MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2025

This month sees GERRY COLVIN release Past, Present & Crescent (Crocodile), a mix of, as the title says, old, new and songs from the  2022 Crescent Theatre show by The Gerry Colvin Band (Jerome Davies, Trish Power, Lyndon Webb and Marion Fleetwood) and The Gerry Colvin Big Folk Orchestra. It’s a new one that gets the ball rolling with Click Club Chair, a samba tinged la la la-ing refrain number about meeting wife to be Kathy at the legendary live venue run by Dave Travis, leading into the first recording of the melancholic circular guitar chiming The Forgotten Man, a song about a singer who’s faded from the spotlight which premiered in 2022 at the Kitchen Garden Café. Striking an associated note, another new one, with dobro, twangy guitar break, fiddle and mandolin, I’m A Songwriter Me is a wryly amusing number about the contemporary process,  tackling writer’s block with a dash of plundering musical history   for inspiration and looking for that elusive hook.

Kicking up the tempo, the accordion and fiddle-propelling five-minute A Folk Melody with its musically tumbling narrative of  the genre’s journey is another brand new song as is the breezy shuffling, jazz-tinged Inconsiderate Man with an acoustic solo from Lyndon and typically sharp Colvin lyrics about self-protecting misanthropy.  The final new number, set to a slight marching beat with mandolin trills and cornet, while the word title pun rather stretches grammatical accuracy, War Feats is a clever metaphorical anti-war protest number about a soldier who loses five toes – and comrades - in battle.

One of the oldest songs, dating from the Colvin Quarmby CQV album, the jaunty countrified social commentary  Crumbling Country Stand, about the ordinary working man upon whom the foundations are built, gets a new treatment with the band line but retaining mentions of Ikea,  Sky Sports,  Colonel Gaddaffi and Tony Blair while the final three are all culled from the Crescent Theatre spectacular.  Originally featured on Jazz Tales Of Country Folk, the bitter post-break-up  I Killed A Flower For You Today gets a rework with the  sparse, moody piano and upright bass-anchored arrangement now featuring brass and rounded out with a soulful closing vocal from Jackie Walters (formerly Jackie Clarke of Asia Blue). Finally,   there’s the fingerpicked acoustic love song delicacy of The Ocean and the eight minute plus closing audience-participation rousing   ebb and flow rhythmed Leave A Light In The Window with its brass and strings and big gospel vocals finale with Walters, Jane Pearl and Jennie Williams. This year marking the 30th anniversary of  founding ColvinQuarmby and his first recordings after the demise of Terry & Gerry, while he may be winding down the number of live shows, it’s clear his consummate genius as writer and vocalist remain undiminished, with the intriguingly titled Festina Lente Lives likely on the cards this summer.

Of Black Country roots and now ensconced in Shropshire, Mick Butler aka  SICKY continues to bang out albums that would, in another universe, be staples of the indie charts and feature regularly on mainstream rock shows. His latest is Trouble In Mind, a collection of a dozen tracks that opens with the keyboard hum of Billy Cousins before turning into a swaggering drums driven marching rhythm and distorted vocals that, an ironic track about    escapism, an imaginary superhero you can pretend to be when you find yourself doubting everything, suggests what Roger Waters might have sounded like had he got into glam.

Indeed, glam is a prevailing influence here, most notably drinking deep from the T. Rex well on several numbers, first being the Blur meets Bolan seduction song whimsy of I’m Happy If You’re Happy, his two young daughters on noises and one of three with Jen Bone on double bass,  with its line “if you’re happy I am James Dean” and continuing through such foot tapping, infectious nuggets as  Ten Minutes with Bridgnorth’s

St.Leonard’s church bells and a  20^th Century Boy rockabilly urgency, the bass licks Bolan boogie of the  abandonment-themed  My Girl’s Gone  with its sample from Quatermass And The Pit, the cautionary waring of destructive habits that is Slide  and the rumbling slider  shuffle of Money For The News, a critique of modern media if you hadn’t  guessed that features the sliding doors of a Stourbridge shopping centre 

There’s nothing here over three minutes and, following the stuttering slow chug and crooning harmonies of  Life In A Jar, the next three are all under two, but it’s the quality not the width that counts on the slow, bluesy Songbird, The Hill (apparently inspired by a punishing charity walk) and the human frailty, lounge organ backed Bowie-cabaret of Mankind with niece Rebecca Butler on vocals. Calling a halt with the breathily sung and longer Just Me with an intro and chorus that sounds like Bolan taking on a Dimitri Tiomkin Western score and has a spoken passage towards the abrupt close. 

