MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2026

Fronted by Chris Corcoran, THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT are a new band put together by Rob Peters who both produced and plays the drums alongside the late John McQueen on bass, John Dale on keyboards and Hannah Brown on backing vocals. Their name taken from the 1970 film set against the backdrop of 1960s counterculture, ‘The World’s Gone Mad’ (Wafer Thin) opens with ‘How High’ snarly punk flurry of fuzzed guitars  and shouty vocals that conjures thoughts of PiL as well as Peters’ own Dangerous Girls in its relentless drive and the staccato jabs.

It generally sets the musical tone for what ensues with driving drums and distorted guitars ploughing through numbers like ‘Looking Glass’, ‘Magic Box’ and ‘Open Our Minds’ while there’s an indie pop approach to ‘Our Lives’ and the catchy ‘Here She Comes’ with its vague 60s echoes, while opening with repeated bass notes,  ‘The Sound’ is almost a ballad. The title track’s a solid shouty Oi punk throwback that the Angelic Upstarts or Sham 69 might have made, ending with more distorted fuzz and bass on ‘What Difference Does It Make’. One designed to be played loud over scrappy speakers in rock dive cellars as heaving crowds elbow each other.

Their first album in ten years, following their reuniting in 2022, THE ENEMY deliver their most potently commercial yet, stuffed with strong poppy melodies, catchy hooks and riffs with frontman Tom Clarke on incendiary form. The drive and energy are laid down from the get-go with ‘The Boxer’ (not an S&G cover) which opens with a pulsing chug before the drums and keys kick in, leading to a  da da da refrain, followed by the galloping rhythm of ‘Not Going Your Way’ with its stabbing guitars and crowd friendly chorus. This initially seem to be slowing down with the intro to ‘The Last Time’ but it quickly emerges as another number designed to fill arenas and fields with bouncing bodies and waving arms.

Having lad down the album’s musical manifesto, things never let up as it propels through the likes of ‘Trouble’, ‘Controversial’ and the battering ram that is ‘Pretty Face’, only slightly slowing for the percussive hiccuppy rhythm  of ‘Social Disguises’ before the spitting sung welter that is ‘Serious’. Ending with the steady bass driving chug of  the aptly titled ‘Finish Line’ with another crowd singalong hook, the only weak spot is ‘Innocent’ where the inexplicably venture in Depeche Mode disco territory, only to find they have no map.  Variously conjuring at times The Pistols and the very best of The Wonder Stuff and Maximo Park, this should put them back at the pinnacle they’d ascended before breaking up.

In the space of just a few years, KATHERINE PRIDDY has gone from low key gigs around Birmingham,  headlining her own major venue tour. Now comes the third album, ‘These Frightening Machines’ (Cooking Vinyl)  that sees her further expanding her musical range taking in extensive use of synths and electronics alongside the organic instruments.

Fuelled by having suffered and unspecified medical condition that brought home the fragility of the female body, the songs span from  anger and despair to hope, longing and even lust,  they are expressions of solidarity and love, reclaiming the voices of women silenced by history,  as they confront illness, disconnection, the vulnerability and importance of relationships, and, as she transitioned into her 30s, the general ache of growing older and not always wiser. 

 With multi-instrumentalist Ben Christophers  featuring on most of the tracks., it strikes the first spark with ‘Matches’, a hollow repeated drum pattern underpinning the musical atmospherics. Priddy on glockenspiel and bouzouki and sung with a traditional styled intimate vocal, it’s a feminist anthem that takes its cue from the persecution of witches, often seeing them burned at the stake. But, as the sound and intensity build the thematic agenda becomes clearer (“They weren’t burning witches – it was women on those fires”), addressing the way women throughout the ages have been  both idolised and threatened by men “they kissed our mouths and bound our legs”), intimidated by their intelligence (“You never stopped to think we’d learn to fly”), as, sounding a call to empowerment, it warns “Don’t they know that we have matches, too”.

