Taken at a walking beat with brushes snares, chiming keyboards and bass pulses, the sweetly crooned Lily Of The Nile is especially lovely, both melodically and lyrically (“I am lost, certain days when I fear in a bitterness of ways/No need to be kind, she moves in and holds her heart with mine”), fully warranting the Elliot Smith comparisons he’s accrued. In contrast, 2 + 30 (as in birthday) is a scuffed, driving, rockier track with a train wheels rhythm that opens with the striking image “Empty as a kettle in denial” and speaks of the realisation of what loss means (“As a sister she begins to see/Older than the elder she will be”), leading into the ringing circling guitar pattern of Cashmere Grey, a Wurlitzer-coloured evocation of “winter's rain and snow” and “a silent cry filled with sorrow”, declaring “I will hide my inhibitions/From the family and all friends/As I seethe my own reflection”. From the slightly Laurel Canyon shades there, he gets positively rock n roll for the strident swaggery Johnnie Walker Guy, varying 50s shades of Elvis, Jerry Lee and Cochrane decorating the memory of his brother (“He was a cigarette smoker, the wheezing kind/Dominoes and poker, he cleans up alright/Never playing by the rules or a part-time smile/And I called him my brother, the Johnnie Walker guy”) and how “all the doctors and all the nurses, the boy had them charmed”.
The mood subdues for the nimbly fingerpicked Passing The Silence, the second to contain the image of a broken door, and again heavy with the weight of loss and grief (“Here in the house where I am supposed to feel safe and so warm…the year brings such a summer, so why does the weather always feel frozen cold?”) and the need to, as he said earlier, thaw, “Taking the time off to show I'm someone breathing, don't stare at the ceiling”. It ends with Open Curtain, another rhythmically urgent number with its percussive clopping undercurrents, ringing guitar waves and flowing, fluid and tumbling vocals (for some reason I had echoes of Pentangle and Traffic’s progressive folk in my head), the track, as the title suggests, about the mixed emotions of finding catharsis of grief through shared music and song (“When everyone everywhere else dreams of life/For how could I undertake all grief to say?/The numb and encumbered perpetual grey/So how can I open the curtain, the curtain is already open/Now someone has offered a way I should try/Just give it a go and have nothing to hide/That's all well and good when you've got things to share/No man alive wants to be heard in despair”. The vinyl release adding snippets of his childhood family recordings providing bridges between the songs, it’s a hugely personal affair but one more than capable of touching bruised hearts and souls sharing similar wounds, while also encapsulated within musical settings that reach out beyond the introspective fragility you might have expected, a reminder that fire can often be a far better commemoration than ice.
Incredibly, it’s been 45 years since they released their debut album and to mark the occasion, UB40 have released UB45, a collection of seven new numbers and seven revisited versions. Of the latter, Food For Thought, Red Red Wine, King, Sing Our Own Song, Cherry Oh Baby, Kingston Town and Tyler are pretty much identical to the originals, albeit the latter two are shorter, Tyler by some two minutes. Of the new material, Champion, the vocal debut of new frontman Matt Doyle and featuring sax from the late Brian Travers, was the official theme for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, it along with Home (with its themes of bigotry and racism), Trouble, Fool Me Once, Say Nothing, and covers of Bill Withers’ Hope She’ll Be Happier and Brenton Wood’s Gimme Some Kinda Sign, are all evidence of band re-energised , recapturing that fresh reggae pop feel that launched them to fame 45 years ago.
Following on from last year’s live album with the Slapdash Cowboys, ROB PETERS goes totally solo for Dream Songs (Wafer Thin), a collection of songs that all began as dreams in one form or another, either at night or ideas that surfaced while out with friends. It’s a decidedly psychedelia-tinged rock affair, the vocals sometimes treated to give a dislocated feeling, as on the opening bluesy lurch Dream On (“woke up this morning/This song arrived”) with its catchy title chorus and existentially asking “what do babies dream about, if nothing then why dream at all”. Again with a repeated title refrain, Blue Is A Flame is another chugging psych-rock number, part Bowie, part Lennon, part Canned Heat, even if it references Roxy’s Do The Strand along with talking of getting his other half a cup of tea, and an echoey vocal mid-section that might have come from The Idle Race. It slows the pace down for the Bowie-esque slow steady basic strum of A Parody Of Femininity, a number that belies the satire of its title (“I don’t want to save the world/I just want to save this girl”) slowly building to a Man Who Sold The World crescendo of chaos that isn’t as . A circling drum pattern and keys set the stage for the staccato rhythm and jabbing refrain My Rendez-Vous, another dip into organ-based 60s trippy psych-blues, while a resonating circular electric bass riff underpins the pulsing The Light Shines, a love song of sorts (“I don’t mind of you stay, I don’t mind if you leave/ I don’t mind if you pray/I don’t mind if you believe…but I feel you should go away”) with prog-folk blues shades and another hook friendly chorus.
