyd, The Nice, Soft Machine and The Move. For an English rock band that had released exactly one album, that is a remarkable place to be standing, and it put them among the British rock bands the underground press took seriously from then on. Led Zeppelin were forming at almost the same moment; the two trajectories start in the same place and end nowhere near each other.

The American Tour that Broke Them

Family Entertainment followed in 1969 and reached No. 6, although the band hated how it got there: manager John Gilbert mixed it in a hurry and released it without their consent. They fired him and later re-recorded parts of it. Then came the first American tour, in the spring, and it went wrong in every available direction. Ric Grech left mid-tour to join Blind Faith and was replaced at short notice by John Weider, on the recommendation of the tour manager, Peter Grant. In New York, Chapman’s microphone stand hit the Fillmore East promoter, who took it as deliberate. By the end of the run Chapman’s voice had gone and the band played Canada without him.

Their reputation in North America never recovered. This is the part of the story that puts them with every English rock band that owned Britain and could not cross the Atlantic - and the reason a progressive rock band with seven charting records is still a cult name rather than a household one. Plenty of British rock bands of the period made the same trip and came home with the same result.

Hyde Park, the Isle of Wight and the Peak

Britain kept them. On 5 July 1969 they played the Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park concert - somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people, two days after Brian Jones died, with the Stones themselves admittedly under-rehearsed. Family came out of it with a larger audience than they went in with. The Isle of Wight followed, on a bill with Bob Dylan and The Who. Then Jim King’s drug use forced a change and John “Poli” Palmer came in on keyboards, synthesisers and flute.

The new lineup produced the band’s commercial peak. A Song for Me, released on 23 January 1970 and produced by the band themselves, reached No. 4. They played Kralingen in the Netherlands - the “European Woodstock”, 100,000 people, Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd on the same weekend - and then the Isle of Wight again on 28 August 1970, to an audience of 600,000 to 700,000. It was the biggest festival of its era, bigger than Woodstock, and Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and The Doors played the same five days. Family’s set included “The Weaver’s Answer”, which stayed their signature song for the next four decades. Anyway arrived before the year was out and reached No. 7.

Wetton, Cregan and the Beginning of the End

March 1971 brought Old Songs New Songs, the compilation of remixes and rarities that finally undid Gilbert’s rushed mix. Weider left for Stud and John Wetton replaced him, having just turned King Crimson down to do it. The band played the second Glastonbury and appeared in Nicolas Roeg’s Glastonbury Fayre. Fearless came out that September, reached No. 14 at home and became the first Family record to chart in America, at No. 177.

In 1972 Wetton changed his mind about King Crimson and left; Jim Cregan replaced him. The band supported Elton John across America to audiences who did not want them, morale broke, Palmer left, Tony Ashton arrived, and Bandstand closed the year at No. 15. Chapman and Whitney both later admitted the songwriting had moved towards conventional verse-and-chorus structure by then.

The Last Night in Leicester

It’s Only a Movie was released in 1973 and largely ignored, which is a shame: it is the most cheerful thing they recorded, funky and openly ironic, with Chapman singing about the making of a western. Family played their final concert on 13 October 1973 at the Hawthorn Building of Leicester Polytechnic - seven years and a few hundred yards from where they had started. Six of the eleven players are now gone: Grech in 1990, Ashton in 2001, King in 2012, Wetton in 2017, and both John Weider and John “Poli” Palmer during 2025.

The 2013 Return

In 2012 the band announced one reunion night. Chapman, Palmer, Townsend and Cregan played the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 2 February 2013; the tickets went so fast that they added the evening before, brought in extra musicians and built a tribute to the members who had died into the show. What had been sold as a one-off ran on to Rockin’ the Park later that year and to UK and European dates until 2016.

Every date, chart position and lineup change on this page comes from the published record of the band, linked per album in the discography. Where a fact is not in that record - a per-album label, an instrument for a late-period player - it is left out rather than guessed at.