The slow walking title track with Soren Bryce on violin was written during a  prolonged period of ill health, one which affected her sense of self within her body as a whole and more specifically as a woman, the nightmare captured in the lines “A passenger at my own wheel/It’s hard to be tied to a body that tried/To erase what I needed to feel/Like a woman”. But it also speaks to anyone whatever gender who has  had similar experiences of illness or trauma and the  disassociation   between your mind and body when you’ve   lost control of your physical self, feeling trapped inside a malfunctioning, self-sabotaging machine (“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”).

Bearing shades of Joni Mitchell, with rockier drums   and 

Patrick Pearson’s electric piano,  ‘Sirius’,   named for the brightest star in the sky,  is a song of support for those who have been “drifting out much more than you’ve been tuning in” and have been having a run of romantic bad luck (“You say it’s looking up, that Lady Luck Is going to turn your world around/Then give yourself to guys who spend their lives with their eyes/Firmly on the ground”), encouraging that  “something out there’s calling you …you’ve no idea/Just how much you brighten someone’s sky”  and to “Just remember someone out there’s looking up to you”.

Warmed by Simon Dobson’s trumpet, ‘Hurricane’ finds her shifting into a sultry bossa nova, the title serving as a metaphor for a love that is both irresistible and destructive, leaving havoc in its wake (“You spilt the milk, I lapped it up I let the push become a shove/and told myself this must be love …Let me tell you … you’ll only know he’s hit you when the lights go down”), touching on how victims of abuse often find it hard to free themselves  (“you ground my heart into the floor (like you always do) Still I’m crawling back for more (like I’ve done before)”. 

American singer Torres on backing vocals and Maddie Cutter on cello, the whispery ‘Madeleine’ addresses  the often industry manufactured rivalry between female singers  (“by mistake or design/They’ve made you feel the limelight can’t be yours as well as mine/It’s an art how they keep our names apart”), leaving them “scared to lose the apples if we dare upset the cart”, as she pleads  “Don’t let them make us strangers/There’s room for two Madeleine”.  

 

The longest track at almost six minutes, the steadily pulsing, liltingly sung ‘Atlas’ with its brushed snares and yet more trumpet draws on the figure in Greek mythology literally carrying the world on his shoulders to serve as a metaphor for those weighed down by burdens and keeping weakness to yourself (“buckle, bend when no one’s watching”) but not being stoical (“don’t be afraid to say that your back is breaking/You don’t have to do this on your own… drop your ego/Say you’re tired and let me take you home”) because    you need to let your voice be heard (“you were not made to spend your days kneeling/It’s time to stand and say what I know you’re feeling”).

 With a tinkling backdrop that includes   saxophone, recorder and flute, the softly swelling  ‘A Matter Of Time’ is concerns with the passing of the years (“A decade swings by/Like the sand that keeps slipping through hands”), and the need to seize the day (“Drive off into your years/Hard on the gas…there’s no need to look in a mirror/Can’t dwell on what’s passed”) because, as she points out, “the thing is with life/It’s just a matter of time…and we’ll never be this young again”.

Anchored by fingerpicked guitar  with violinist Will Harvey and cellist Heather Truesdall adding their contributions, ‘Table Four’ is another that touches on growing older (“I’m proud to say I made it out alive I got away and clocked a fair few miles”), the pressures of her  career (“some days it feels like I’ve been/Living fast and chasing day dreams/Now they’re catching up with me/Late nights and new faces/Names attached to distance places”)  and the siren call of home (“everywhere I’ve gone I’ve had a small town on my mind/You can try to run from where you’ve come from/But you can’t leave it behind”). Here she confesses “I know I fall in love too easy/Spread myself a little thinly/Give too much and be left wanting more” and that while “now and then I’ve weighed up quitting” she “never could resist an open door”. It ends returning to the title with “save a seat at table four/ Cos I’m not running anymore/ I’ve closed the chapter, locked the door/I know you’ve heard this all before/Believe me/Leaving isn’t easy”.

