MIKE DAVIES COLUMN NOVEMBER 2024

A quartet from Stourbridge comprising Julia Disney on keyboards, Odilia Mabrouk on violin, percussionist Lisa Westwood and  Jon Hazelwood on bass and guitar with all three girls sharing lead vocals, CATCH THE RAIN  made their debut late last year with the Tapestry EP, their music variously embracing  contemporary folk, classic Laurel Canyon vibes and  Eastern European, the title track being  a five and half minute fiddle and piano driven waltzing Weimar cabaret and Balkan cocktail  with fairytale lyrics about the heart’s fateful tapestry. That’s reprised here  on their debut album Alder Grove alongside the dreamy piano-based, chorus cascading, lullabying Broken Wings, Disney on soaring lead, a song with a refugees hint about having to leave home and   navigate life anew (“We were children fighting in your war/Far too young to leave the safe safe shore”) that sounds as though it could have come from a Willy Russell musical. Also  resurfacing, again featuring Disney  and also of a stage musicals bent  is the jaunty Love Is Fine  aimed at telling depression and sadness (and anyone who brings you down) to bugger off (“There is just nothing left to say, so go away…All that you do is hold me back/And I'd like some time to/Fly, a while, without you, by my side”), and Mabrouk on lead, their eponymous, piano-based signature tune about mental turmoil  (“the rush and the roll that’s inside of me/ Is the call of a siren’s warning”) and  finding recovery   (“I need to catch the rain and slowly find myself, again and again/Or soon I’ll lose a sense of where and when I am”).

It opens with the first of the new numbers, Disney on lead for Sailor’s Tale which, with its jittery piano and swaying melody draws on familiar folk imagery of seeking adventure, here framed as a conversation between a young woman looking to see the world and a sailor who embodies her dreams of being carefree, who dispenses some wise advice: “He said only settle down/If that is where your heart is/But don't let yourself drown/Don't stop before you've started/Or you'll only look around/Always hoping for excitement/And you'll never leave this town/And you'll never find your true love”. So, basically, follow your dreams, then rather than live with regrets. Keeping a maritime note, The Sea with its rolling piano notes, percussion waves, whistle and slightly Eastern European tang mingled with a Pentangle spray has Mabrouk singing about  how the sea brings out all emotions within us, their impact lingering even when we’re not directly embracing its power (“when I leave you are with me/I close my eyes so I can be/Closer to you the one I know/The inner music of my soul”).

Themes of escaping percolate the album, specifically so on the jazzy rhythm (a definite Brubeck touch to the bass) and pulsing folk colours of Time To Fly with Disney on lead singing about leaving a toxic relationship (“Throw all you have at me I’m not gonna break/Wait for reactions well what a mistake/I’m done with your web of confusion and lies/I’m building a wall you see each day brick by brick/The more shit you throw at me the more the wall sticks”).

Mabrouk on lead and Disney on aching violin, things rein back in for the delicate fingerpicked title track, a close harmonies song about the calming and restorative power of nature amid life’s chaos “ever we’ll wander and ever we’ll meet, safe in the alder grove” while also sounding an environmental note about climate change (“A thousand joys are bearing me/Through verdant fields and cedar trees but all I can, think of is 'when, will, I lose you'…Anger-weary overwhelm, trapped in a world-burning game, when will we love, when will we truly, care, for our home”).

There’s a jazzy waltzing Eastern European rhythm again for the near six-minute Kings and Queens, a social commentary protest song of sorts about the them and us divides in society  (“For you are the kings and the queens, and we are the pawns, we’ll do as you say/What choice do we have but to play this old game, we’ve been here before, we don’t wanna play”) that then reverses the situation (“ if you get the chance to talk/Through muddy waters you’ll clumsily wade, our mind’s already made/For we are the kings and the queens and you are the pawns you’ll do as we say”). A few seconds longer with Westwood’s sole lead, Ode To The Overthinker is pretty much summed up by the title (“There once was a girl with a busy mind/Filled with thoughts of every kind/She found herself to much frustration/In a constant state of contemplation/She'd start by thinking just one thing/But off that thought five more would spring/And each of those would spawn ten more/And none the same as the one before”) that concludes “Mindfulness is key, they say/Give me mindLESSness any day!”.