An appropriate Latin flavour to the drums and the jerky, snaky tango rhythm Frida And Diego spins the story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, sung from her perspective and fear he won’t leave his wife. Initially stripped back to an acoustic strum and throaty vocals, Waiting For A Sign (“it’s guilt that gets me out of bed as day is dawning/She’s been away for hours to work this Sunday morning”) slowly builds in keyboards intensity before finally ebbing away again at the end.
The longest track at almost nine minutes, Forever In Your Dreams is a musically schizophrenic affair, the first part with its repeated riff and overlapping vocals all melodically soaring 70s prog-pop with twinges of Floyd, The Beatles and Traffic before, around the three and a half minute mark it slips into a dreamy keyboards reverie and from there develops into a lengthy psychedelic quasi-orchestral instrumental with background choral vocals and the title repeated like a mantra. It’s lyrically enigmatic in a Syd Barret way too: “Plantacine Boyd/He can’t keep other people’s visions /Constantly annoyed at the lack of time and consideration…Cannot hang around with strangers/Lives for the void and Molotov cocktail danger”.
It ends with the nakedly acoustic strum, cellphones aloft, linked arms sway of One More Dance with its mingling of resignation and hope (“What if I don’t want to leave you/What if I can’t say goodbye/What if there’s no other reason/Was it all a lie/We can meet all our friends/If we try once again/And we’ll see in our lives/We can dance one more time to the end”. With an album launch at the Red Lion in Kings Heath on May 15, it’s another solid marker in a disappointingly undervalued musical career.
Back when he traded as Death By Stampede, Joseph Hicklin produced some outstanding recordings, often with a Neil Young influence, that never got the exposure or success he deserved. These days, writing some of the most powerful lyrics of the decade, he’s half of BIG SPECIAL alongside ferocious drummer and DJ Callum Maloney on a self-declared mission to “explore the bleak and beautiful honesty of a nation in an ever growing state of depression through personal experience, poetry, perspective as well as varied and creative music”. As such, debut album Postindustrial Hometown Blues (So Recordings) does the job nicely with its frequently concrete-pulverising cocktail of punk and rap as evidenced by previous singles Shithouse (about mental breakdown, both individual and societal), This Here Ain’t Water (about mental health and addiction and the way the media criticises the working class), Desperate Breakfast (the depressing, dehumanising nature of the daily grind) and the slightly poppier propulsive Trees (“Life dipped and came back with a flurry/Whilst he had/One hand on the weed/And another on the money”. These alongside EP cuts like the rumbling Dust Off/Start Again (“The poets and the artists now work in the banks/The radicals have spare rooms and paired socks/Take ya piece and give thanks/For your bolts and your locks/After all it's not yours”) with its Eastern European textures, I Mock Joggers (“Because I'm insecure about my weight/I should be out running/But I'm always running away/Or running late”), Black Country Gothic (“The black-country monks/Gargling hymns and eating the body/Of some budget Christ/With dirty children/Off-white angels/Kicking feral pigeons/And picking up half smoked nub-ends taught to never look up”) and what might called their power ballad iLL (“I'm looking in the bag I've brought us/But there's only paracetamol and peanuts/That's not enough to feed us/A bottle of blossom, a can of sardines and a sliced loaf can't free us/We need codeine and Jesus”). These are all gathered on the album along with new tracks the spoken For The Birds (“We were supposed to be young/Now the old roads are paved with graves/The birds flew off with my days/Everyone is building without purpose/And I'm here smoking on a fat lip/With a cold toe, counting strays”, the outstanding, big-voiced huge anthemic pandemic despair closer DiG! (“I'm just trying to get us to the sea/We planned a holiday years ago/I don't know if we’ll last another summer indoors/We've been through a lot y'know/But we haven’t seen anything together/We don't want to be here forever/We hope to leave before we're old”), the almost hymnal echoey My Shape (Blocking The Light) (“I am not well/She can see I've gone mad/I can hardly tell/She's says I'm pretty when I'm horny and sad/A whole year without a day’s work /I've a calloused spirit/I can't just be a number again”), Butcher’s Bin (“I'm just meat, dreams and gob/Hang me on a hook, some singing hog”) and, the closest to Hickling’s earlier sound, the depression-themed recent single Black Dog/White Horse (“They sanctify the gold but not the tin”) with its blues foundations and spaghetti-Western whistling. I once described him as a bear of a man with a bear of a voice. It great to see he’s finally got success in a bear hug.
