Over the past 20 years, singer, songwriter, music teacher and, briefly, my landlord, JOHN NAPIER has released, physically and digitally, a vast number of singles, EPs and albums, variously under his own name or as part of an array of stylistically diverse collaborations such as Waler, The Line Managers, The Snowflakes, The Midworth Ramblers, Jeremiah Weeps and Italo Disco outfit Real Velour. To mark the anniversary, he’s now released ‘White Elephants – A Compilation MMIII – MMXXIII’ featuring ten of the one and ten of the other.
In solo terms, featuring Becky Pickin’s electric piano and Andy Miles’s guitar, it opens with slow walking ‘White Elephants’, an ineffably sad number about a father’s sadness that his children, his white elephants, are unwilling or unable to leave the nest and have lives of their own, achingly captured in the lines “Well I'm proud of my sons/But it hurts to have lived with them alone for so long/I wish they'd move on… I'm out of ideas/And I've tried to look out for them for so many years/As time lingers on/Despite my best efforts, they're no further on… They're bold and devoted, gentle and kind/Made of only the best parts of me/But each day they're wasting away on the vine”.
Rather more upbeat is the optimistic note of the folksy picked flickering campfire singalong ‘I Don't Know How I Know This’ (“Things may get much worse but someday I can tell/The world is going to wake up to itself/And be at last in perfect health… When all of those who've tried to drive us back/Will suddenly run out of track”) as he sings “I believe in paradise, here on earth not after life/And isn't that worth sacrifice/To see the best of us revived?”
With a guitar line that evokes ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’, the title track is about falling short of your expectations (“Faith tells me there is something more to me/But fate has not dealt me the hand I thought I'd see”, but still holding fast to a determination make it so (“Well I may not be the man I thought that I was s’posed to be/But I still believe the answer lies in me/Cause I made a vow so long ago that I intend to keep/And I won't give up until the world has seen/Oh, the man in me”). He sings “What makes you think that you are special?/What makes you think you are the one?/When there are millions more just like you/Who think the world has got it wrong”, with the observation that “You don't deserve it and you sure as hell ain't earned it/Perhaps it's time you moved along”, but it comes with an implicit faith in the capability of the individual to do something bring about some kind of revolution because “change/Is never gonna happen without me”, even if you don’t yet know how.
That’s followed by the fingerpicked and harmonica colours of the gentle McCartney-bruised title track of ‘Human After All’ while, from ‘Things Are Much Worse Than We Had Thought’, the whistling ‘Heard It On The Radio’ is another cheery little number about infringement of liberties as he sings “we are not blind, were just not tough enough this time”, of replenishing empathy with apathy because “our hearts’ not big enough this time”.
Of a rockier persuasion with chiming guitars, the patriotic (in a good sense) ‘The Beauty Of England’ was the B side to ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ (and also on the Waler EP ‘England Now!’), the strummed, brass tinged ‘False Economy’ was a 2020 single, the same year producing ‘I Don’t Mean To Sound Cynical’ with Selina Blakeney on backing vocals from ‘Tombstones’, the Laurel Canyon-flavoured ‘Here I Am’ dates from 2022, with a Streets-styled spoken verses and a country romping chorus ‘Living On The Cutting Edge Of Retro’ was a 2021 single with The Humdrum Express, though I can’t find the source of the chugging country swaying ‘Annie’ but it’s 2006 or earlier. I’m surprised though that he didn’t include either ‘Not Your Enemy’ or, to my mind one of his best, ‘I’m Going Out For A While’.
The collaborations kick off with The Snowflakes’ moodier 70s Beatles rock feeling ‘Regrets’, followed by Waler, his electronic alt-folk duo with Vincent Gould, and the Spaghetti-Western flavoured ‘One Horse Town’, and then punk-rap outfit The Line Managers alongside bassist Andy Kearney and drummer Olly Forrester with The Black Post a rant against the stagnation of post-millennial culture set to a relentless punk, garage rock groove. The Midworth Ramblers are a duo with Mike Nicholson and ‘Apple Trees In Bloom’ is a hypnotic funky folk steady rhythm groove from 2023. Real Velour contribute the bubbling electro ‘Let Me Know Tonight’ and the disc’s rounded off with the doomy strummed, droning ‘”The Death Of The West’ by Jeremiah Weeps, of which I have no background info, and John on vocals for The Dissenters’ slow 70s cosmic psychedelic ode to ‘Mushy Peas’. (www.johnnapierbandcamp.com)
An early taster for October’s ‘Surface, Echo & Sound’, EDITORS release ‘Rush’, a surging number which frontman Tom Smith, who plays mandolin on the single, says has two people in a bar talking about life, drinking and reflecting on its highs and lows (“we talk about religion, swallowed up by a bar scene/I'm not walking on the water, illusion of the light/When you learnt to meet my gaze, there were halos in your eyes”) and explores the "idea of finding comfort in people close to me".
