MIKE DAVIES COLUMN APRIL 2023

Sporting an Orbison hairdo and shades, MARC LEMON keeps them coming, his latest up on YouTube being the reverb heavy, Velvets/Syd Barrett-influenced shoegaze chug of Lighthouse, an ode to a visionary and rebel  (“they say that your ideas are an anachronism to the thinking classes/They are sheep to be sheared/Much of what you've said and done reveals a deeper truth/One they have obscured but you have made clear”) that uses an image of a rusty Ford Corsair as a metaphor for society (“A fragile entity you work to save/Are both beyond repair”). (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUqw8T6wWmA)

Recording as SHY FACE TROUBADOUR, singer-songwriter Tony Willé self-releases ‘The Train’, a folksy Americana piano and guitar ballad about the loss of his brother some years back, a musing on the previous nature of time and the realisation that when it’s up then the train is never late and “all our tears and prayers couldn’t slow it down”, the lyrics managing to reference not only The Rolling Stones but Mickey Channon, who played forward for  Southampton, and represented the England national team in the 70s, scoring over 250 goals alongside the poignant refrain “I don’t have a religious bone in my body but I believe in love”. (www.shyfacetroubadour.bandcamp.com)

Awash with drones and interlaced with readings adapted from the Bible, The Book of Bare Life & Returns - Full Liturgical Edition, subtitled  Praying the Psalms in the Anthropocene  (the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on our planet),  is the latest from  DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER, one he describes as “songs based on psalms, deep time, anarchy, the agricultural revolution, the domestication of the horse, the industrial revolution, oil, walls, ruins, wilds, kindness, wine, waiting, and the dreadful otherness of god”.

It opens with To and End, a  drone and spare guitar accompanied ode to mortality and the peace of accepting sung like an old work song blues,  moving into the sparse plucked accompaniment of the eco-apocalypse prophesying Sing O Hills (“Let the hills sing the song they have been keeping/And the waters clap their fierce ancient hands/Let the hills sing the song that’s down there sleeping/Because its coming”) and followed by the eight-minute Happy Be They, a prayer for the downtrodden and lost (“Oh harken to our hurt/Behold and enfold/The worn out faces of the earth”) and the peace of those who “know ye’in the warmth of the sun and the soil”.

Six  tracks are spoken passages set to atmospheric instrumental backing, varying from 50 seconds to the four minute early dawn purity of Ascents, while elsewhere the semi-slurred The Earth is Full (“Break all the ceilings to the floors/Let all things be silenced and stilled in awe/Hear the wind my Loves/Know ye the Fear upon the heights/Know all the stars beyond the whirring lights/Light your prayers my friends”) is what Beans On Toasts might sound like had he trained in canonical singing with lines such as “The Kings shall not be saved by all their wars/Nor armies saved by all their saddled horses” very much of an Old Testament persuasion.

Eco themes and exploitation of the earth are present again on the slow and measured plucked rhythm and echoing vocals of  A River (“If the black gold burns/And the wheel yet turns/And the States keeps friends/Who pillage in their violence”), continuing in the quasi-lullaby reassurance of The Gentle Strong (“Fret ye not, little heart/At the wheels that want and take and hurt/O forsake their heartless rage/For the wheels shall all lay down and be covered in moss/And the trees shall take back all their walls/And the gentle strong shall inherit the land”), one repeated with Why So Sad? (“These wastelands have an end/Ye shall praise again”) in its call to remember the joy before the despair (“I remember/Walking midst the crowds in the streets/All toward the house with dancing feet/And the procession was all/All’s a festival”) that would seem to have its roots in the idea of the Second Coming.

Calling Billy Bragg to mind, the tranquil and quite lovely The Knowing with its pulsing rhythm and intermittent piano notes is another eight-minute piece, here about finding peace in trust in the “song of the God-in-love”  (“With the wine that flows down the mountainside/And every creature eats from the loving hand/And every creature rests on the loving breast”), again calling out the despoliation of the land (“wherefore this butchering the soil?/So may it perish from the earth”). The final ‘song’ being the chiming notes of the sparsely accompanied Unholy States, a blessing that speaks to a rebirth of nature: “Resting bodies where the dwellings are singing/Bow thee low to meet the clear spring/Unmake the walled unholy states/Open up the goats’ lonely gates/Blessed be the soil that creates and waits”. It comes with a short essay (physical with the CD, pdf with the Bandcamp digital) on the Psalms, the Anthropocene and Doughnut Economics. Blower may be a theologian, but you don’t have to be of any religious persuasion to appreciate the beauty of his words and music, but it might help if you share his concern for the fate of the planet.

