MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2025

 

Following on from the Lord Of Chaos single featuring Kathy Pilkinton on vocals and Graham Coe on cello  with its theme of shedding your burdens and from whence the EP title comes, CHRIS CLEVERLEY now releases God Of All Things (Opiate Records), the full five track follow up to last year’s seasonal-themed In The Shadow Of John The Divine. Again putting a different spin on the usual seasonal, there’s two further originals and three traditional numbers given the  Cleverley treatment. The latter  opens the collection with a suitably wintery instrumental arrangement of The Holly & The Ivy, the second being the more obscure The Falcon or Corpus Christi Carol, voices held in the distance with a liturgical arrangement taking its cue from Jeff Buckley’s and the third closing up with his and Kim Lowings’s haunting medieval-shaded arrangement of Coventry Carol, a staple at All Saints Church in his hometown of Kings Heath and one rooted in his childhood memories. The other original, a co-write and duet with Molly Rymer Frost Giant which, invoking  the imagery of the Jötunn, the ancient Norwegian embodiments of the primal forces of nature and chaos and an analogy for the  frozen disconnect in contemporary connections with each other and the world in which we live as they sing “shards of frozen/Haemoglobin/A frozen ocean/It’s you I’m hoping for”. Quite magical. 

The second taster for KATHERINE PRIDDY’s third album, ‘Frightening Machines’ (Cooking Vinyl) is the title track, a dreamy, slow walking, keyboards-stroked number that, the title referring to our complex but fragile bodies, comes from personal experience of when hers stopped functioning as it should (“Seems things have taken a turn/All these levers and systems won’t do as they’re told anymore/I’m having to learn/That these frightening machines aren’t as tough as they seem…now I’m calling/Out for a sign that this body’s still mine after all”). Feeling “a passenger at my own wheel”, it ends with recovery as she sings “I just needed to take time to heal”. A fine body of work indeed. 

The second single from THE ENEMY’s forthcoming album, Social Disguises,  Trouble is a riff chugging swaggery  rocker with punky echoes of early Bowie that frontman 

Tom Clarke says addresses the feeling of  “when you realise you’re no longer part of counter-culture, or sub-culture, when you’re in that grey area between being anti-establishment, and being the establishment” as he sings “I don't understand a thing these days/Maybe I'm too set in my ways”.

Piano notes falling like snowflakes, DAN WHITEHOUSE sings of Christmas in the trenches on The Bells Of Brierley Hill (Want To Know).  Co-written with Chris Cleverley as part of a Black Country writing workshop,  the song is told through the voice of a young soldier lying in the trenches on Christmas Eve and  imagining the sound of “the church bells/Of St Michael’s ring across the town/A call for all to come together/A day of peace, a chance lay our weapons down”. He’s also just released a Bandcamp only cover a David Essex’s seasonal evergreen A Winter’s Tale, a simple piano arrangement that allows his voice to bring out all the regret in the lyrics. 

 

MARC LEMON sees out the year in his Village Green Machine persona with Good Morning Mrs Kitteridge (from whence the name comes), an organ-backed, and obviously Kinks-influenced,  song about a  Cockney lady who lived next door when he was a child, and tells how he helped across the road when she returned on a bus from a night out at a  club with the women from work, somewhat worse for drink.

ANDY LLOYD has been busy reworking his back catalogue again, this time as New Shoots which gives the  21 tracks, variously from his Bloomsbury Set, Wedge, Sanctuary and Food incarnations a reggae overhaul. It all works far better than you might imagine, giving them a Jamaican groove that, rooted in both the 60s ska of Laurel Aitken, John Holt, Horace Andy,  Tony Tribe and later early Marley days,  can stand proud alongside fellow Brummies UB40’s takes on the genre.  I’m not going through all of them but you really should check out A Thing Like That. Gentleman Of The Road, the Marley-infused Getting Away From It All, the breezy I Remember The Times, the more dub shaded title track and an unrecognisable version of his 1983 Top 60 hit Hanging Around With The Big Boys. Sounding incredibly fresh, and infectious  it’s available on Spotify but he really should make downloads available on Bandcamp, and spark a real career renaissance.

