MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MAY 2026

DOMINIC CRANE has been playing gigs around the area forever, but he’s finally got round to recording some of his songs. First up is the rhythmically loping Beatlesque So Moseley with its circular guitar pattern which  tells the true story of meeting the woman who would later become his wife, when he ventured into  retro clothing shop called Houghtons looking for a pair of antique spectacles and she was working behind the counter.

DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER   returns to his musical rather than essayist mode with the self-released We Are All Here, a suitably dark and enigmatic affair that variously conjures thoughts of Cave and Waits with its brooding musical textures and poetic lyricism. Given his writing as a theologian, religious imagery is never too far away, the album opener ‘We Are All Here Part 1 offering “God dwells in tents where the beasts sing…God dwells here with everything” and ending with the resonant lines “I wear the past like a tattered robe/Sing into my empty cup/And blow smoke into the firmament”.

Heavy drums wade through the sound effects of the growled Blessings with its raw social commentary on isolation and alienation (“I have no ground/To build my home/I live with outlaws/In HMOs/The streets are hollow/And the eyes are sallow/Mushroom clouds of mutually assured aloneness”), breathing political fumes with “I have no innocence/And neither you my friend/Sat there with your judges hammer/We’ll all be judged in the end/How long should I live/Around the quiet edges/Of your belligerent power/And your stolen scepter?”, the repeated quote  "Eulogete tous diokontas" being is a Koine Greek phrase from Romans 12:14 which translates as "Bless those who persecute you”, the line “I'm not a piece/In your culture war/And all your enemies/They’re not mine anymore” a riposte to those who would seek to use difference to divide.

 Expectations has a circling tribal chug and again lyrics that speak to a sense of nihilism (“I've gambled everything you gave to me/And if there were any left/I’d pay it back to you, I swear/But there ain’t”), again turning to Chrisian imagery with  “What else did I expect/From you yonder hung up bleeding/And where there’s suffering/I know there’s none that you’re not feeling”.

 A shuffling rhythm with a rap sensibility, the vitriolic A New Thing again talks of culture wars “gathering you up like bricks to build platforms/The sheep are shorn/Middle class indignation/Shopping for religion/When was progress not self-righteous?”, spitting out “fuck the demagogues” in a call for some kind of rebirth or reset, the mention of hyssop and  sage an oblique reference to the Crucifixion. That said, “the book of privileged suffering is writ with words all stole from those who have nothing/All the amenable gods are following their owners like dogs and sniffing their cushions/There is no god who defends your opinions…I saw God making merry with your enemies/Sitting outside your cities in squalor/Wherever you dump your shit/Wherever you deface your land and build a new margin” definitely has whim of fire and brimstone preaching to it.

The density of his words, the metaphors, allegories and imagery are challenging to decipher and interpret, but generally these are songs that might be reasonably described as taking an anti-authoritarian stance, calling out the corruption of those in power (“You can do what you want to who you/Like if you make the paperwork tally up right/The pen is the sword for they who outsource wars”), the  boot heel of the privileged on the necks of the weak and poor but woven with a reckoning (“The age to come is beneath your feet/Hidden in the soil where nobody planted it/Resting, buried like treasure under snow and rain./Underneath the rotten leaves/Underneath your dreams again/Breathes like a lake of time welling on the underside”), most notably finding expression in the eerie notes of the semi-spoken The Boot Is On The Other Foot Now, even if you might need a   guide to navigate ancient historical and Biblical references to Moloch, Aeola Capitalina and Rachel.

There’s time when  it plays like dark poetical sermons as with lines like “The world of men is violence/And violence calls for law/And in the law’s raised hand/All the violence it punishes is reborn/Lawyers are alchemists/The noble and small/And the small and wicked shall inscribe this/Violence upon the forehead of the unsanctioned poor”, while punctuating songs with Greek phrases such as  "Kai epi tes ges"  in Open Door translating as  " upon earth"  as in the Lord's Prayer.

The Money’s Gone is another that adopts  a rap style, albeit of  a more society apocalypse content (“Bank cut the rates like a melon/Damn those/Boats/Damn those wire-cutting mountain/Goats/Damn those Sapiens sowing their/Oats/Damn those bat-shit coders/Law is eating its own hind-quarters… Ay all the money’s gone/Hark, your dragon’s calling”).

Choral voices backing, it comes to a close with the marching rhythm  of  Come On Down and an intoned call for coming together  (“come on down/From yr lofty towers/From yr wearing grind/From yr wasted hours/Oh come on down/From yr endless grinding beef/From yr many wars/From yr castle keep/Oh come on down/It’s friendly soil…take a seat/Around the table/And let us reason/A costly fable…Here, sit ye down/Ye also are summoned/See, the horses roaming free/See the river running”).

It ends circling back with the drone of the murmured, choral swelling  We Are All Here Part II and its repeated solace  refrain “We are all here/It's alright/Don’t harm yourself/Reconcile” with its healing kiss and cool waters.

I don’t make any claims to have grasped more than the surface of what he’s singing about , but the cumulative effects of immersing yourself in his words and the miasma of his music is one of the year’s most distinctive experiences.