From Haiti via America and now living in Birmingham, Creole singer-songwriter GERMA ADAN has self-released ‘The Women Of Dan’, watery blues-folk guitar accompanying her softly sung vocals on lyrics taken from Audre Lorde's poem The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors, a celebration of the female warriors of Dahomey as featured in the film The Woman King. (www.adanproject.com/about-me).

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2023

FYFE DANGERFIELD resurfaces after a long absence with new track and video Shook, a drum-led slow march beat  rhythm festooned with electronic beeps and squiggles on which he furtively sings “call me Shook/what are you?” like something out of a creepy children’s story that circles enigmatically around a theme of loss of identity (“i got so involved in your ghost stories/now i can’t even see the path before me”) and mental health (“richter scale anxiety/what the hell’s become of me?”)

Following her recent album using just unaccompanied treated and layered vocals, KATY ROSE BENNETT goes full on experimental   with the sonic manipulations of Dissolution created as part of her time as one of Drake Music’s Artists-in-Residence, a musical journey through grief and loss, to understanding that’s might be described as Bjork and Radiohead filtered through a Laurie Anderson lens and the work of Stockhausen. Constructed entirely from samples of Katy’s voice, looped, layered and sonically manipulated to emulate percussion, converting lyric texts into midi keyboard patterns mapped to vocal samples,  it comprises five parts, each representing a stage of the grieving process, based on the Kubler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She reflects on the grief experienced resulting from Functional Neurological Disorder, a disabling, long-term health condition, and the consequential sense of loss of identity and potential.

As you might assume, it’s not one for the car stereo, but requires full immersion to appreciate the nuances and indeed the wry humour evident in lines like “what if I eat more spinach, what if I eat more fish, what if I drink more water, what if I drink less gin” on Dissolution III. It opens with a  disorienting soundscape, revisited on the eight-minute Part IV and closes with the choral/hymnal-like tranquillity of the seven-minute Dissolution V. About as far as you could get from her Songs Of The River Rea, it’s a bold journey into unknown waters and astounding evidence of her progression of an artist not afraid to take chances in the pursuit of her music. 

Now settled into Bolan spelling mode, MARC LEMON turns is focus to the plight of the homeless , mental health  and depression in the simply strummed  Night Shelter, a song written from a dark place with the title carrying a bitter  irony (“the gentle cloak of death”), the track ending with a children’s chorus singing Silent Night (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvxNcrChDLw)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2023

 

From New York, but currently living in Birmingham, THOMAS TRUAX is an art rock  experimental songwriter and inventor whose past work has seen collaborations with Jarvis cocker, Duke Special, Richard Hawley and Terry Pratchett as well as an album  interpreting music from the films of David Lynch and writing  a score for a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. His tenth album, Dream Catching Songs (Blang), sees him joining forces with Siouxie and the Banshees drummer Budgie, while also crediting his self-made mechanical drum machine Mother Superior.

Featuring animal howls, the languorous, muted twang title track opens proceedings, initially semi-spoken before slipping into a narcotic croon as he sings “Heart be strong/This night might be long/Be brave, hold on”, the drums making their presence felt with the spoken  noir Everything’s Going To Be Alright (“We try to play a game of poker with an incomplete deck/Between the booze and the takeaways the kitchen is a wreck”) with its synths, raspy guitar, urgent sung chorus poppier refrain and references to William Shatner, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Coco Chanel and Priti Patel. Birds & Bees goes all clattery rockabilly  in a celebration of sex (“Daddy always said you’ve gotta watch out for them floozies/Momma always said you’ve gotta watch out for them floozies/But I like it”) while, with its staccato clipped guitar riff , blurping synths and rattling drums, The Anomalous Now is another talkie track where lines like “Swearing in Hungarian, strange cravings for bananas/Fear of strangers/And general mild discombobulation” can’t help but bring David Byrne to mind as he introduces the ‘band’  (“First off we have the wonderful Mother Superior on mechanical percussion/And here behind the human drum kit, our very special guest star: the one and only Budgie/Joining us with noises from the beyond,  my long time business partner The Hornicator/And of course here in my arms, let’s not forget Hank the Guitar”) while Free Floaters is more of a laid back Lou Reed with a lovely image of clothes  dancing on the washing line (“A sheer white skirt, red shirts from France/Some polka dotted underpants/Blowin’ in rhythm in a laundry line dance/Their undulations leave us lost in a trance”).

Seagulls caw over the intro to the relatively mainstream love song balladry of A Wonderful Kind Of Strange (“I'd become resigned to nothing more/When I washed up in my bottle on to your shore”) with its military cum Spector drum beats, to be followed by the mechanical instrumental chimes, harmonica and drum splutters of Origami Spy Arrives In A Paper Boat and a return to skewed rockabilly for the loping, finger-snapping A Little More Time that owes a touch to the melody line of Sixteen Tons.