Thirty years ago, MICKEY GREANEY went into Abbey Road with producer John Leckie and the Enigma String Quartet, who he’d met at the Birmingham Conservatoire, to record the follow-up to his debut Little Symphonies For The Kids, a critically acclaimed album produced by Bob Lamb and featuring Steve Craddock and Simon Fowler from Ocean Colour Scene with Steve Ajao on sax. Turning down a major deal from Parlophone who didn’t want to sign the band as well, a second set of sessions took place in 1996 with John Cornfield in Cornwall but things just fizzled out and the tapes were left to gather dust, accruing a mystique as one of the great lost albums. However, finally, after John Rivers worked his magic on Leckie mixes (the original masters were lost), a visit to Prague to record with the Czech Philharmonic and Symphony orchestras and a huge amount of perseverance and encouragement, it’s finally seeing the light of day as, borrowing a John Lennon quote, And Now It’s All This via Seventeen Records.
It opens with the Quartet in the solo spotlight for Overture before proceeding into the strings pulsing, sweeping, emotionally soaring Sweetheart with its romantic poets inspired lyrics (“Love is a flower that slayed me/Out of the earth that made me/Where I return, wishing for your sweetheart/Love never came with a key to possess, turning for your sweetheart”).
Switching to piano, strummed guitar interspersed with surges of electric, Crazee Dazee, one from Cornwall, is a bruisedly sung brokenhearted ballad (“You’re walking on the roof, you’re asking me for proof/And in my own defence, there is no evidence/You’ve got me on my knees/again, I beg you baby please again/Be careful with my heart, you’re tearing it apart”) with McCartney colours to the vocals, the subdued melancholic tone carrying through into I Want To with its curiously sado-masochistic lyric (“I, I wanna need you/Starve you and feed you/Feeling like this time might be the first time/I, I’d even hurt you/Just to know, just to know, just to know/To know I can reach you/I, I wanna choose you, worship and use you”), building intensity as his voice soars to the rafters.
Another relationship in crisis (“I can’t help it if you knew it/You’d be there to see me through it/Seems the more we learn the more we lose/I could learn to laugh about it but you know I truly doubt it/Seems the love we lost took more than the love we gained”), It Ain't Easy again has a McCartney persuasion, here as a hugely melodic pastoral acoustic ballad that also hints at James Taylor. Then insistent keyboard stabs open up the infectiously poppy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with its ooh la la la refrain and philosophical acceptance (Today I learned to live with my defeat/A simple smile, a word can bring me to my knees…Today I learned to question my belief, the thing I held was true has moved beneath my feet/I think instead I’ll chase the love that once I fled”); Beatles yes but also shades of Roy Wood.
Somewhere between Tim Buckley and The Moody Blues, the quiveringly sung atmospheric Sympathy And Lines is another majestic and moody number with strings and what sounds like woodwind again underscoring the emotional pulse, turning to the acoustic strum and piano of the plaintive, empathetic, compassionately understanding Carl’s Song (“You couldn’t last another day without her/I could be wrong, I’ve been wrong before/Oh but I’m sure, that’s why I’m telling you/She isn’t trying to hurt you/You should know, when she’s all alone, all alone/Thinking about the way that it used to be”), a number of timeless quality and one of his finest compositions. The seven-minute Look At Me Now with its strings and background female harmonies is (think Coldplay minus the bombast) a slowly building swayalong anthem (“Look at me now/see how I’m dying without you… all my seeds have opened, all my leaves are grown…see I’m blinded without you”) that should really be heard in a darkened stadium lit by cellphones, keeping it sparse with just the voice and guitar of the Cohenesque emotional spine-shivering desperation of Stop Breaking My Heart that picks up the same lyrical thread (“Think of me constantly, think of me more, save no emotion, keep nothing in store/Bend for me, pray for me, send me away, make me a stranger or beg me to stay/And if I’m asking more than you can do, stop breaking my heart, fools never leave, friends never part”).
Textured by a lengthy woodwind coda, the seven-minute No More has a bluesy lope, contrasted by the following airy West Coast pop of Nowhere In The World before its epic finale with the 11-minute bonus track operatic opus Venia Veda Requiem, scored for piano, brass and strings, Mickey exercising his falsetto, the song touching on Within You, Without You but perhaps more readily reminiscent of the Bee Gees’ ambitious baroque pop Odessa although the variegated musical textures also embrace the pre-glam psych-folk Tyrannosaurus Rex in its final stretch.
Had this been released when it was recorded, it might now be occupying a similar pantheon as Sgt Pepper, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Days Of Future Passed. Belated, perhaps, but it easily gets a free pass to the ranks and should deservedly elevate Greaney from the ranks of cult obscurity to be recognised as one of the finest songwriters and craftsmen of his generation. The question being of course, after 30s years, what about some wholly new material?
