MARC LEMON returns with another ace excursion into echoey, reverb-lashed guitars American 60s pop with How Many Thousand Times (“did I end up where I started from”) that more than earns an honorary place on any Nuggets compilation. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMspyPcgk4)
Good news that the GERRY COLVIN BAND has a label deal with Crocodile Records for his two upcoming albums, Past Present and Crescent (live tracks from the theatre show and new numbers) and Last Christmas Needle, meanwhile there’s a fourteen track remixed compilation titled Johnny Cash Shirt, the title track now featuring harp player Billy Jay and train rolling bookends.
The compilation, curated by Crocodile, ranges across Colvin Quarmby and the Gerry Colvin Band and, for those who’ve not yet discovered him (and longtime fans wanting refresher), offers a handy introduction to the variety and quality of his songwriting, not to mention how effectively he puts a song over. It opens with the title track followed by The Bell off Back & Forth, the same album also yielding the achingly plaintive, fingerpicked bruised heart of The Man She Left You For, the transcendentally exquisite Watching Feathers Fall and a live take of their show staple closer One More Week (originally on Colvin Quarmby’s A Short Walk To the Red Lion), all with Trish Power, Lyndon Webb, Michael Keelan and Jerome Davies.
The line-up also features on the circling fingerpicked loveliness of My Country and the hard scrabble Rainbow Season from Six Of One Half A Dozen Of The Other as well as Clown Shoes (a jaunty song about county lines) and Paranoid from Fully Functioning Windup Mechanism.
Delving back into Colin Quarmby days, you get The Ocean, Go And Ask Somebody Else and I Look The Same But I Have Changed off A Short Walk To the Red Lion and the vaguely bluegrassy A Rival from Town And Country Times, the collection completed by the emotionally powerful Broken Man from QVC with Marion Fleetwood on violin and a radio interview with Billy Jay who presents a show on Ferndale Community Radio in Plymouth. The Gerry Colvin Band play Stratford on Avon Playhouse on Nov 16 featuring the reunion of female backing trio Asia Blue.
Forty-five years since she made her recording debut, TOYAH continues to be a significant musical force, balancing nostalgia-based shows with new material that underscores her unique sound and stylings. Having scored another Top 30 album in 2021 with Posh Pop she returns now with new single Roses In Chain, co-written with longtime collaborator Simon Darlow and featuring husband Robert Fripp providing signature guitar to the production. A song that explores the intensity of relationships, it has a suitably driving, implacable marching rhythm of almost Floydian feel underpinning her distinctive vocals and the flourishes of rumbling prog-rock before stripping everything back for the just bare piano unaccompanied final seconds.