Featuring co-writer George Boomsma on acoustic guitars and mandolin, Will Harvey on violin and viola, Truesdall’s cello, Richard Walters on harmonies and a  brief but soaring guitar solo by   Christophers,  the slow waltzing, strings-brushed sway of ‘I’m Always Willing’,   a thoughts of home road song   (“sleeping alone/Waking up aching/I work to the bone/Rinse and repeat again/Thinking of home/Where you’ll be waiting/Or maybe you won’t… I swear I’m coming home/You say the word/I would trade everything/ Diamonds for dirt/To be in your arms again”), is the sort of thing you want to hear as you drift off to sleep to the words “I’ll try to do love right/ I’m not always able I’m always willing”. 

Featuring bowed guitar by Christophers, it ends opening on distant piano notes and rising to an anthemic bells ringing finale with ‘Could This Be Enough?’, a reverie about making it through life’s seasons as “we make the best of what we’re given/Far from hell but not quite heaven”  and taking the time to look inward (“Think I’ve been adrift too long/To notice what I’m doing wrong/Close my eyes to steer my breathing”, the sensuality of “unmade sheets and salted skin” offset by a metaphor of “bedrooms where the damp’s set in”. Conjuring the rush and ebbing of the heart’s stirrings (“love can’t always last the Winter/If only we were evergreen/Instead of August’s fever dream”), she asks “when did we both stop believing?” but also  “could this be enough for love?”. The final line sums up both the song and the album’s  thematic self-reflections with the simple “I’ve come to accept that perhaps part of being human is being a perpetual work in progress”. Long may she continue to refine that process.

SCARLET FANTASTIC, essentially Maggie de Monde,  return with From Montreal To Rotherham (Last Night From Glasgow), a typically eclectic stylistic mix that opens with the throbbing bass and poppy dance floor energy of  ‘Make Way For Love’  with its Chorus Of Friends gospelly backing vocals.  A previous single, ‘Time’ is a percussive beat David Bowie cover  (you know the ‘he flexes like a whore/Falls wanking to the floor’ one), taken at a narcotic-paced rhythm with Rick Pentecost’s piano, Adam Phillips on violin and a cabaret-style spoken passage. Anchored by piano and double bass,  with its pulsing melody lines, nervy strings and sudden stop start stabs, again drawing on her European cabaret influences, ‘Better Day’ is a call to escape from depression (“Darkness don’t carry me away/Let me see the sun for another day/This pain deep in my soul/Don’t let me fall into that hole”) and the awareness that “lest I should forget/I know I can be free…In sweet music I will find/Some peace to soothe my anxious mind”.

There’s a pair of songs that are deeply informed by the death, a few years back, of her husband and musical partner of 27 years, Leif Kahal, the first being the orchestral upbeat 80s pop (and more double bass) of  ‘Without Summer’ (“You know life without your love is like a year without summer/How can I live my life without your love without summer/In the dawn’s early light, in the garlands of flowers/I feel your presence remain, the dream is lasting for hours”), followed by her desert-sun slow walking tribute to her ‘Cowboy Guardian Angel’ with its echoey drums intro, chiming guitar and soaring, emotion-laced vocals as she sings “I hear you in the wind sometimes, I hear your voice in song/I wrote this one for you, forever never gone…Oh how we danced/To the tune of the wind, our crazy romance”. Heartbreakingly beautiful

Co-written with and featuring Steel Pulse’s Basil Gabbidon, ‘Fill Me With Joy’(with a melody that initially part reminded me of ‘Summer Place’) is another dreamy sway that speaks to the album being suffused with hope rather than pulled down by loss and grief (“Hush the mind, see what we find, and leave the soul to speak/Unspoken words, feelings of knowing/Blessed moments forever growing/Seeds of love are what we sow, mystic dream is how we know”) where she sounds like a cocktail of Winehouse and Piaf. Likewise, the repeated nocturne  piano notes and strings of  ‘Blossom Alley’ that begins like   Nick Cave holding hands with Joan Baez but then unfolds into a carousel oompah lurchalong and what feels like children’s voices on backing as she sings “I dream I dance with blossoms on the breeze/That leave us too soon but now is our chance to reach for the moon/To live to laugh, to love to dance, a little romance”.