His first new music of the year, trailing the second of his Christmas EPs, CHRIS CLEVERLEY releases the shimmering Lord Of Chaos on which, accompanied by Graham Coe on cellos and Kathy Pilkinton on vocals with John Elliott handling programming is a late December winter prayer to the gods of ice, gods of oceans, gods of spirals and agents of chaos for a “bright white light, that might hit me like a blessing” as release from the “extraordinary weight we carry/All through the year”.

The second single from his work in progress album documenting his travels in Nepal, 

Accompanied by drummer Ally McDougal, bassist Bart Debney-Davies, Will Looms on electric guitar and Nick Cowan on keys, GEORGE BOOMSMA releases the reflective You Said, a slow walking, gently fingerpicked, drum shuffled lightly blues-tinged song softly crooned in a whispering vocal about an “untimely adieu” and an unspoken carpe diem conversation  about casting off the things that weigh us down (“the world is passing you by two steps at a time/Have faith in your sibling/She is older and wiser than you/Enjoy the ride, it soon will pass quickly/And be filled with pride from climbing impossible skies”).

 

Available on Bandcamp or as a limited edition handmade CD, STYLUSBOY  releases The Coleshill Tapes (Home Session),  a four song EP inspired by the residents of Coleshill who shared their memories from World War II.  Opening with the upbeat strummed reverie of  Pockets Full Of Life And Freedom with its talk of waltzing the dark away at Saturday dances and battles paused for a football match between foes, it moves on to the plucked notes of  the wistful poignancy of the slow, softly crooned  winter-set The Journey That Never Came Back. A Better Tomorrow is as musically upbeat and ultimately optimistic  as the title suggests with the lyrics recounting taking shelter from bombing raids and the community spirit of the residents and it ends with Raise A Glass, a thank you toast to those who’ve gone before, the granddads, the fathers and brothers “who fought for me and you”, the mothers and daughters and sisters “who held life  together like glue” and “those who sailed that day’...and those who brought them back home again”. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2025

Fronted by Maggie K De Monde, SCARLET FANTASTIC continue their comeback with From Montreal to Rotherham released next year by Last Night From Glasgow, co-written and produced by John Walters and featuring both him and Basil Gabbidon of Steel Pulse fame. It’s heralded by the first single, a hypnotic, moody, part spoken, electro-clopping cabaret with strings cover of Bowie’s Time from Alladin Sane though whether the line about falling wanking to the floor is more likely to get airplay than it was 52 years ago remains to be seen. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOSKelrE0bA)

KATHERINE PRIDDY gets into an early Halloween mood with new single Matches (Cooking Vinyl), which, the first taste of next year’s  sonically varied and adventurous These Frightening Machines, is set to a building lolloping rhythm with a driving drums battery  and hushed, conspiratorial vocals was, , inspired by the witch trials and, echoing the album’s, sees her reclaiming the voices of the women who have been silenced, persecuted and misunderstood throughout history.  Katherine will play Birmingham Town Hall on May 9.

Reverting to his VILLAGE GREEN MACHINE alias Marc Lemon’s revisited and reworked English Café, about a group of university students about to bid final farewells to one another, knowing realistically they will never see one another again,  a fine piece of 60s jangly folk pop that he says took Dave Davies as its inspiration, though anyone who’s into Vinny Peculiar or Cleaners From Venus  should embrace with open ears. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8z54-a3yp4)

ROB PETERS & THE SLAPDASH COWBOYS have also done a spot of revisiting, releasing a newly recorded single version of the staccato rhythmically  stabbing My Rende-Vous originally from and his first release since 2024’s Dreams album, the psych-freak out section now featuring demented fluttering guitar. He’s launching it with a gig at the Red Lion Folk Club, Kings Heath on Wednesday November 19th along with the expanded Slapdash Cowboys line up of Hannah Brown on drums and vocals, Kate Hall on bass, synth, percussion and vocals and Emma Reading on electric guitar and percussion with special guest Katherine Abbott.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2025