Filtering the sparkle of 70s pop with the sour of 21^st century life, this is his best yet.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2025

While they had 10 Top 40 singles, including Blackberry Way going to No1, between 1967 and 1972, despite releasing four albums in the same period THE MOVE only ever had one Top 75 album, their self-titled debut which peaked at No 15.

Quite why they never caught the album-buying public’s interest is a mystery, but seems likely to have been the disconnect between the pop sound of the singes and the more aggressive heavy rock they favoured for the albums, the debut being the only one to include any big hits, though 1970s Looking On did feature Brontosaurus.

Their final album was Message From The Country, recorded due to a contractual obligation with EMI, with most of the band focused on the debut Electric Light Orchestra album. It’s now been issued in an extended edition by Cherry Red, or more strictly reissued and remastered from 2005 which piles on the final singles Tonight, Chinatown (and California Man and B-sides Down On The Bay and Do Ya (a great crunchy rocker with a The Beach Boys break that was the A side in America and subsequently a hit for ELO) alongside alternate versions of the latter, Don’t Mess Me Up, The Words of Aaron and My Marge.

Given nobody’s heart was really in it and musical styles were all over the place (see Presley pastiche Don’t Mess Me Up, a precursor to Eddie and the Falcons perhaps, and Johnny Cash parody Ben Crawley Steel Company, both sung by Bev Bevan) , numbers like the title track,  the muscular boogie Ella James (ELO orchestra rock evident, the experimental psychedelic chamber folk  No Time with Roy Wood on recorder and  the surely Pepper-era Lennon-influenced Words Of Aaron are more than simply filler and deserve a full reassessment. The reissue also comes with new, detailed liner notes by Mike Barnes.

While I suspect it’s unlikely to prove representative of the forthcoming The Awful Truth album (“a modern mutant music hall interpretation of the day’s news, a haunting jolt into realism narrated with all the angst of an insistent, slightly dishevelled late-night newscaster”), THE NIGHTINGALES are at their most immediate and accessible with The New Emperor’s New Clothes, a crank it up loud, driving rock n roll blast of thundering drums, pounding piano and ringing guitars aptly tagged as  Velvets meet Fairport Convention in a crowded boozer.

KATHERINE PRIDDY’s second winter-themed collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, again written for the project, the slow swaying ‘Daybreaker’ (Cooking Vinyl) dreamily embodies the thaw after the freeze, a reemergence into the sunlight  carried by the gently rippling guitar pattern as her pure voice floats on the breeze as it builds to a swelling, keys and strings euphoria. (www.katherinepriddy.bandcamp.com/track/daybreaker)

A prelude to their third EP, Solitude, THE MISSED TREES, guitarist Joe Peacock and violinist Louisa Davies-Foley, release ‘I Am Water’. Their most immediately accessible and radio friendly track to date, it’s inspired by the story of  Manfred Gnadinger, a German hermit who dropped out and went to live on a beach in the Galician fishing village of Camelle, where he was known as Man, creating sculptures (“in splendid isolation”) out of things that washed up and living in tune with nature until an oil spill from the sunken Prestige tanker covered his sculpture garden and he died, ostensibly of a broken heart. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2025

Released via Bandcamp towards the end of last year, EP2 is the second live in rehearsals set by ROB PETERS & THE SLAPDASH COWBOYS, recorded in the run up to the Alive album. Kicking off with the brief strummed sway love song to his wife, This Is Love, it gives way to the surging drive of  Jesus In The Parking Lot with its punchy drums and dirty electric guitar, slowing down again for  the sparsely accompanied Alive from The Moon That Thought It Was The Sun. It ends with the eight minute Finger Rain, originally from A Copper Heart, with its psychedelic swirl and George Harrison nods. A third is due later this year.

A taster for his upcoming Troubled Delight album, SICKY aka Mick Butler releases  I’m Happy If You’re Happy, a jaunty, upbeat little number about  seducing someone’s heart, which, Jen Bone on  double bass, scuffed percussion, a broken violin,  ukulele, glockenspiels, bells, drums,   mouth organ, random noises and backing vocals from daughters Lily and Scarlet, has the lazy purring feel of  vintage Britpop and most definitely has the effect the title suggests.