Written and recorded by David Benjamin Blower

Guitars, production magic and design by Chris Donald

Vocals and steel tonged drum by Rosa Blower

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN APRIL 2026

DAN WHITEHOUSE  strips things right back down to just piano accompaniment for  Only Love, the ballad title track of his forthcoming similarly styled album. Recorded live in one take with pianist David O'Brien   improvising the    cascades of notes over  Dan’s vocal, it’s rooted in how time with his son in Japan is  limited by 90 day tourist visas and is an unguarded confessional of the guilt, the necessity, the spiritual longing between a father and his child and the boomerang whiplash of moving back and forth.

So titled because it features songs he used to record for YouTube in the bay window of his flat, with music production by Avago,  ANDY LLOYD  releases  Bay Window  (DTI Records), the opening track being the somewhat warm samba sway of Soul For The Summer followed by the slow heat hazed soulful dreaminess of Into The Light that taps into his inner Bill Withers. Changing styles, Another Day Late For Love is a scampering folksy fingerpicked number about growing older but never moving forward where the words tumble over each other while Indian Summer tips into more of a bluesy rock groove with strong hooks and electric guitar. Taking the mood back down, For The Faith is a soft falsetto vocal fingerpicked shuffle with dampened drum shuffle  and harmonica, digging into more fiddle folksiness with the lazing, loping rhythm of One Man Band with McCartney undertones. Indeed, there’s also a tint of a Mull Of Kintyre strumming sway on the harmonica and piano-backed country balladeering Loneliness Will Never Let You Down, just one of the album’s many highlights.

Deep circling acoustic guitar notes, percussive clops and breathy vocals anchor Morning song, things moving to a close with the folksy shuffling vocally double-tracked (sounding like a duet) Count As One, strings-swathed piano 80s power ballad These Days Of Love, the melancholic slow walking Away From Me and, finally, fingerpicked and strings-soaked, the wistfully lovely Too Sad To Say Goodbye. This is a magnificent album and in any just universe, he’d be up there with the Ed Sheerans of the world. Available on multiple streaming platforms, do yourself a favour and track it down. It’s already one of my albums of the year, it should be one of yours too.

Headed up by Ash Hemming, JJ ASH are a reformed   incarnation of  a trio that first made waves in the 90s, announcing their return with Irish Lover, a terrific moody and menacing stomp and clap folk rock persuasion  single that moves from opening acoustic  strum to  the steady drum beat and electric guitars as the first person narrative tells how a young lad

unwisely hooked up with an older woman (“she was the age of my mother/16 when I met her/Oh, quite a man when I left her”) who happened to be married to someone away with the Irish army (the IRA, one assumes) who is now back and looking for payback. It’s a hypnotic listen, though perhaps a more emphatic ending might have been better than the gradual fade.

Though born in Liverpool and raised in Shropshire, Carol Decker has strong Birmingham associations going back to her time fronting The Lazers before hitting the big time with T’PAU. Still professionally partnered with guitarist Ronnie Rogers, the band have   maintained a high profile despite their chart star waning, with regular 80s package themed tours and the release of comeback album Red in 1998 and its 2015 follow-up Pleasure & Pain while Carol has been a  regular stage and screen presence, including taking part in The Masked Singer.

With a lineup of James Ashby  on lead guitar, bassist Luke Burnet-Smith, Pete Faint on keys, drummer Dan Western they return now with Be Wonderful, easily one of their strongest and most immediate albums, kicking off with the pounding, driving, guitars blazing Read My Lips and Carol in firecracker vocal form, taking the pave down slightly with the snakily pulsating Miles & Miles before hitting strings-washed piano stadium ballad territory on Showdown. The 90s groove kicks back in with Casual Remark with its mid-section acoustic solo before a standout Stupid Love Song provides the second big ballad with string section and a steady walking beat rhythm and bassline.

The lyrically positive and upbeat  (“Be good/Be happy/Be sad/Be sorry/Be brave/Be foolish/Be wonderful”) title track’s another punchy pop rocker with driving riffs and hooks anchored by a solid bassline, the synth, guitars and piano providing the flow for the midtempo soaring  Echo, the final stretch opening with  the funky groove of Run  and closing up with, first, the smouldering bass-led,  almost whisperingly sung World On Fire and, finally, opening with hesitant piano notes and coloured by strings, the soulful balladeering   end of a relationship (“never listen to your heart because it will always find the part of you that’s lying) Say Something  that, fading away on melancholic strings, has the same quality as China In Your Hand and could easily have been a Whitney Houston hit.  The front cover sports a photo of  a 10-year-old Carol, the music carries the heart and soul of the woman she is today.

 

Marc Lemon returns in his VILLAGE GREEN SOCIETY guise with a new vocal remix of the energetic and punchy White Plastic Moccasins, a song about “a company director who banishes his wife, who is also part of the company, to the kitchen to make coffee and fetch his fags” that  wears its Kinks (and Jam) influences on its sleeve  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvva3fs6mxo)

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.