JOHNSON & FINNEMORE marks the debut duo teaming of Birmingham pedal steel guitar legend Stewart Johnson and Swampmeat Family Band frontman Dan Finnemore for Find A Love That Brings You Home (Gulf Coast) featuring, among others, contributions from Buzzby Bywater on bass, pianist Liam Grundy, fiddler Howard Gregory,  and Stewart’s daughter Hannah,  Julian Littman and Charlie Dore on vocals Johnson providing dobro and guitar alongside pedal steel,  it’s steeped in country but also embraces the blues and touches of 70s Laurel Canyon, opening proceedings with the Hawaiian colours of the fiddle and mandolin arrangement crooned country waltzer Babybird.  The equally country How Many Summers? takes a chugging rhythm as Finnemore sings about shining on everyone and giving your love away until it’s gone, followed by the more desert country soul paranoia and anxiety of Beady Eye. A compact 100 seconds, again with Hawaiian steel colours, the easy swaying How’s The World Treating You is the sole instrumental, staying in a laid-back JJ Cale groove with Ride High where Neil Young echoes seep into the slow shuffle. 

A love song, piano tinkling away, Ear To The Ground is another swayalong, the tone changing with the Johnny Cash cowboy chug of The Gun, a love song too but of a much darker hue, Stewart’s solo plucking out notes like silver bullets while Hannah duel vocals with Dan. It ends with the title track, a two stepping honky tonker with Mariachi brass flavours and percussive clicking.

Doing the rounds is also the documentary, The Many Lives Of Stewart Johnson tracing the man’s illustrious career that, a former army brat, has seen him play all over the world and in styles ranging from rock n roll and blues to bluegrass and country, even playing in  stage productions of Great Balls Of Fire and Jailhouse Rock as well with daughters Hannah and Sophie  in The Toy Hearts and the Hannah in The Broken Hearts.

 

A taster for his next album which charts his experience travelling in Nepal, GEORGE BOOMSMA channels the choppy percussive handclappy style of Stealer’s Wheel for the ‘Pokhara Line’ which,  set during a bus journey from Pokhara to Kathmandu, picks up the story midway from when his travelling companions left and he  continued the journey solo, the song capturing both the excitement of what lies ahead and the underlying uncertainty faced by a now lone traveller. The title refers to one of the world's steepest Zipline which, in Pokhara and over a mile long can reach speeds up 62 miles per hour.(www.georgeboomsma.com)

Basking in the glow of great reviews for his 2018 debut album Santiago, AMIT DATTANI was brought crashing down to earth when he was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve condition and told that, within two years, he would no longer be able to play. Refusing to accept such a  fate,  he learnt an entirely new way of playing and now, seven years on  armed with a custom-built guitar, he defiantly returns with The Wrong Kind Of One which, recorded live with Steph Sanders on drums, again showcases his folk-blues fingerpicking style, mixing songs and instrumentals, it embraces self-penned numbers and traditionals alike.

It opens with the title track’s skittering notes, scampering drums, and extended picked play out which, reminiscent of  Will The Circle Be Unbroken, addresses refugees and the journeys they’ve made to escape violence, hardship, war and destruction only to find themselves  dehumanised and mistreated in the lands where they sought refuge. 

That’s followed by  his take on Make Me Down A Pallet On Your Floor, a traditional blues about homelessness that continues to have resonance in today’s social climate, returning to a theme of resilience and paying attention to your mental health in times of dark days and anxiety with the slow sway of Steady the Boat. The first of three instrumentals, the melodically circling Gathering Acorns was written during covid after watching his young son picking up acorns in the  local park, the childhood theme continuing with the ragtime touches of Golden Days, inspired by their walks to school, singing songs together.

As you might surmise, turning to electric guitar, the steady marching beat Now I Can Play On with its  hints of Richard Thompson is about his new guitar  and being able to continue making music, it getting a second nod in the brief instrumental Tony, referring to both its name and his father’s nickname. The last of the vocal tracks is his  slower tempo  cover of his favourite Dylan song, One Too Many Mornings, , ending with the third instrumental,  bringing blues colours to the traditional gospel hymn Just A Closer Walk With Thee,  a thank you to whatever divine power brought about his prognosis defying living musical resurrection. 