Looking ahead, having not released anything since 2023’s sonically experimental Dissolution II, KATY ROSE BENNETT is working towards a new album featuring settings of poems by  Scottish poet  Donna Ashworth, terrific early unaccompanied  tasters of which can be heard on the YouTube videos  for When I’m No Longer Here (www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1051695302724019)  and The Stars Called You Home (www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6MuAnRBeXg)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2024

 

 

A  belated eulogy for ANDY LEEK who passed at the start of November.  Starting his musical career while still at school fronting the Wailing Cocks, releasing two singles (“Rockin' Youth and Listen To The Wailing Cocks) via Birds Nest in 1979 before the tragic death of guitarist  Alan Boyle cut things short. That October he joined  Dexys Midnight Runners,    playing on  Geno and four other tracks on their debut album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, but, uncomfortable with the famous, quit to go and work in a mortuary just before Geno hit No 1. However, this exposure led to Beggars Banquet licensing two songs he’d recorded with the Wailing Cocks as a double A-side, Ruben Decides and cult classic Move On (In Your Maserati).

In 1988 he reunited with fellow former Dexys man Kevin Archer as keyboardist in the Blue Ox Babes but  although they recorded an album for Beggars it remained on the shelf until he released it as Midnight Music on his own Undiscovered Classics label in 2009, although one song, Twist in the Dark, was, recommended to her by Kirsty MacColl, covered by Frida from ABBA for her 1984 solo album Shine. 

In 1984 he was briefly signed to Fascination Records, releasing two singles, Soul Darling with Specials producer Dave Jordan, and a version of ABBA's Dancing Queen produced by Tony Visconti. Then, in 1988, working with George Martin, he set Dylan Thomas’s  Come And Sweep My Chimbley to music, sung by Tom Jones for the EMI album The Music From Under Milk Wood - A Play For Voices. Martin, who was effusive in his praise, also produced his 1988 solo debut album Say Something   via Atlantic and featuring Steve Howe, Clem Clempson, Level 42’s  Alan Murphy,   Peter-John Vettese and a 36-piece orchestra , though, unfortunately, despite Martin  predicting at least four No 1s, none of the singles charted. That said, the title track was No 1 in Lebanon during the civil war.

Briefly released on Spanish label  Ouver  (though the track All Around the World was popular in Germany), Eternity Beckons followed in 1997 while, recorded in 2000 and self-released, Sacrifice And Bliss produced the singles   Forgotten People and Waking Up the World, with his last two albums being the remixed Say Something Revisited in 2010 and Waking Up The World in 2013, on which each song had its own counterpoint, giving rise to seven themes telling a story of youth, experience, realisation and return.

On his website, www.andyleek.co.uk,  there’s my review of Eternity Beckons:

He's possessed of a beautifully controlled voice that can soar like an angel or, as on Apple On The Bough, enfolds to embrace. itself in the sort of richly deep emotional drama that might grace a Les Miserables.

Although these aren't intended as comparisons, he's in the same sort of vocal league as Chris De Burgh, Paul Simon or Paul McCartney while Twistin' Turnin', a simple image of a bird in flight, evokes the fragile folk beauty of Nick Drake.

His delicate, intricate guitar work flows as effortlessly as his melodies and his songwriting craft is beyond reproach. Listen to the affecting sibling bonded Joined At The Hip or the simple classic choke in the heart voice/guitar love song that is So Blind or, for more buoyant moods, the very credible stab at a singalong world peace togetherness anthem that is Children Of The Sun, a companion piece to his homelessness single Forgotten People that manages to be guileless rather than naive.

The world has enough second rate karaoke turns who can churn out versions of Daydream Believer for the golf club dinner, buy this album, spread the word and make Leek the star he deserves to be. 

Quoted alongside MacColl and Martin is one of mine, “The greatest undiscovered talent in pop”.  The words still stand.

