Potentially the band’s final album, DEXY’S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS sign off with Love, Kevin Rowlands once more joined by Sean Read and Mike Timothy with Jim Paterson providing three cowrites. Lightly coloured by strings and horns, as the title suggests love in different forms is the main concern, although the bookending My Life In England, served in two parts, reflects on childhood memories of growing up in Wolverhampton after arriving from Ireland with his parents (“ I thought they said meet when the schoolkids called me mate”), though Part Two has him launching into an invective about the state of the world as he spits out “This world’s so fucking crazy, and innocent people being starved. We’ve got to stop this madness; it can’t go on no more. Our humanity is dying while they suffer over there. People being slaughtered, our governments don’t care . . . Rise up people in England”.
All that vented, it proceeds through the piano-backed swing-jazz grooving You’ve Got The Love which basically just repeats the title over and over, the poignantly tender stripped back soulful Once A Man, Twice A Child about reconciling with and caring or his father in his final days and, voice soaring, the 60s soul influenced You’re Alright sending a message of love to his grandchildren telling them to be good to themselves and be kind. You could heard Tom Jones sing this.
Underpinned by swirling organ and steady walking drums, I Want To Be Holding You is his Christmas love song while, a lament for a lost love, the cello pulsing I’ll Always Love You comes on like a Bond theme song.
Electric piano guides a dreamy bluesy Van Morrison shaded cover of Tim Buckley’s Strange Feelin’, relocating the lyrics to London and Wolverhampton, coming to the end with the beats-driving, tempo-shifting falsetto-voiced soul (Northern and Detroit) of It’s Over Now which feels more upbeat than the lyrics would warrant. Finally, prior to the England reprise, is Old Love, a wistful piano-led, strings tempered slow walking rhythm musing on growing older (“l hate getting old/It happened so fast; where did it go?/They don't see me/They just see my age”) while feeling the same inside (“I know I look different/But I feel the same inside/I have the same insecurities/ That I had when I was a child”), pondering on love in the autumn years, reflecting how, when he was younger, he wondered if oldies “fancy others their age”. He concludes, “I don't want to think of myself as an age”; looking back over his career I think the better word is timeless.
JOHNNY FOREIGNER venture into concept album territory with the typically sonically chaotic Forwards! which, taking Birmingham’s motto as its title, puts the city’s often controversial history and heritage under the lens, from the Lunar Society and Priestley Riots, through post war brutalist redevelopment, to the current era of strikes and misguided patriotism, drawing then and now comparisons with a wider national perspective.
Throughout the album punk trio Luxury Nan Smell take on the role of The City Elders with backing vocals that interrupt, question or comment on the songs Bryn Bowen, appears as The Lords of Change, embodying the landlords, lawmakers and civic powerbrokers who shape the city.
The brief piano jabbing Foreword with semi-spoken words and background tumult sets the scene as they sing “I am riding Watt’s engine thru ragged centuries of progress… These machines don’t work for us, they work us, furnace fouled by rust, alive between the diamonds and the dust, this town never trusted us…I’m the last of my line still holding/My last name on a blue plaque on the crumbling ruins of the wrong building/I sleep to the sound of hammers, but in the end, the Rea will rise again”.
Battering the ears and mentioning St Martins, Deritend, Digbeth and Great Hampton Street, The Remnants of The Lunar Society leans into the chaos, more musically complex than it initially sounds, setting up the events of the clamorous The Sacking of Fairhill House which addresses the Priestley Riots of 1791 directed against religious dissenters and sympathisers of the French Revolution that the home of Dr Joseph Priestley.
Opening with whistling, urgent and pulsing, The Concrete Collar takes its title from a 1970 tabloid quote about the brutalist Manzoni redevelopment of the city centre (“Bulldoze the bits that the Luftwaffe missed”), regarding it as a choke hold and which obliquely also pertains to Spaghetti Junction, wittily nodding to the criticism of the former library, famously referred to by the then Prince of Wales as a ‘carbuncle’.
The drum-belting ‘The City Elders Refrain mentions suspicions fires burning down listed buildings (“they’ll say it was kids but we know better than that”), notes of optimism sounding on the intricately picked and, initially, musically calmer The Rea Will Rise Again, Kelly Parker singing in the voice of the river (“I brought the boats and the boats bought the factories and the factories bought the industries and the industries buried me …Some day the Rea will rise again.”).