Disney’s final lead comes with Keep on Walking which they says explores the experience of long and arduous hikes but that’s just a metaphor for persisting in the face of adversity (“my rucksack is heavy/From the weight of it all/And I’ll keep, keep on walkin’/In the hope that one day/A cool breeze from the ocean/Will come wash your shadow away…For the voice of the mountain/Keeps me sane, keeps me strong”).

It ends with Mabrouk and the percussive strum, keys and chorus harmonies of Time To Listen, a song about   taking time to listen yourself and your own   needs   and putting in some self-love  (“When I was young I knew what I wanted/Guess I didn’t have a clue/Loving another would heal my heartache/Now I know that isn’t true/Started to do some digging, didn’t like what I found/Now it’s   time to turn it around… This time I won’t be walking away/From who I really am”). Well worth getting a good soaking. 

BIG SPECIAL and JOHN GRANT join forces for Stay Down Lazarus (SO Recordings), described as a “big moan about the social promise of elevation and rising up, that doesn’t really exist for most people” as it explores themes of deception and being forced to conform to a   societal expectations, a track that was the first to be written for the debut album but felt somehow lacking,. Grant fills that lack adding his mighty voice to the chorus refrain while the others get on with the rapping (“new posters for old flicks”), thundering drums and electronic storms.

The every innovative and experimental BONFIRE RADICALS return  with Flywheel, a five-track EP of swirling musical colours and shapes recorded live in the round and drawing on British, Greek and Balkan influences alike, propelled by their urgent rhythm section. It kicks off with the musical mayhem of Zalizome/Den Born Manoula M, a fusion of two Greek traditionals with metronome on speed percussive rhythm, clarinet, Sarah Farmer’s frenzied dancing Celtic fiddle, indecipherable vocals and Emma Reading’s blistering guitar crescendo.

Penned by clarinetist Katie Stevens, The Lost Pick, a lament for an awol plectrum, takes its influence from Bulgaria folk with kaval and recorder dancing around a 13.8 groove. Then, in distinct contrast, Michelle Holloway sings reedy lead with Stevens, Farmer and Peter Churchill on harmonies on a brooding arrangement of the traditional Love Is Teasing that edges more towards trance-inducing Eastern doom metal than folk.

Farmer’s responsible for the burbling wobbly, scat electronica Sarah’s Muffins with its epileptic drums and ba ba baaing vocal interjections sounding like The Swingle Singers having a meltdown. It ends with a brief reimaging of bassist Churchill’s Satsuma Moon off their last album here reincarnated with accordion as Squeeze That Satsuma. Barkingly wonderful.

TABLE 4 1 is Birmingham-based singer/songwriter Harry Bott, former lead singer of the Cigarette Social Club, his dreamily waltzing pop meets folk new single  ‘Day &Night'  "a sombre outlook on love - the highs, the lows, seen through the eyes of a damaged romantic".

Progressive-rock/folk duo ARMCHAIR GODS return with a new EP, Ritual, out now on Bandcamp (https:// armchairgods.bandcamp.com) with other platforms following in January. While visiting the White Peak in the Peak District, they came across a young woman meditating near the central cove of a Neolithic stone circle,  obscured from view from the entrances, a sacred place of ritual. On leaving, she left behind a token, a garland of wildflowers placed on a large fallen limestone slab encrusted with moss and lichen, weather worn by   time, This and subsequent visits to ancient sites through the seasonal festivals of Mabon, Samhain, Ostara, and Beltane, many believing these ancient stone circles served as early cosmic observatories, their alignment with equinoxes and solstices heralding the changing seasons and the procession of pagan festivals through the Wheel of the Year. Thus, the tracks named for the festivals, this music for pagan celebrations. Celebrating the Autumn equinox and harvest, Mabonopens things up with a cosmic swirl of  keyboards drums and guitar, proceeding to Beltane the Gaelic May Day festival,  the mood calming down to a dreamy haze with stuttering, repeated acoustic guitar patterns, drums and virtual  brass. Out of seasonal sequence here since it takes place in March,  named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostra, Ostara marks the spring equinox, the track with military snare beats, tinkling piano, orchestral keys and timpani returning to the  cosmic swell before gently ebbing away on strings. Coming from old   Irish and meaning 'end of summer', Samhain is synonymous with Halloween  and, the longest track at almost six minutes (with a video on YouTube) is suitably brooding and robed in shadowy musical shapes with its steady, relentless drum beat and the hovering ghostly keys and wailing guitars. Something to celebrate indeed.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2024