Another veteran of the scene, ANDY LLOYD has been busy assembling everything he’s recorded, albums, singles, etc.,  under  various guises and musical styles, The Bloomsbury Set (best known for his minor hit Hanging

Around  With The Big Boys, the EP now remastered and reissued) , Andy Lloyd & The Wedge (Living In America their best-known, the 12” extended mix with Laurence Juber from Wings on lead guitar reissued now by Sony), Food, Popman & The Raging Bull (his reggae years) and Sanctuary. There’s far too much to go into here but for archivists, collectors and newcomers alike, it’s well worth searching the streaming platforms such as Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube and the like

More usually drawing on the retro sound of Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and Cream, Birmingham trio BLUE NATION have just released the all acoustic Cold Night EP, a live collection of  three tracks  in support of The Mental Health Foundation , These line up as the strummed title track, sounding  not too far removed from the version of 2018’s The Kaftan Society, the wistfully folksy, punchily building Thieves For Lovers  previously only to be found (as far as I can tell) on their 2021 Live From The Front Room  and the terrific, soaringly anthemic fingerpicked and chugging, close harmony song of loss and remembrance Echoes, a number that builds with emotional force and ends the year on a monumental high note. With four studio albums already under their belt, the recent Ordinary People a riff-driven blues rock gem, and having already made waves in America, they really should be much better known 

 

Despite consistent sell-out shows and the fact that he’s one of the finest showmen and songwriters of the past 50 odd years, GERRY COLVIN’s not the household name or chart star his talent warrants. So, chances are while  The Last Christmas Needle (Crocodile Music) contains re-recordings of past releases, notably off the limited edition Gerry’s Christmas Baubles, for most  these are all ostensibly new. Which, for those willing to explore, will reward them with a seasonal album that isn’t another churning out of the familiar carols and cheesy Christmas songs that turn up with dispiriting frequency from an array of country stars, but, rather, mostly originals that range from the delightfully playful to the piercingly poignant.

The album featuring his regular backing musicians of uptight bassist Jerome Davies, accordionist Trish Power and Lyndon Webb on guitar, mandolin and violin with various contributions by Marion Fleetwood, Paul Johnson and Stuart McLeish, it opens with the self-penned One More Sleep, an a capella intro giving way to a bustling capturing of the anticipation and preparations of Christmas Eve. 

That’s followed by a new, slightly longer version of the title track, quite frankly one of the best and most emotional seasonal songs this side of White Christmas and Fairytale Of New York as, backed by Power in the final stretch, he sings “when the last Christmas needle falls from the last Christmas tree, you will still be holding hands with me”. Pausing to wipe away a tear, Joni Mitchell gets a co-credit as he borrows the opening lines from River for the gently circling fingerpicked wry Coming Up Christmas, that transforms it from a lament for a lost love to one for a lost Christmas spirit, wishing to return to “where before it all began before Christmas became the Christmas that it’s become” with its emphasis on commerciality where the only river is Amazon.

There are a few evergreen covers given the Colvin touch, the first being a dreamy, bass-led shuffle through  Jerome Kern’s I’ll Be Home For Christmas, famously recorded by Bing Crosby and equally famously banned by the BBC who though it would be demoralising for the troops. Elsewhere, backed by accordion, he gives David Essex a run for his money on a sadness soaked A Winter’s Tale and delivers an inspired slowed down, fingerpicked reworking of Mike Batt’s slightly retitled Wombling Gerry Christmas. 

Naturally, there’s a carol, not one from the well-thumbed songbook but his own The Shakespeare Carol which, featuring his late musical partner Nick Quarmby, is supposedly based around the bard’s own words as it calls on the men of Arden’s Grafton, Wexford, Marston, Bedford and elsewhere to come together in St Andrew's Church in Temple Grafton, reputed to be where Bill and Anne tied the knot, to celebrate, be they Jew, Muslim or Christian. In similar traditional vein, The Parting Pint On Saint Nicholas Night is the Scottish parting song with two final lines to pin it to the December 6 celebration, while   Saint Stephen’s Day is his own fingerpicked waltzing ode to the Feast of St Stephen  complete with accordion and tinkling chimes and an invitation to break bread and take wine in the woodlands and dance with the dryads as it breaks out into a  Celtic military marching beat and the strains of Auld Lang Syne.

If you want melancholy, then there’s the accordion-backed Winter In My Heart about a lost relationship, or by contrast he can be exceeding playful, rewriting his own ‘ohnny Cash Shirt with a festive twist as he jingles all the way through the country clopping Santa Claus Hat (“I got this merry festive suit when Santa Claus fell off my roof/Been eating venison since that day”).  It ends with one final cover, looking to put the grey skies of winter behind with a breezy, bass twanging, guitar strummed shuffle through the Morecambe & Wise immortalised Bring Me Sunshine. He most certainly will. 

