FRUGIVORES

Tymon and his then wife musician/artist Helen Cherry formed a musical duo called Frugivores in the mid 1980's. In 1987, they released the one full-length album, New Age Songs and a sole 7" single, Moth Into The Flame. The album was released by Coda Records on vinyl and CD in 1987. It features 11 original Tymon (credited on the LP as Tymon Murray) songs, including an updated version of his early "Lose This Skin" b-side, "Indestructible". Helen is the lead vocalist on the majority of the album, with Tymon singing solo on “Phantom Fear”, “The Optimist”, and dueting on another four tracks with Helen. The track, “Edge of My Heart” also appears the 1987 Coda Records compilation, First Impressions.

The Coda record label was a subsidiary of the successful English independent record label Beggars Banquet from 1986 to 1992. Nick Austin, one of the company's directors until 1992, suggested the idea after returning from America and being excited by an emerging new music genre called "New Age". Coda served as an early UK outlet for the New Age genre and appears to have lasted for six or seven years with roughly twenty album releases, some of the later ones on CD. Artists on the label included Claire Hamill, Rick Wakeman, Eddie Hardin, and others. Many of the releases on the label were under the Landscape Series, signifying their musically sedate contents, but the Frugivores were part of the New Lyricist Series.

In 1987, Nick Austin launched The Landscape Channel, and later the programme, Art of Landscape as an offshoot of his Coda record label. Art of Landscape featured "New Age" and classical pieces over a combination of specially shot video and old BBC wildlife footage obtained for a song, plus the occasional music video. Over the intervening decade or two, The Landscape Channel proved to be quite a successful international satellite-distributed premium channel, available for some time in mainland Europe and now once again in the UK. For more information regarding The Landscape Channel, visit: www.landscapetv.com

Describing the album, fan John Henderson says: "It's a bit bewildering to imagine how the Frugivores album came about, but essentially it's a very pastoral sounding album which features Tymon and significant other Helen Cherry singing in roughly equal doses. Helen sounds quite a lot like Tymon in certain ways - she's got a wonderful kind of quiver in her voice and has a deep, stately tone. The album has a tone not terribly far removed from the track "Sirens" on "Battle Of Wills" - wistful and melancholy."