If Weimar cabaret is one of her touchstones, it seems apt that the next track, co-writer John Walters from Landscape on vocals and Phillips on violin, another song of love and desire has her in a ‘Berlin Room’ (“I’m coming alive again, I feel your fire …I will lie with you again/In the moonlight on our sacred bed/You tell me you ache for me, you call me Goddess/a cosmic awakening, nothing more nothing less”), even if it’s carried by  Spanish swaying beats  intercut with soaring swirls into tango territory.

Co-written with her late husband with son Sean on drums, brushed snares, trumpet and finger snaps carry the snake rhythm ‘Injecting Thunder’, a sultry sung  retro dance hall swayer that again speaks to their story of romance  (“I was sitting in a bar in heartbreak city/When I first saw that face of yours/Through thick smoke I introduced myself/So you would be mine forevermore…The way you move your hips to the rhythm of the beat/Makes me feel butterflies”).

Isobel Cooper on cello and more tinkling piano phases, it ends with the irresistibly catchy near six-minute tumbling Eurythmics gone hymnal pop of  ‘Jesus Green’, the title presumably a reference to the Cambridge park, closing the album on soaring notes of bright hope and acceptance (“I think I knew deep down inside I run on instinct, helps me survive/How do we know what the future will be?/Just let go and live the mystery”), a song that can proudly stand alongside ‘No Memory’.  Fabulous and indeed Fantastic.

For his third album, The Bracken And Tread,  GEORGE BOOMSMA has taken his travels in Nepal as inspiration, documenting the journey and experiences in song.   

It begins with ‘Make A Start’, a lurching bluesy keys-driven  slouch about his  demolition therapy redecorating his late brother’s room, basically telling himself to off his arse and, as a songwriter,  “shed off those shoddy rhymes on brotherly love”.

Again referencing his brother, ‘People Say’  is a chirpy number, with a whistling bridge, about performing his last album live (“I don't want to bring them down, the singing's already sour”) and moving forward, leading  to the scuffed shuffle of ‘You Said’ from whence the album title comes, an unspoken conversation with his sister after deciding to do a therapeutic trek together  to “dust off the dead”.

And so, Kieran Towers  on fiddle and Charlotte Carrivick on banjo, he follows her to ‘Kathmandu’ which, despite the location, plays as a bluegrassy number as he speaks of being awestruck by the scenery.

The falsetto sung, plucked strings, dreamily swaying ‘David And The Elephant’ tells of a man from the Orkneys, and presumably a pachyderm, he met in Nepal who was “partial to the folkie, as well as karaoke” who also seems to have been there to exorcise old ghosts.

The handclappy, staccato fingerpicked ‘Ghorepani-on-High’ with its steady hypnotic drum beat is set in Nepal village of the title and tells of his arduous and lengthy trek   to the peak of Poon Hill (“One at a time, stairway of stones/And my aching bones, dog tired/It is a climb after all, then with a tune that might have been penned by Chris Cleverley,  it’s ‘4am’ when the top’s reached, the view soaked in  and the effort rewarded.

Electric guitar making its first real impression and  the rhythm and arrangement conjuring thoughts of Stealers Wheel , ‘Pokhara Line’ has him apprehensively taking a mind-broadening solo bus journey after his sister’s returned home, thinking of those still there home (“I see my woman on a Saturday night as I daydream my way to her”).Musically, it’s back to Americana with the campfire waltzing ‘To Bandipur’, a hilltop Newari town in situated between Kathmandu and Pokhara, and an encounter with a hustler guide who takes him there  ending with the near six-minute slow dreamy, piano-tinkled trudge of ‘Black And Blue’, him  lost at midnight in the  middle of Bhaktapur,  the smallest and most densely populated city of Nepal, and having something of a mystical experience (“Embered eyes pass by lined with gold/Still I hope like the fallen fly/I'd turn to witness spinning round/The emerald of the square/As empty as stone”) .