 

Putting the Chris into Christmas, named after the iconic Manhattan Cathedral, and his first new music in two years, In The Shadow of St John The Divine (Opiate Records) has CHRIS CLEVERLEY again weaving his characteristic experimental style with a trademark sweet voiced intimacy and inviting melodies as the songs put a personal spin on the usual festive fare that blends joy and wistfulness in the seasonal cocktail of often contradictory emotions, love and grief.

It opens with Kelly Oliver duet The Ringing Of Bells, a retitling fuller production reworking of his Christmas 2016 release Ring O Bells, a reflective fingerpicked swayer about being apart but with the lyrics serving a prophetic foreshadowing on the lockdowns to come (“In a year's time this could all be fine…The silence in the room will be over soon… So there's this Christmas card rhyme and the scent of the pine needles lying around, that will always remind me/Of those years past, when we were raising a glass/Toasting/Hoping for better times”), that now also has Kathy Pilkinton on vocals and Katie Steven playing clarinet.

Pilkinton’s also to be heard on For A Winter Angel where she’s joined by her Awake Mother partner Minnie Birch, a song, which has swaying melodic echoes of The First Noel and chiming bells,  about supporting a loved one through a period of declining mental health (“It’s the first year in a while/As Christmas approaches you’ve been able to smile…in that glorious way/I remember you used to before life went astray”) with the prayer “I hope that someday things will shift in your mind/And you find it within you to leave the worst of this behind/And I really don’t need anything more from you/But just to keep on here fighting until the winter is through/And I will put my arms around you, I will love you in ways/That I’m pretty sure aren’t even possible to say”.

They both also feature on  the pulsating Vespers, which gives  the EP’s title as two former lovers meet on Christmas Eve in the cathedral’s shadow to say their goodbyes in the   candlelight to the strains of  the Midnight Mass (“It’s an odd time of year for saying goodbyes/For starting all over, drawing a line/Sip at the coffee, stare at the walls/Trying to make some kind of sense of it all”) as the arrangement swells to a finale and the lines “You say “let’s light a candle for peace on Earth/It might not make a difference, things may/never change/But just think where we’d be/Without the faint light of that flickering flame”.

There’s a definite Simon & Garfunkel  undercurrent to  the synth-rippling folk of Snowfall, My Evergreen, a story of a snowman that offers a bittersweet allegory for the ambiguities and often transitory nature of love (“You built me out of ice/Kept me around for a while/Gave my face an expression…Thank you my love/For bringing me to life…Today was the best day ever/But I’d rather melt away, than be here when it’s over/Today was the best day ever/Cause for a moment there I knew I was alive”).

It ends with a five minute plus rearrangement of Sufjan Stevens’ Sister Winter and its mingling of melancholy and whimsy, Tim Heymerdinger on drums with harmonies from Pilkinton and Graham Coe who also provides cello solo, ending with the apt words “I've

returned to wish you a happy Christmas”.  This is definitely one you want to find in your Christmas stocking.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN NOVEMBER 2024

A quartet from Stourbridge comprising Julia Disney on keyboards, Odilia Mabrouk on violin, percussionist Lisa Westwood and  Jon Hazelwood on bass and guitar with all three girls sharing lead vocals, CATCH THE RAIN  made their debut late last year with the Tapestry EP, their music variously embracing  contemporary folk, classic Laurel Canyon vibes and  Eastern European, the title track being  a five and half minute fiddle and piano driven waltzing Weimar cabaret and Balkan cocktail  with fairytale lyrics about the heart’s fateful tapestry. That’s reprised here  on their debut album Alder Grove alongside the dreamy piano-based, chorus cascading, lullabying Broken Wings, Disney on soaring lead, a song with a refugees hint about having to leave home and   navigate life anew (“We were children fighting in your war/Far too young to leave the safe safe shore”) that sounds as though it could have come from a Willy Russell musical. Also  resurfacing, again featuring Disney  and also of a stage musicals bent  is the jaunty Love Is Fine  aimed at telling depression and sadness (and anyone who brings you down) to bugger off (“There is just nothing left to say, so go away…All that you do is hold me back/And I'd like some time to/Fly, a while, without you, by my side”), and Mabrouk on lead, their eponymous, piano-based signature tune about mental turmoil  (“the rush and the roll that’s inside of me/ Is the call of a siren’s warning”) and  finding recovery   (“I need to catch the rain and slowly find myself, again and again/Or soon I’ll lose a sense of where and when I am”).