The tumult in which that ends carries over into The New Navigation, which steals from the 18th century song, Birmingham Lads and, addressing the bankruptcy in “the city of a thousand cuts’ with no light ahead “where everyone who can afford to lives, when everyone who can afford to leaves” while “the banking clans…take a museum, add a station./Fast train back to the capital with the fire-sale rights to it all/Leave us betting on the guilt, but that line ain’t getting built” and, born into debut, you’ll be paying it off until you die
The stabbing propulsive The Great Work turns its attention to thuggery in the name of patriotism, “ the frightened mob with a Union Jack” as they rail that “normal men don’t siege hotels, form faceless flag cop street patrols or go shout at boats again”, repeating the concrete collar metaphor as “the Rea runs red with rust and shame”.
It ends on hopeful notes with Our City Elders Reprise that simply repats the lines “When we build again, we must learn from our mistakes, build a city that makes our grandchildren proud.”, musically moving from lower to upper case vocals. It ends with the brief calm, soft and simple acoustic strummed yr ideas that takes the form as a semi-spoken love letter from the city to those who can revive the glory days “I was yearning you would move here. …all the debt don’t bother me, if you still believe in big dreams/I would build a factory, and fill it with yr machines/I love you, and yr ideas”. Ever forwards.
THE TWANG tease next year’s album, Bring Yourself, with the somewhat Oasis-sounding Something To Someone’, sounding a call for self-belief (undoubtedly fuelled by singer Jon Watkins working through the loss of his wife to cancer and a subsequent break up with fellow writer Phil Eltheridge that almost led to the band’s collapse) in its soaring chorus “Don’t try to be everything to everyone/Take it from me, it’s a waste of time/Just trying to be something to someone like me”.
DAN WHITEHOUSE is in meditative mood for Only Love (Want To Know), a stripped to basics album about fatherhood, absence, and presence recorded live with no overdubs with jazz pianist David O'Brien reharmonising and reshaping as they went,
never playing the songs the same way twice and mostly written in Minatomirai, a hyper-modern district on Tokyo Bay in Japan where Dan spends 90 days a year on a tourist visa to be with his son.
It opens with the tentative piano notes of Bird of Paradise which uses a flower as a metaphor for commodified intimacy (“I tried to be discreet, parked in another street …
Just another lonely soul you welcome in”), exploring loneliness and finding peace in what the arrangement brings (“No matter how many lies/I hope you realise/Behind the vice/You’re my bird of paradise …and for a moment there I found some peace in war”.
The title track is inspired by what he calls the boomerang relationship with his son (“Only love leads me away from you/Only love guides me back") but applies to any relationship where distance divides, capturing the experience in the existential yet physical poetic image “I carve your name onto my forearm/It’s a performance no one likes/You say you love the taste of my blood/And we both know this to be a lie”.
The album features two covers, the first a sublime, melancholic reading of Harbottle and Jonas’s Wild Goose , transforming its call to seek freedom and dreams into willing his son towards wildness and self-expression. The second cover, Spaces, is by his manager Katie (no relation) Whitehouse, a song written for her daughter as a pledge of support in troubled times of mental turmoil that translates perfectly to his feelings for his son.
The longest track at five-and-a-half minutes, A Thousand Lives shares a similar sentiment in as much as its about freeing yourself of fears, doubts and depression and being in the moment (“There’s nothing here to be afraid of/These people they have my back/And my fears don’t jump out of the bushes/As they once did /Yeah I’m pretty sure I’ve cleared my path /Of any and all obstruction/And I can share and celebrate what is happening now …and I can smile with you again”), the lines “ He knows where I am/He can hear my voice/I won’t lay awake I made my choice/We can dance through the night a thousand times” again relating to the album’s father-son bedrock.
Taking inspiration from Phillip Glass, whom he follows on social media, the instrumental Mina Glass, built around stillness, repetition, and quiet awe, arose from noting a post by the composer from Minatomirai, the view from his window looking almost identical to his own, the title nodding to his name but also the character in Dracula, Glass having composed a new score for the 1931 horror.
His 90-day annual reunion inevitably is shadowed by the realisation that he will eventually have to leave and fly back home and, written in Tokyo, Every Brick confronts that pain and speaks of acknowledging rather than distracting himself from that grief and plays as a tender love letter to his son and a hope for a future forged from their experience ("I hope that someday you will see the light and find the house that all this built/It’s got your name on engraved on every brick/And you can be yourself, whatever the hell that is” as he vows “I will watch I will wait/My shoulders broad I’ll always carry you/What you give me I can take/I know we’ll find a way to bury this”.
It ends, by way of a somewhat thematic departure with Are You There? a song inspired by a real murder, the ghost of the dead father vising his child on their birthday (“I’m sitting next to you, and asking how do you feel?/So blow out your candles, on your special day/Make a wish and I will always stay…She made me an angel for you - now I’m always there (watching over you)”) but also reflects on the darker sense of feeling like an observer in your own life. There’s nothing here to have you singing or dancing along to, but in touching the heart, Only Love’s labours are most definitely not lost.
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