John Napier is a man of many musical aliases and genres, one being THE SNOWFLAKES where he’s joined by Andy Miles and Becky Pickin from Grand Valise and Andrew Souter. Their new single on Bandcamp with its Sun Records homage cover combines Summer Days, a late 70s summery laid back McCartneyesque ballad (borrowing a musical phrase from the intro to Band On The Run) along with spoken passages that variously suggest Barry White and, later, The Streets. It’s twinned with Regrets with its retro Bond theme song style, keyboards more to the fore, vocals adopting falsetto notes and an ooh la la refrain.
Joined by Florence Brady on shruti box and backing vocals alongside Lydia Catterall, BENJAMIN DAVID BLOWER is in protest mood for his Hymns Of Disobedience EP, which features a clattery percussion take on the traditional civil rights movement song adapted from the spiritual Don't Let Nobody Turn You Round, the other two, written or re-written in 2019 around the October rebellion in London, has him in full Billy Bragg meets Pete Seeger mode with the spare environment/climate-changed What Shall We Do, the other being the equally Seegerish slow-paced five-minute strummed call to action and awareness amid times of darkness Rebel For Life.
Originally recorded for their 2012 Union album but never included, MAGGIE & MARTIN (the spectacular voice of Scarlet Fantastic’s Maggie De Monde and the superb piano work of Martin Watkins) release I’ll Always Remember You, a download EP of four covers that opens with a stunning version of Amoreuse that totally eclipses the Kiki Dee original, an inspired, slowed down, achingly sad piano ballad reinvention of Blondie’s Dreaming, a magnificent classical piano backed arrangement of Leo Sayer’s Dancer and top it all off with a stripped down version of Cat Steven’s Wild World. Essential stuff.
Following on from his two albums this year, DAN WHITEHOUSE gets into the festive mood with his first Christmas-based release, a rather fine intimately sung, piano ballad cover of David Essex classic A Winter’s Tale.
KATY ROSE BENNETT sees the year out 'You Are My Team', an inspirational ballad that, played on electric guitar with the vocals layered to provide a choral backing, is not just inspired by Amazons Prime’s gay baseball series but features lyrics constructed totally from lines of dialogue in the show. Katy writes “As a butch, sports-playing teenager in the 90s, slowly becoming aware of my sexuality, there was such little LGBTQ+ representation anywhere, other than in 2-dimensional caricatures - I clung to k d lang in the sea of heteronormativity. Seeing this beautiful TV show as an adult had a profound effect on me. I wish it had been there when I was growing up. It would have saved me a whole lot of shame. This song is a love letter to A League Of Their Own”. She knocks it out of the park.