It opens with the first of the new numbers, Disney on lead for Sailor’s Tale which, with its jittery piano and swaying melody draws on familiar folk imagery of seeking adventure, here framed as a conversation between a young woman looking to see the world and a sailor who embodies her dreams of being carefree, who dispenses some wise advice: “He said only settle down/If that is where your heart is/But don't let yourself drown/Don't stop before you've started/Or you'll only look around/Always hoping for excitement/And you'll never leave this town/And you'll never find your true love”. So, basically, follow your dreams, then rather than live with regrets. Keeping a maritime note, The Sea with its rolling piano notes, percussion waves, whistle and slightly Eastern European tang mingled with a Pentangle spray has Mabrouk singing about  how the sea brings out all emotions within us, their impact lingering even when we’re not directly embracing its power (“when I leave you are with me/I close my eyes so I can be/Closer to you the one I know/The inner music of my soul”).

Themes of escaping percolate the album, specifically so on the jazzy rhythm (a definite Brubeck touch to the bass) and pulsing folk colours of Time To Fly with Disney on lead singing about leaving a toxic relationship (“Throw all you have at me I’m not gonna break/Wait for reactions well what a mistake/I’m done with your web of confusion and lies/I’m building a wall you see each day brick by brick/The more shit you throw at me the more the wall sticks”).

Mabrouk on lead and Disney on aching violin, things rein back in for the delicate fingerpicked title track, a close harmonies song about the calming and restorative power of nature amid life’s chaos “ever we’ll wander and ever we’ll meet, safe in the alder grove” while also sounding an environmental note about climate change (“A thousand joys are bearing me/Through verdant fields and cedar trees but all I can, think of is 'when, will, I lose you'…Anger-weary overwhelm, trapped in a world-burning game, when will we love, when will we truly, care, for our home”).

There’s a jazzy waltzing Eastern European rhythm again for the near six-minute Kings and Queens, a social commentary protest song of sorts about the them and us divides in society  (“For you are the kings and the queens, and we are the pawns, we’ll do as you say/What choice do we have but to play this old game, we’ve been here before, we don’t wanna play”) that then reverses the situation (“ if you get the chance to talk/Through muddy waters you’ll clumsily wade, our mind’s already made/For we are the kings and the queens and you are the pawns you’ll do as we say”). A few seconds longer with Westwood’s sole lead, Ode To The Overthinker is pretty much summed up by the title (“There once was a girl with a busy mind/Filled with thoughts of every kind/She found herself to much frustration/In a constant state of contemplation/She'd start by thinking just one thing/But off that thought five more would spring/And each of those would spawn ten more/And none the same as the one before”) that concludes “Mindfulness is key, they say/Give me mindLESSness any day!”.

Disney’s final lead comes with Keep on Walking which they says explores the experience of long and arduous hikes but that’s just a metaphor for persisting in the face of adversity (“my rucksack is heavy/From the weight of it all/And I’ll keep, keep on walkin’/In the hope that one day/A cool breeze from the ocean/Will come wash your shadow away…For the voice of the mountain/Keeps me sane, keeps me strong”).

It ends with Mabrouk and the percussive strum, keys and chorus harmonies of Time To Listen, a song about   taking time to listen yourself and your own   needs   and putting in some self-love  (“When I was young I knew what I wanted/Guess I didn’t have a clue/Loving another would heal my heartache/Now I know that isn’t true/Started to do some digging, didn’t like what I found/Now it’s   time to turn it around… This time I won’t be walking away/From who I really am”). Well worth getting a good soaking. 

BIG SPECIAL and JOHN GRANT join forces for Stay Down Lazarus (SO Recordings), described as a “big moan about the social promise of elevation and rising up, that doesn’t really exist for most people” as it explores themes of deception and being forced to conform to a   societal expectations, a track that was the first to be written for the debut album but felt somehow lacking,. Grant fills that lack adding his mighty voice to the chorus refrain while the others get on with the rapping (“new posters for old flicks”), thundering drums and electronic storms.