The second taster of the upcoming Live Freaky! Die Freaky!” psych-rockers SOLAR EYES  release Time Waits For No One  (Fierce Panda), a churning, heavy drumming   groove monster that, opening with a sample of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear And Loathing in Los Angeles, is about being stuck in a rot and desperate to get out and live life in the best way possible, Glenn Smyth spitting out “no, no, no, no”.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN AUGUST 2025

A sort of stop gap until next year’s studio album, Songs of Love and War,  CRAIG GOULD & THE NOBLE THIEVES release Live at Beckview Studios, a 6-track EP pairing three new songs with three fan favourites off  their 2023 debut Songs from the Campfire, released in both audio and visual formats.

It kicks off with one of the latter, a near six-minute strum through Out Of The Woods, followed by two of the new numbers.  The trotalong Old Days is a wistful reflection on  getting older and wiser, disembarking from  the “amber sea” as the narrator  tells how he “ danced on bars and under stars” but also “slept in parks and back of cars/Been awoke by law/Been shown the door”. It’s a realisation that “I’m not without knowing, had to change my ways before I die”  and that “I’ll never go/That way again”. Even so, while “Time, on my face is showing” there’s a sense of pride that “I’ve lived a life and not a lie”. The twangier country chug My Front Porch Neighbourhood is also reflective, looking back on a life looking for direction and a purpose (“all us kids born back in ’83/Made to pick a career at 15/Didn’t know what the hell we wanna be”) with a string of  dead end jobs in the rearview mirror (I’ve been a builder, building things I’ve never built/Just watch YouTube videos that’s my skill/Attended lanes, fixed frames and tendered bars/I worked in science laboratories and condom packing factories/Been a ticketing guru, railroad big-shoe, crocodile making man/I met the queen and the duke, and delivered fresh fruit, to the 100s locked away/Dressed in style, for a while, swept cinema aisles, and fanned the flames of political game/Once a gold crown shaping, furniture creating, bin-man extraordinaire”), with music the rock (“Singing songs of love on our front porch neighbourhood”) even if “me and a guitar seems a world too far for philosophy to comprehend”, as he notes “ It worries me how you judge by employee/

When you can celebrate the songs that we sing”.

The two other Campfire tracks, Dreamers, from whence the band name comes, and the  jaunty country romper Burned, sandwich the melancholic deep twang slow waltzer Red River, where Rosie Faith steps into the spotlight, a love song (“just believe me/Just run away with me!/Never let go, and run away/The dance never ending”) with Neil Young undertones.  Fully capturing the fire and passion of the live shows, this radiates the band’s power and confidence, and cranks anticipation for the album to the max.

Following on from last year’s debut album,  Old Tall Stories,  KINGS HEATHENS  - Evan C Ritchie and David Fisher, return with  Of Wind and Tide, another collection of self-penned  shanty and traditional folk, many numbers inspired by their trips to Cornwall  

Fisher leads off, Ritchie on bouzouki, with  the swayalong stomp Pilgrim Song,  a tribute to all who undertake pilgrimages, be  they of a religious nature or Harry Potter fans paying their respects to Dobby the House-Elf at the Freshwater Shrine in Pembrokeshire    as he sings “So here's to the traveller, the ones who set out/To find and discover what life's all about /Here's to the wanderers, the waifs and the strays/And those who hold on to the old-fashioned ways”.

 Swapping vocals,  Ritchie’s first is Shantyman, a song in celebration of those who lead shipboard singing “to lift your spirits/And sometimes to make the capstan go” sung in the person of a master of his trade and with a definite  wink in his eye as the crew go about their work  (“You might think a shantyman would never strain his arms/But I'll tell you, they get heavy, boys, when I'm playing this guitar/So save it with your envy, there's a/Reason it looks like I'm living high/While you haul the ropes on by”).

The first of five traditionals,  fuelled by urgent banjo, guitar and harmonica, Fisher sings Blue Cockade, the version here inspired by  Frank Blair’s uptempo interpretation, while Ritchie takes charge of  the sturdy strummed swayalong Maid on the Shore, the arrangement borrowed from the iconic Stan Rogers. It’s back to originals with Fisher on banjo and Ritchie on slide for his self-penned  Liskeard Lights about an old salt who’s married the barmaid and settled down, his wife wise enough to give him space to go to sea when he feels the need, but always looking to return to see the lights of the title, even if Ritchie never has.