The physical copies have the tracks blended into each other linked by with audio clips recorded on his phone  in Nepal and electroacoustic compositions, creating  an  immersive sound design best experienced as a continuous listening flow.  Strap on your metaphorical backpack and journey with him.

 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2026

 

 

Rather like the current Katherine Priddy release, the latest advance single for the new album, The Bracken And Tread, about his journeys in Nepal, Make A Start sees GEORGE BOOMSMA taking a swerve away from his familiar sound with a strong Beatles psychedelic vibe to its narcotic vocals and woozy arrangement and circling melody line, as, painting a wintery backdrop, he sings about basically getting off your arse and doing something (“Thaw off and be thankful…shed off those shoddy rhymes on brotherly love/Come now my friend sitting by a winter's bitter end/Bare bones and heart sitting by a winter's work of art/One by one, tooth and nail, make a start”) rather than just keeping out the metaphorical cold.

Taken from the upcoming SCARLET FANTASTIC album, From Montreal To Rotherham, opening with echoing drums, the rhythmically slow walking Cowboy Guardian Angel (Last Night From Glasgow) is Maggie de Monde’s Bowie-inflected tribute to her late husband Leif Kahal, reflecting on their 27-year marriage.

His first release since 2020, Nuneaton’s CHRIS TYE marks an impressive return with ‘Getting Back To The Start’ (Little Dog Music), a sweetly sung, high voiced circling fingerpicked dreamy waltzer that speaks of heart weariness (“strung out again/

Tired of the daylight”) and the struggle to reset the emotional clock (“here in a state/Slowing down in a stalemate/Stalling before every move…Needing to be someone else…spend such a long time/Getting back to the start/And then you fall apart”). 

Following on from the Fuzzbox story come two more books, both available physically and digitally,  about Birmingham bands that operated on the fringes, one a memoir and the other, well,  a sort of biography wrapped in a detective story wrapped in musical archeology Written by Andy Houston,  Dead On It: In Search of Birmingham's Lost Band is a fascinating account of the titular Erdington band (initially Ded On It) who, in the early 90s, threatened to be the next big thing out of Birmingham, their music inspired by Prince’s deeper funk side (their name taken from a  song on The Black Album), the Chili Peppers, acid jazz and rock, embracing seething primal guitars, chest-throbbing bass lines and synths. They regular played jammed venues, but then they simply disappeared.

The book’s premise is that, in 2021 in the recently reopened Flapper & Firkin,  the narrator, music journalist Tom Carter, meets a mysterious stranger who hands him a cassette of a band called Dead On It, imparting no other information ither than he was the drummer. His interest piqued by the music, Carter embarks on a quest to find out more about the band, whose names he doesn’t know, and try and track them down.

What ensues is a mix of fiction and fact, real people reimagined as part of the story. Here I have to put my hand up and say that I am one of them, drawing on my days writing the Tapedecked column for BrumBeat and quoting my reviews of the band, to which end I come over as a sort of keeper of the scrolls, though sadly, while it has my career in music correct, I never lived in a  large Victorian house with a  purple door. Regularly cited in the book as the pundit with the keys to the quest, I confess to having a  smile at some of the descriptions and comments of my fictionalised self.  

Of equal importance in Carter following the breadcrumbs is my fellow BrumBeat writer Max Freeth who subsequently enters the narrative and whose reviews are also quoted along with various other writers who contributed to the mag and others of its ilk.