The every innovative and experimental BONFIRE RADICALS return  with Flywheel, a five-track EP of swirling musical colours and shapes recorded live in the round and drawing on British, Greek and Balkan influences alike, propelled by their urgent rhythm section. It kicks off with the musical mayhem of Zalizome/Den Born Manoula M, a fusion of two Greek traditionals with metronome on speed percussive rhythm, clarinet, Sarah Farmer’s frenzied dancing Celtic fiddle, indecipherable vocals and Emma Reading’s blistering guitar crescendo.

Penned by clarinetist Katie Stevens, The Lost Pick, a lament for an awol plectrum, takes its influence from Bulgaria folk with kaval and recorder dancing around a 13.8 groove. Then, in distinct contrast, Michelle Holloway sings reedy lead with Stevens, Farmer and Peter Churchill on harmonies on a brooding arrangement of the traditional Love Is Teasing that edges more towards trance-inducing Eastern doom metal than folk.

Farmer’s responsible for the burbling wobbly, scat electronica Sarah’s Muffins with its epileptic drums and ba ba baaing vocal interjections sounding like The Swingle Singers having a meltdown. It ends with a brief reimaging of bassist Churchill’s Satsuma Moon off their last album here reincarnated with accordion as Squeeze That Satsuma. Barkingly wonderful.

TABLE 4 1 is Birmingham-based singer/songwriter Harry Bott, former lead singer of the Cigarette Social Club, his dreamily waltzing pop meets folk new single  ‘Day &Night'  "a sombre outlook on love - the highs, the lows, seen through the eyes of a damaged romantic".

Progressive-rock/folk duo ARMCHAIR GODS return with a new EP, Ritual, out now on Bandcamp (https:// armchairgods.bandcamp.com) with other platforms following in January. While visiting the White Peak in the Peak District, they came across a young woman meditating near the central cove of a Neolithic stone circle,  obscured from view from the entrances, a sacred place of ritual. On leaving, she left behind a token, a garland of wildflowers placed on a large fallen limestone slab encrusted with moss and lichen, weather worn by   time, This and subsequent visits to ancient sites through the seasonal festivals of Mabon, Samhain, Ostara, and Beltane, many believing these ancient stone circles served as early cosmic observatories, their alignment with equinoxes and solstices heralding the changing seasons and the procession of pagan festivals through the Wheel of the Year. Thus, the tracks named for the festivals, this music for pagan celebrations. Celebrating the Autumn equinox and harvest, Mabonopens things up with a cosmic swirl of  keyboards drums and guitar, proceeding to Beltane the Gaelic May Day festival,  the mood calming down to a dreamy haze with stuttering, repeated acoustic guitar patterns, drums and virtual  brass. Out of seasonal sequence here since it takes place in March,  named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostra, Ostara marks the spring equinox, the track with military snare beats, tinkling piano, orchestral keys and timpani returning to the  cosmic swell before gently ebbing away on strings. Coming from old   Irish and meaning 'end of summer', Samhain is synonymous with Halloween  and, the longest track at almost six minutes (with a video on YouTube) is suitably brooding and robed in shadowy musical shapes with its steady, relentless drum beat and the hovering ghostly keys and wailing guitars. Something to celebrate indeed.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2024

Featuring bassist Simon Smyth, the founder of The Smyths tribute band and fronted by singer James Schofield, TV PINS are a 5-piece from London and the West Midlands, bringing a British  edge to the sound of West coast Americana, filtering influences such as Supertramp and Crowded House through 70 Americana. Riding a  chugging guitar rhythm, new single Daisy Saturday Night, a taster or their forthcoming album, Aircutter, is a catchy alt-pop ode to  festival goers, old school ravers, and people who refuse to grow old and is quite likely named for guitarist Duncan O’Neill’s wife.

 

Now based in Bristol, folk instrumental duo THORPE & MORRISON self-release their third album, Grass & Granite, the title a reference to fiddle player Sean (Morrison) and guitarist Harry’s (Thorpe) countryside upbringings in Ayrshire and   Suffolk and their former adopted home in Birmingham (the cover also shows a house carved into the standing stones in the Outer Hebrides from whence Sean’s grandfather came) and reflecting the pastoral and industrial aspects of their sound. Taking in traditional English, Scottish and Irish tunes as well as self-penned material, it’s a glowing testament to their musicianship and virtuosity drawing on themes that explore both longings for home and moving on to new experiences, the lively opener, Big Skies & Water Meadows (which incorporates Damien O’Kane’s Castle Rock Road), an invocation of the landscape where Harry was raised in a cottage beside a water meadow. 