Featuring bassist Simon Smyth, the founder of The Smyths tribute band and fronted by singer James Schofield, TV PINS are a 5-piece from London and the West Midlands, bringing a British  edge to the sound of West coast Americana, filtering influences such as Supertramp and Crowded House through 70 Americana. Riding a  chugging guitar rhythm, new single Daisy Saturday Night, a taster or their forthcoming album, Aircutter, is a catchy alt-pop ode to  festival goers, old school ravers, and people who refuse to grow old and is quite likely named for guitarist Duncan O’Neill’s wife.

 

Now based in Bristol, folk instrumental duo THORPE & MORRISON self-release their third album, Grass & Granite, the title a reference to fiddle player Sean (Morrison) and guitarist Harry’s (Thorpe) countryside upbringings in Ayrshire and   Suffolk and their former adopted home in Birmingham (the cover also shows a house carved into the standing stones in the Outer Hebrides from whence Sean’s grandfather came) and reflecting the pastoral and industrial aspects of their sound. Taking in traditional English, Scottish and Irish tunes as well as self-penned material, it’s a glowing testament to their musicianship and virtuosity drawing on themes that explore both longings for home and moving on to new experiences, the lively opener, Big Skies & Water Meadows (which incorporates Damien O’Kane’s Castle Rock Road), an invocation of the landscape where Harry was raised in a cottage beside a water meadow. 

Original numbers also include his more ruminative fingerpicked Something New written for friends embarking on journeys into the unknown, the fiddle-led Coast To Coast inspired by the journey of two friends across America, the one proposing to the other on reaching their destination, while a jazzy pizzicato fingerpicked and dancing fiddle Merlin the Wolfhound relates to an overly amorous, Guinness-drinking Irish wolfhound and , continuing the playfulness, the rhythmically choppy Claudette’s Last Dance is a fond farewell to the duo’s faithful Peugeot.

On the trad front, there’s the self-descriptive Wedding Marches, a pairing of two Danish tunes, the fiddle pulsing Causeway Joy, inspired by the Outer Hebrides and combining The Oysters Wives Rant and Ales Engelska by Danish cittern player Ale Carr, with Scottish slow air lament Put The Gown Upon The Bishop closing up shop.  There’s three vocal tracks, two traditional, The Girl I Left Behind Me (incorporating two fiddle reels), Sovay, sung by Michelle Holloway from Bonfire Radicals, and rounded off with Sean’s Gizmo’s Tunes, and a slow waltzing cover of The Pogues’ Rainy Night In Soho with plucked and bowed fiddle. They’ve been gradually building a hefty reputation on the folk circuit over the past five years, this firmly cements them in the major leagues.

Fronted by the recently joined Tilly Clarke on vocals, TILLY & THE DROLLS are a Moseley-based quintet whose music encompasses rock, jazz, blues and folk (their covers range from Wade In The Water to I Run, Seven Nation Army and Valerie), the latter being the case for the marching beat, vocally soaring anthemic new single The View From My Window (Second Glances) featuring some fine, muscular guitar work from Steve Ashby.  

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2024

Based in London but with Birmingham roots, KEO are a post-grunge four-piece anchored around Anglo-Irish brothers Finn, on vocals and rhythm guitar  and bassist Conor Keogh, the sons of Dave Keogh (Kehoe) well-known to 80s BrumBeat readers as the frontman of the much undervalued Surf Drums (check out These Seven Years at www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Y7EaLPCGw) and now author of Accidental Gangster , a  series of books on his late legendary club owner (Barbarellas, Rebeccas, The Cedar Club, Eddie’s) father-in-law Eddie Fewtrell. Though not following in his jangly guitar footsteps, with its circling guitar line, quivering, husky vocals and  slow and steady drumbeat new single Crow, an emotive number written by Finn when a family member was suffering from cancer and about his fear of losing them (“I’d rather watch you and bleed / I’d rather cry over me”). (www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-Wr5giWag)