Illustrated with deliberately grainy black and white photos to add to the air of mystery, following press cuttings, interviews and fading memories, it slowly builds a picture of the band, the record deals that never came to fruition, their musical shifts in gear and sound, the gigs they played, mixing that with a lovely account of how they sent a cassette to Prince (they apparently did) and an imagined scenario of how that might have played out, discussing them with George and while  intrigued too busy to get involved. Whether he actually sent them an invitation to join the fan club and a merchandising catalogue is true, it probably should be.

Ultimately, Carter manages to uncover the names of the band members (Iain Reid, Chris Booth, Simon Lush, Andy Martin) and what happened to at least three of them after they split up, the book ending with lyrics to their songs, Houston summing it up as “exploring what it means to go off-script, flirt with greatness, and laugh at yourself when it doesn’t work out”.  It’s a quick and absorbing read that   captures the story of many a local band and leaves you wanting to actually hear the music, none of which, at present anyway, is available on line. Maybe that’s a project someone else might want to take up.

By coincidence, Freeth is actually the author of the other book, Ausgang:Scarred Lips,  an autobiography of himself and the band from his childhood in Winson Green and Cape Hill, through teenage years (comic books, kung fu, yoga, discovering punk, Barbarellas, etc.), art school, his first proper band The Solicitors (playing what he termed nagoy music) and the Kabuki, a magnificently unique bass-heavy outfit in a similar musical field to Alien Sex  Fiend and Sex Gang Children with whom I recorded a Beacon Radio session and whose solitary single, 1982’s I Am a Horse stands the test of time, and the subsequent formation of the goth-inclined Ausgang  alongside Kabuki bassist Cub, guitarist Matthew and new addition Ibo on drums.

They made their debut in in September 1983 at the Powerhouse, toured with The Cult and signed to Criminal Damage Records, their Solid Glass Spine single making it to 23 on the UK Indie Chart before Cub left to be replaced by Stu and the band moved to FM Records, releasing debut album Manipulate  in January 1986 before eventually setting up their own Shakedown label, briefly taking on the name Ausgang-a-Go-Go, a slogan a friend had painted on his jacket.

After a series of musical permutations, they eventually split in 1987, reforming in 2003, releasing the Licked album two years later and enjoying a whole new level of success with festivals and gigs in New York, Prague and Berlin.

Blessed with a seemingly photographic memory, Max goes into great detail, both about his personal and musical life, working as a journalist for BrumBeat and alongside Paul Flower (who, bless him, refers to me as his mentor) at MCP, the major Midlands gig promotors of the time. These days, alongside the current version of Ausgang (a new album featuring the song of the book title is in the pipeline), he teaches a form of yoga.

Taking chapter headings from songs or book titles, it is, as you’d expect a journey littered with familiar musical stories of  highs and lows and I was pleased to see mention of Max’s daughter Naomi, who released several singles on Gut between 1997 and 1999 but never received the attention and acclaim she deserved. She later became Phoenix, her band at the time featuring Dan Whitehouse on guitar.

As befits a band who once recorded a track about a  one-sided conversation between Max and his bed (Kabuki has done similar with Hair), it’s an at times bizarre story but, on account of his dynamic writing and incidental anecdotes,  never less than engrossing reading, another snapshot of how the city forged bands that may never have found mainstream success but became cults whose stories and influences have endured.

 

 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2026

 

Hailing from the North East but now Birmingham-based after graduating from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in June 2022,   while jazz-folk singer-songwriter LUCY MELLENFIELD  had a  mini-album, In My Short Time, back in 2020, Tell The Water, She Will Listen, released on Birmingham’s Stoney Lane Records, is her full length debut. Drawing on themes of fragility, love, loss and the turmoil of society, she plays grand piano, upright piano, Rhodes, keyboards, synths and acoustic guitar with accompaniment from Tom Henery   on guitars, Alex Collett-Sinfield   on sax, mandolin, kalimba and flute, bassist Josh Vadiveloo, drummer Jonno Gaze  and producer  Chris Hyson on synths.