Original numbers also include his more ruminative fingerpicked Something New written for friends embarking on journeys into the unknown, the fiddle-led Coast To Coast inspired by the journey of two friends across America, the one proposing to the other on reaching their destination, while a jazzy pizzicato fingerpicked and dancing fiddle Merlin the Wolfhound relates to an overly amorous, Guinness-drinking Irish wolfhound and , continuing the playfulness, the rhythmically choppy Claudette’s Last Dance is a fond farewell to the duo’s faithful Peugeot.

On the trad front, there’s the self-descriptive Wedding Marches, a pairing of two Danish tunes, the fiddle pulsing Causeway Joy, inspired by the Outer Hebrides and combining The Oysters Wives Rant and Ales Engelska by Danish cittern player Ale Carr, with Scottish slow air lament Put The Gown Upon The Bishop closing up shop.  There’s three vocal tracks, two traditional, The Girl I Left Behind Me (incorporating two fiddle reels), Sovay, sung by Michelle Holloway from Bonfire Radicals, and rounded off with Sean’s Gizmo’s Tunes, and a slow waltzing cover of The Pogues’ Rainy Night In Soho with plucked and bowed fiddle. They’ve been gradually building a hefty reputation on the folk circuit over the past five years, this firmly cements them in the major leagues.

Fronted by the recently joined Tilly Clarke on vocals, TILLY & THE DROLLS are a Moseley-based quintet whose music encompasses rock, jazz, blues and folk (their covers range from Wade In The Water to I Run, Seven Nation Army and Valerie), the latter being the case for the marching beat, vocally soaring anthemic new single The View From My Window (Second Glances) featuring some fine, muscular guitar work from Steve Ashby.  

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2024

Based in London but with Birmingham roots, KEO are a post-grunge four-piece anchored around Anglo-Irish brothers Finn, on vocals and rhythm guitar  and bassist Conor Keogh, the sons of Dave Keogh (Kehoe) well-known to 80s BrumBeat readers as the frontman of the much undervalued Surf Drums (check out These Seven Years at www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Y7EaLPCGw) and now author of Accidental Gangster , a  series of books on his late legendary club owner (Barbarellas, Rebeccas, The Cedar Club, Eddie’s) father-in-law Eddie Fewtrell. Though not following in his jangly guitar footsteps, with its circling guitar line, quivering, husky vocals and  slow and steady drumbeat new single Crow, an emotive number written by Finn when a family member was suffering from cancer and about his fear of losing them (“I’d rather watch you and bleed / I’d rather cry over me”). (www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-Wr5giWag)

MARC LEMON continues to mine a successful seam of lo fi 60s psychedelia pop on Crystal Falls And Shatters with its echoes of Syd Barrett, the Velvets and The Soft Boys, the track, recorded in one take, a response  to the current xenophobic state of the western world as he sings “I pity you in your servitude/And now that I myself am free/I'll never hate you as much as you hate me”. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_KZ6yU7rM)

WILLIAM WILLIAM ROGERS has found something else to sing other than the Yellow Pages, Hot House being his jangly Morrissey meets 70s folk new single and a taster for upcoming album Pond Life. Featuring   bass, drums and organ, it’s a perspective and age shifting wry reverie of a schoolboy summer  when “Semen spilled in the goosegrass” and Wolverhampton was “sizzling like Hanging Rock” and, while getting “an F in hard knocks” a dream that “one of these days/You're gonna smash all the clocks” and “one of these days/I'm gonna burn all the maps”.  

LITTLE JUKE are a new West Mids four piece comprising   Alex Ohm on  guitar and vocals, bassist Hannah Maiden, guitarist Stephen Ashford and Tom Crowson on drums, their debut release being ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’, a dreamy, cinematic mingling of folktronic and indie that opens with nervy piano and airy psych vocals before pattering drums and guitar arrive, the track building in power and intensity as it reaches its strings-enrobed finale. Impressive stuff, if they’ve more like this, 2025 could see them making substantial strides.