Following his ejection from Henry Cow in 1975, Blegvad had returned to New York City to work in cartoons (most notably as a background scene artist for Peanuts).
This was a dense and detailed song cycle with music by Greaves, lyrics by Blegvad and contributions by Woodstock jazz musicians Carla Bley, Andrew Cyrille and Michael Mantler.
Returning to England in 1982, Blegvad cut the albums The Naked Shakespeare and Knights Like These, both of which featured ex-64 Spoons guitarist Jakko Jakszyk.
Disillusioned, Peter Blegvad returned to New York in 1986 and began collaborating with The Golden Palominos, the art rock band led by ex-Pere Ubu drummer Anton Fier.
Blegvad has reflected “We lacked discipline in those days, or something, I don't know... John and I retired to a Vermont farmhouse one hot summer with the idea of writing an album... and I think I wrote one line in two months!"
Influenced by the time of its recording (and perhaps by Jakszyk's more direct approach as a performer), the music of The Lodge was much more compact and straightforward than that of Henry Cow or Kew.
Others, such as “Not All Fathers” and “Old Man’s Mood”, showed elements of tone poetry mixed in with African and art rock rhythms, piano balladry, chants and chamber chorales.
The Lisa Herman showcase, “Swelling Valley”, was a romantic piano-and-solo-voice performance which had more in common with an Aaron Copland American landscape piece than with the muscular art rock songs elsewhere on the record.
Several songs dealt with the topic of milk, explored from a symbolic or ritualistic perspective and in a manner which Blegvad referred to as a pursuit of its “occult subtext”.
He described these as “meta-phonemes, in which a story is told vertically instead of horizontally.” [4] The Lodge's initial live performances were in May 1987 as a duo/trio of Greaves and Peter Blegvad with Lisa Herman guesting on some songs.
[5] In 1988 the album line-up of The Lodge performed a concert at the Bataclan in Paris minus Herman and Fier, with Gavin Harrison taking over on drums and Lyndon Connah (64 Spoons) as live keyboard player.
Jakszyk went on to work with Tom Robinson, Dizrhythmia, Level 42 and 21st Century Schizoid Band as well as pursuing a solo career (often accompanied by Gavin Harrison).