Described as a musical snapshot of the last five years, she says it draws on  how, in her early twenties, she’s faced fears, battled with relationships, fell in love, saw loved ones suffer, revisited childhood trauma, experienced health scares, and raised questions about the frightening society we live in, with music, the water of the title, being her support system and means of communication.

 

Striking a theme of fragility from the start, it opens with the hushed piano-based Like A Feather, a lightly fluttering song about coping with family conflict, divorce and being pushed to choose sides as she sings “What team am I on?...I’m walking along the wire…Talk to my brother/He’s just another one caught in the game”.

That’s followed with the watery rippling Fact Of Life, the arrangement becoming fuller with drums, keys and brass, her soaring voice intimate and exposed, conjuring a mood reminiscent of a cocktail that stirs together Tanita Tikaram, Jacquie McShee and perhaps even Kate Bush, as she addresses relationship uncertainty and the need for clarity (“Am I a fact in your life?/Or am I just a passing fancy hoping that I’m yours/I will be okay if it comes to that/So please don’t be afraid to tell me how it is”).

With pensive repeated guitar notes and an uneasy brooding atmosphere against which her quivering and clear voice floats like the vocal equivalent of Millais’s Ophelia,  Paper Thin goes to the heart of an unpredictable, agonising love affair with themes of dependency, instability (“I’m on the brink of flying away in pieces/My cards aren’t glued

They’re loose, loose as stacked sticks/One little nudge and they’ll come crashing down”) and, again, the torment of uncertainty (“Will you be here tomorrow like you were today?

…your charms, they’re so intangible/Just like paper slipping through my fingers/I lay myself out for you/A soft bed of flowers where you can rest your head/But when I open my eyes, all I see is a bed for one/Instead of two”).

 

One of only three tracks that clock in under five minutes,  the fingerpicked Yellow Duck begins with the image of a lonesome yellow duck wading through a pond at night, the song evolving with nervy piano notes into a  reflection of  a young woman trying to find a solid rock amid life’s turbulent waters (“no one to confide in/Put up a wall, defence is her strength/Swallowing blindly everything that is left/The lights go out on this once lit fun fair/Push and a pull, pull and a push/A mother’s attention and a mother’s curse/Rippling, wallowing, shattering, scattering/Clinging on… Floating around/These days never feel like walking on solid ground”).

Again under five minutes, etched on hesitant piano notes, Orange and Lemons is a more upbeat love song (“Each kiss was just another moment’s bliss/Looking over the hillside, there was no doubt in my mind…Now let me wonder how a face as pure as yours/Ended up in my bed next to me…You made me smile like I’ve never smiled before…It was your voice that melted my heart/That now runs free through the valleys to nowhere”).

The first of six that push beyond seven minutes, riding a jittery pulsing rhythm the slow jazz grooved Remember This reflects back on childhood with “homely smells of corned beef stew/Hand cut, crinkled chips fresh from the pan/Kippers and some buttered bread on a Sunday” and how “she would stand in front of the mirror/In her cream white coat and bag stuck to her side/Perfecting her bright red smile/Before jumping into the car and racing me down the hill”), switching parents (“Perched on the arm of his chair/He would tell me I’m solid; what a thing to say/But he’d teach me to take pride in my words/And read me tales like the Selfish Giant”) before  the present makes its stark presence felt (“let me take your old frail hands/For you deserve the world, but age takes its toll… how I wish I could take you out for a dance and a bitter lemon/See you sit down at the bar/And entertain the crowd with your um cha cha”),  poignantly closing with “You let me see that love was true…Sparked a moment in my heart/That hangs like a piece of art today…Can you hear my prayers to you now?”