Written some years back, Fisher’s banjo bouncy Down By the River is, as you might guess, about the serenity of sitting on the riverbank (in Worcestershire here) and watching the world go by, then, sung unaccompanied with Ritchie on lead,   Song of the Western Men is the unofficial Cornish national anthem, a stirring patriotic number with  lyrics from a poem by Robert Stephen Hawker published in 1826 and set to music in 1861 by Louisa T Clare.

Another setting of a poem, this time by William Wilfred Campbell to a tune by  Fisher  who sings lead while Ritchie provides slide and whistling, the lightly fingerpicked bucolic domestic bliss Margery (“The cattle are housed in shed and byre/While singeth the kettle on the fire”) was originally titled Canadian Folksong with Campbell, like Rogers, hailing from Ontario.

 Being inspired by Cornwall, there’s inevitably  song about smuggling, this, titled for the cove in west Cornwall,  being Ritchie’s Lamorna, the story of a man who finds escape from life’s oppression (“The price of grain is rising again/But no compensation for the hardworking men”) through smuggling and  partially inspired by the history of the Carters of Prussia Cove. 

There’s three further traditionals, first up, Ritchie on lead with additional vocals by Pete ‘Howlin’ Bush’ Smith, being the evergreen tale of a cannonball at sea tragedy Mrs McGrath, the second is the album’s sole instrumental Ievan Polkka/Newlyn Reel which mixes the Finnish former with the klezmer-like Cornish latter, while it all rounds off with the acapella Padstow Farewell Shanty.  The remaining track, and arguably the album standout, is Fisher’s banjo-dappled  tongue in cheek Generic Folk Song which, as you might gather, takes the piss out of trad folk cliches with May morn walking, false hearted pretty maids and a gallows (“And the sad end to this sorry tale/Is that everybody died”) as he invites “Come sing along with me/With a fol-a-lol-a-lol and a too-rye-aye/And without the copyright fee”.   Definitely one to haul away.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JULY 2025

Editors frontman TOM SMITH  makes his solo debut with Lights Of New York City (Play It Again Sam) which, opening and closing with a greasy late night, neon-washed sax, is a slow-paced introspective ballad recalling “Losing ourselves in the East side cliff/

Caramel sunset nothing to care/Falling into fairground, sugar on the air” and a lament for the fleetingness of youth (“I wanna run those hotel corridors again/That spill out to a skyline, bloated by the rain/A cold night air meets steam from a train/Hear them gone, just a subway train/Speaking your name…it's such a pity/We can't meet again when we were young/It's right there in your hand, and then it's gone”).

Produced by and featuring Dan Whitehouse and Peter Millson with Harriet Harkum on backing vocals, Wolverhampton’s ANGELLA CORRINA releases her second EP, Nature’s End, the jaunty, poppily acoustic  title track inspired by a 2025-set dystopian 1986 novel by  Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka that proved remarkably prophetic in its narrative of ecological disasters, poverty, hunger, society collapse and the extremes of politics, the track concluding that “the elite shall inherit the earth”.

The thinly veiled sarcasm of Safe Brown Token draws on her personal experiences while working as a ‘diversity hire’, expected to be   a model employee and not  challenge the discrimination she encountered, the chorus with its rallying cry to  ‘sing our songs’ and ‘dance our dances’, inspired by both Diversity’s dance performance about the death of George Floyd  and the resulting flood of complaints and Billie Holiday classic protest song Strange Fruit.

Personal experience also informs the echoey keyboards-backed The Assimilation Game which relates how, as an ethnic minority employee unsure of her own identity, workplace bullying and racism had a devastating effect on her mental health as she fought to find her authentic self. Strummed on guitar, Propaganda & Conspiracy Theories looks back to the COVID pandemic and how some people were ready to follow whatever regulations the government drew up without question while others were up in arms about the idea of wearing masks and social distancing, and the inevitable conspiracy theories that ensued;  basically, it’s about assessing the evidence and making up your own mind. Finally, there’s A Song For Humanity, a recognition of  the primal urge to come together through the unity of song and music as a way to understand others and ourselves and become one voice in a time of division.

