In 1971, Uriah Heep released their second album, "Salisbury", a title taken from the English city of Salisbury Plain. This area is surrounded by vast plains where the British Army maintains a large military training range for tanks, hence the album's title and its iconic cover featuring a British-made Chieftain tank.
For this second album, the band hired a new drummer, Keith Baker, who replaced Ollie Olsson. The rest of the band remained the same: David Byron, Mick Box, Ken Hensley, and Paul Newton.
"Salisbury" was recorded during the final months of 1970 at Lansdowne Studios in London and was produced by Gerry Bron.
Composed of six tracks, "Salisbury" represents a natural and defined progression from its predecessor, "Very 'Eavy, Very Umble", with a greater emphasis on melody and a refinement of their progressive hard rock sound. This was partly due to the fact that their keyboardist, Ken Hensley, a conservatory-trained musician with a distinctly classical background, played a more prominent role in the songwriting process, a factor that would become dominant on the band's future albums. With this shift, the group tempered their heavy, dark hard rock sound and worked on refining the complexity of progressive rock within the heavy rock genre. Although the standout track is the 16-minute suite "Salisbury", it unfairly overshadows the other five tracks. "Salisbury" also features a 26-piece orchestra, revealing the band's latent progressive tendencies on this album. On the other hand, the remaining songs showcase the band's eclectic, early sound, beginning with the frenetic "High Priestess", the ethereal ballad "The Park", the catchy "Lady In Black", the heavy hard rock track "Time To Live", and the bluesy "Simon The Bullet Freak".
“Salisbury” would be Uriah Heep’s greatest progressive effort along with the later “Look At Yourself”, “Demons and Wizards” and “The Magician’s Birthday”, completing with all of them an anthological quadrilogy of the best progressive rock.