MARC LEMON continues to mine a successful seam of lo fi 60s psychedelia pop on Crystal Falls And Shatters with its echoes of Syd Barrett, the Velvets and The Soft Boys, the track, recorded in one take, a response  to the current xenophobic state of the western world as he sings “I pity you in your servitude/And now that I myself am free/I'll never hate you as much as you hate me”. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_KZ6yU7rM)

WILLIAM WILLIAM ROGERS has found something else to sing other than the Yellow Pages, Hot House being his jangly Morrissey meets 70s folk new single and a taster for upcoming album Pond Life. Featuring   bass, drums and organ, it’s a perspective and age shifting wry reverie of a schoolboy summer  when “Semen spilled in the goosegrass” and Wolverhampton was “sizzling like Hanging Rock” and, while getting “an F in hard knocks” a dream that “one of these days/You're gonna smash all the clocks” and “one of these days/I'm gonna burn all the maps”.  

LITTLE JUKE are a new West Mids four piece comprising   Alex Ohm on  guitar and vocals, bassist Hannah Maiden, guitarist Stephen Ashford and Tom Crowson on drums, their debut release being ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’, a dreamy, cinematic mingling of folktronic and indie that opens with nervy piano and airy psych vocals before pattering drums and guitar arrive, the track building in power and intensity as it reaches its strings-enrobed finale. Impressive stuff, if they’ve more like this, 2025 could see them making substantial strides.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN AUGUST 2024

 

While he never had the high profile solo career promised by his 1985 debut album Dangerous Music and Journey-esque minor hit single Heartline, or indeed his heartthrob good looks reminiscent of the young Rick Derringer, Wolverhampton-born ROBIN GEORGE went on to earn an illustrious reputation as sideman guitar with the likes of David Byron, Phil Lynott, Robert Plant, Magnum and Glenn Hughes. He sadly passed in April, but now has a posthumous release with   VIX FUZZBOX (whose solo album You he co-wrote and produced) playing and singing  on his final project, the utterly infectious upbeat summer anthem that is Summertime Reggae Rule (Sing Song Records), also coming in Swing and Acoustic Electric mixes with the video on  www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0cSshi4toQ. Utterly atypical of the music he was known for, but a celebration of life and living that deserves to afford him the belated send-off he deserves.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JULY 2024

 

From Birmingham but currently seeking  fame and fortune in London, LILY CLARKE  makes her debut with the self-released  The City (www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzDyvdDkAkk),  an essentially simple but structurally complex number with strummed acoustic guitar backdropped by sound samples (train, seagulls), muted drums and what sounds like woodwinds that speaks of insecurity (“I wanna be someone else most days”), lack of a sense of purpose and the need for someone to lean on (“when I feel like nothing you’re the stableness I know”). It’s already picked up several very positive online reviews as well as a BrumRadio  Track Of The Week, so definitely a name to keep an eye on. (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082586691322

Mixing, mastering and playing everything himself, Castle Bromwich-born  LUCA SIMIAN wrote his new  single Waving Goodbye  back in 2022 but it stayed gathering dust until it started getting solid reactions at live shows. So, he wisely resurrected it, the track, a delicate simply strummed ballad of offering support in dark times with spare piano notes that warrants favourable comparisons to Damien Rice. He started making music when he was 8, making his debut album, Hummingbird, when he was just 14. He’s now 18, has played two sell out O2 Birmingham shows and does a damn fine version of Elvis’s Little Sister. Expect great things by the time he’s 21.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JUNE 2024

 

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.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MAY 2024

 

Originally from Northallerton, North Yorkshire, but now based in Birmingham and currently to be heard on the new Katherine Priddy album,  George Boomsma  marks his album debut with The Promise Of Spring, eight songs reflecting on the passing of his brother, Tom, to whom it is dedicated.

 A gradually swelling, dreamily ambient two-minute instrumental with wind effects intro precedes Fallen before his vocals, echoey and wispy make an appearance as he sings “Should I listen closer to the world that's spinning round?/What love could ever be heard?/Nothing of a question when my life is here without/A notion of anything so human…Do they even notice that my life is here without?” launching a metaphysical trajectory that continues throughout the album. The title track, forceful drums and dramatic acoustic guitar, follows, something of a contrast to the Nick Drake references that have greeted previous releases, a song that speaks of both loss (“I close my eyes to see you again”) and rebirth (“I will be open to a thawing in my own sweet time”) from a frozen life.

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?