John Napier wears a variety of musical hats, a folksy singer-songwriter, purveyor of Italo Disco as Real Velour and, sporting Kneecap-like balaclavas,  alongside bassist Andy Kearney and drummer Olly Forrester,  one third of New Wave outfit  THE LINE MANAGERS. The trio’s new EP, The New Normality, is a cocktail of PiL, The Clash, The Pistols and Big Special, the echoing, chimed guitar, slow, spoken title track (“resignation disguised as optimism”) getting things going,   followed by a new wave rework his previously folksy Not Your Enemy. There’s a similar thundering propulsive drums and scratchy guitars urgency to the staccato  Kings, a studio version of a Claptrap live track released in January, with its world turned upside down lyric (“It's not our fault the culture changed/No one told us no one explained/We weren't ready to live this way/Some say we got what we deserved/Others told us it could be worse/But indifference is what really hurts”), ending with a live version of the Big Special-like bench-pressing drums, snarly guitar and spat out spoken vocals of This Is Not A Showcase. They fully deserve to follow in Hickling and  Moloney’s footsteps into  national recognition.

From Lichfield, JAYLER are a blues rock quartet of 19-year-olds with a clear hard-on for  Zeppelin, right down to frontman James Bartholomew’s hair and trousers and  Tyler Arrowsmith’s Page guitar licks and posturings. They do it well, however, and new single Riverboat Queen, recorded at Vada Studios in Birmingham, is a solid 70s riff belter complete with obligatory guitar solo breakdown. With an EP already under their belt, hopefully a debut album should be along sometime next year.

 

In 2018, AMIT DATTANI, acclaimed for his fingerpicking guitar work, was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve condition and the prognosis that at best he had  two more years of playing guitar before his hands would no longer cooperate. He refused to be defined by his condition. Seven years and much perseverance later,  armed with a custom-built guitar and an adaptation in his playing style, he returns in splendid vocal form with ‘Wrong Kind Of One’, the sprightly and intricately fingerpicked (showcased on a lengthy play-out) title track of his forthcoming album, which, with a melody that I suspect deliberately recalls ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, addresses refugees who have had to make terrible sacrifices and journeys to escape violence, hardship, war and destruction (“Where’s my home now, dust and rubble”) , only to find themselves  dehumanised, left aside and mistreated (“they say I’m, I’m unwelcome, and they turn out all the lights…I will stay here, in the shadows/I’m the wrong kind of one”)  in the lands where they sought refuge.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JUNE 2025

 

Having reviewed tracks by former Quads members Josh and Terry (Johnny) Jones, I’m completing the siblings set by drawing your attention to lead guitarist COLIN (Jack) JONES who has several numbers up on YouTube (www.youtube.com/@colinjones9700).  As If (You Can) is a midtempo West Coastish ballad with a lilting melody, I Think I’ve Learnt My Lesson a more driving rock number with his distinctive chiming guitar making its presence felt while the climate change themed  Scared! is a moodier slow chug with samples from two Greta Thumberg speeches. The Quads have become something of a cult, but the three brothers deserve to be also feted for their current music too.

Celebrating the first anniversary of his The Promise Of Spring breakthrough album, GEORGE BOOMSMA has now released The Promise Of Spring Live recorded at two shows at the  Green Note and The Regal Theatre in Tenbury Wells backed by Will Looms and electric guitar, bassist Bart Debney Davies  and drummer Ally McDougal to bring a much fuller (listen to the percussive textures of Open Curtain) and at times, as on Johnny Walker Guy, rocking out sound.  As well as all the songs from the album (How High The Mountain having been revisited from his self-titled 2016 album) save for Fallen, there’s also live recordings of two others,  the ironic Streets Paved With Gold from 2017’s sophomore  Do Something With The Night and the twangy chugging autobiographical My 60s Weekend, a brand new number that lays the ground for where the next album’s direction might lie. His musical development over the albums comparable to that of Chris Cleverley, his standing should follow a similar path.