Uriah Heep – Shady Lady

Uriah Heep taped four songs for The Midnight Special in 1975, and NBC sat on the fourth until January 1976, by which time the band on screen was coming apart.

Uriah Heep taped four songs for NBC’s The Midnight Special in 1975, and three of them reached American television that August. The fourth, Shady Lady, stayed on the shelf for another five months. It finally aired on January 23, 1976, in an episode hosted by Helen Reddy, with Petula Clark, Natalie Cole, C.W. McCall and Ted Neely on the same bill. By then the five musicians on screen were already at work on what would be their last album together, and a promotional clip had become a snapshot of a lineup that would not survive the year.

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Shady Lady is the second track on Return to Fantasy, the band’s eighth studio album, which Bronze released in Britain on June 13, 1975, with Warner Bros. handling the United States. Four members share the writing credit: singer David Byron, guitarist Mick Box, keyboardist Ken Hensley and drummer Lee Kerslake. Gerry Bron produced the sessions, held that spring at Lansdowne and Morgan Studios in London. The album climbed to No.7 on the UK chart and reached No.85 on the Billboard 200.

The record marked a turn back toward the band’s roots. After two albums that played down their gothic side, AllMusic’s Donald A. Guarisco wrote, Return to Fantasy brought the mystical themes back to the front while hitting harder than either of its predecessors. Shady Lady sits squarely in that harder-rocking half of the record, with Hensley’s keyboards and Box’s guitar driving under Byron’s high, theatrical lead.

The trade press noticed the change at the time. Billboard made Return to Fantasy one of its Album Picks in the July 19, 1975, issue, calling it the band’s most varied set yet while noting that their hard-rock trademark was still central, and a week later Record World reported strong early reaction to the record. Decades on, AllMusic’s Donald A. Guarisco heard the album as two halves: a first side that keeps to a “similarly strong hard rock vein” behind the title track, and a second side that drifts into brass, Beach Boys-style harmonies and AOR balladry. Shady Lady is the second song on that first side, with Hensley’s keyboards and Box’s guitar driving under Byron’s high, theatrical lead.

Five months on the shelf

The gap between taping and broadcast changed what the clip shows. When the first three songs from the session, Devil’s Daughter, Return to Fantasy and Prima Donna, aired on August 15, 1975, the album was barely two months old. By the time Shady Lady ran in January 1976, in the late-night slot that followed The Tonight Show, the band was making High and Mighty, recorded between December 1975 and March 1976 and produced by Uriah Heep themselves. It became the last Uriah Heep album with Wetton and the last with Byron, whom the band dismissed later in 1976. Viewers who stayed up for Shady Lady were watching a group already near the end of its most famous run.

Of the five musicians in the clip, only Mick Box is still alive. Byron, Hensley, Kerslake and Wetton have all died, and Box has held the Uriah Heep name together since 1969. That gives an album track that was never a single an unexpected afterlife. Because NBC held it back, the last song from that session is also the last Midnight Special look at the Byron and Wetton lineup at full strength, five musicians who had only one more album left in them together.