Only slightly shorter, another ruminative piano ballad, Ground Zero returns to feelings of being emotionally untethered (“all the faith I had has begun to dissipate”), both defiantly self-reliant and vulnerable (“I can walk on my own two feet, but I need somebody to join me through the folds/I’ve chosen a lonely road/A path away from home/I can’t escape now/Just got to wait for the snow”) as the poetic takes hold as she sings “fear grows like ivy on a house in disarray/Send me a sign…Feels like Christmas morning/Sipping chocolate on a carpet ride/Oh, but watch out for the white bear/He is known to tantalize/Feeding off your wonder/Dancing rings around your eyes”).

Edging close to ten minutes with glacial piano and haunted woodwind and brass notes conjuring a wintery nocturne feel, Why Fear The Night with its lengthy instrumental play out is steeped in nature imagery as it explores the world of dreams and the imagination (“Earth’s witchcraft begins work for tonight…Once the world is sleeping a young girl stirs/A strange sound seems to have awakened her/So she turns on her reading lamp and takes a glimpse outside/A fox’s eyes meet hers”). She urges “prepare to take flight/let go of your pillow/Creatures crawl out from their lair/Mysterious insects flitting in and out of the glare…Senses now aroused, the young girl takes a chance/Her night lamp by her side, she leaps outside to dance/She swoops below the moon who unveils her pretty face/And prances over roof tops, singing sounds of love and grace/let go and fly”.

Equally minimalistic and atmospheric, her voice, at times wordless, flowing across the scales, the languid, sax-caressed Breathing Sideways turns to social commentary (“Truth has no place here no more/Doubting our own kind…Some of us find it hard to stop the train/That we’ve found ourselves captive on/Caught on a trembling jet stream/That opens up a world of grave uncertainty”), a world where “Invisible warfare is everywhere…And all these stories, they give reason to doubt/And all these lies, they just give reason to shout”) but which has become the norm in which we live.

 It heads to a close with the sparse piano arrangement of Pillars with its thematic echoes of seeking safety in conformity (“If you dare stand out to face the rain/You will only find yourself in pain…I thought I was strong/Thought that I could speak my mind about what I believe in/Turns out I was wrong/I rely on numbers and agreement of others/But turns out that most of us do”). Singing “I urge to speak but all my reasoning is dried up from the dust of doubtful winds/And every pore is left to dry, left to quench the water denied to me”, it’s about trying to sort the truth from the clouds that obscure, rising to take on progressive rock colours as it concludes “Thoughts like iron bars are cast upon me…

Some plucked from the air and some are rooted in the soil/But if we don’t know which is which/We’ll believe none”) before the dying fade of the piano.

It ends with the two part combined 11 minutes plus At The Mercy, part I with sparse resonant bass notes and narcotic vocals and stream of consciousness lyrics (“Visceral reactions, responses, internal fights/Intrinsic fears like stabbing spears forging their way through/Psychological patterns, a web of intricate insecurities/Non-sensical, irrational, delusional/But human”) as, in a fight or flight, reaction she withdraws into herself  (“I lay battered, overwhelmed/Lost, scared/Vulnerable to the unexplainable/Vulnerable to the unattainable/It’s a reminder of this living vessel I am occupying”). It feels like an existential prayer to the elements find sense among the noise and chaos that afflict us emotionally, physically and psychologically, the lengthier part II pared down to just the barest instrumentation and the repeated otherworldly lines “We hold our hands up/We’re at the mercy of our insides” before it rises to a climactic swell.

A musically masterfully crafted poetic and at times metaphysical journey into and exploration of  the complex emotional synapses that shape our anxieties, needs and hopes in an ever shifting world of relationships and psychological pulls, this is a stunning and immersive piece of work that deserves to see her follow Katherine Priddy as the next Birmingham sensation. 

Talking of whom, her third and final single from the upcoming These Frightening Machines album, Hurricane (Cooking Vinyl) sees her spreading her musical wings for a very sultry, bossa nova flavoured track with Bond theme undertones that features Ben Christophers on electric guitar, bass. piano and organ with Simon Dobson on trumpet.

 

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.