It ends with, first, the percussive distortions and rumbles of the cool swagger of Big Bright Marble, an ode to the wonder of the sun that we’re orbiting round, and then the six-minute plus musical paranoia of The Fisherman’s Wishing Well Prayer, the vocals shifting from conspiratorial to croon before the mid-section erupts into a brief apocalyptic drone and nervy tinkling piano scales and the final ebb into the ether against a lyric about mortality and faith (“now she’s in the hospital/She’s refusing all her medicine/And we don’t dare wake her sleepwalking/The doc’s got an air of resignation/He avoids meeting my gaze/I don’t know if you’re out there God/But I hope you are because now I’m scared/And I’m gonna kneel/And stare deep into this wishing well/And I’m gonna pray”) and miracle cures (“I dip my pail, bring it back up full/Then I stroll right back to that hospital/With this dazzling medicine/Sloshing at my side”). Not one you listen to casually, but well worth exploring when you have the time to absorb.

Following a 2019 collaborative EP, Birmingham-born singer-songwriters Robert Lane and Emily Ewing join forces again under the name of MIDNIGHT ASHES, the first fruit of which is ‘Life Is For Living’, a moody, blues-flavoured number with walking beat drums with Ewing on lead and Lane harmonising on the chorus with a carpe diem message about not having any regrets when it comes to leaving this mortal coil. (https://midnightashes.bandcamp.com/releases)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2023

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR READERS

Inevitably a quiet start to the year, but, taking their name from a long gone city-centre green space near the Bull Ring once home to the giant statue of King Kong, mention should be made of MANZONI GARDENS. Lining up as singer Greg Bird, guitarists Andy Roberts and Steve Lawrence, drummer Tom Rees and bassist Basith Udin , their sound’s a cocktail of  80s new wave, college rock and 90s alt-rock. They kick off their 2023 with a new single that marries the fuzzy guitar riffery wash, propulsive drums and blurry vocals of the defiant Boundaries (“I'm not dropping out/Not gonna die now/And I’m swinging fine now/I was just holding out for something more”) with the more psych-narcotic Bowie-shadings of  the reflective ALL CAPS (“Problems way back when/Felt way smaller then/All forgotten friends and time to spend/And on that night/That haunted night/You kicked and cried as we hurried away”) with its circling guitar line and clouds of drums.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2022

John Napier is a man of many musical aliases and genres, one being THE SNOWFLAKES where he’s joined by Andy Miles and Becky Pickin from Grand Valise and Andrew Souter. Their new single on Bandcamp with its Sun Records homage cover combines Summer Days, a late 70s summery laid back McCartneyesque ballad (borrowing a musical phrase from the intro to Band On The Run) along with spoken passages that variously suggest Barry White and, later, The Streets. It’s twinned with Regrets with its retro Bond theme song style, keyboards more to the fore, vocals adopting falsetto notes and an ooh la la refrain.

Joined by Florence Brady on  shruti box and backing vocals alongside Lydia Catterall, BENJAMIN DAVID BLOWER is in protest mood for his Hymns Of Disobedience EP, which features a clattery percussion  take on the traditional civil rights movement song adapted from the spiritual Don't Let Nobody Turn You Round, the other two, written or re-written in 2019 around the October rebellion in London, has him in full Billy Bragg meets Pete Seeger mode with the spare  environment/climate-changed What Shall We Do, the other being the equally Seegerish slow-paced five-minute strummed call to action and awareness amid times of darkness Rebel For Life.

Originally recorded for their 2012 Union album but never included, MAGGIE & MARTIN  (the spectacular voice of Scarlet Fantastic’s Maggie De Monde and the superb piano work of Martin Watkins) release I’ll Always Remember You, a download EP of four covers that opens with a stunning version of Amoreuse that totally eclipses the Kiki Dee original, an inspired, slowed down, achingly sad piano ballad reinvention of Blondie’s Dreaming, a magnificent classical piano backed arrangement of Leo Sayer’s Dancer and top it all off with a stripped down version of Cat Steven’s Wild World. Essential stuff.

Following on from his two albums this year, DAN WHITEHOUSE gets into the festive mood with his first Christmas-based release, a rather fine intimately sung, piano ballad cover of David Essex classic A Winter’s Tale.

KATY ROSE BENNETT sees the year out 'You Are My Team', an inspirational ballad that, played on electric guitar with the vocals layered to provide a choral backing, is not just inspired by Amazons Prime’s gay baseball series but features lyrics constructed totally from lines of dialogue in the show. Katy writes “As a butch, sports-playing teenager in the 90s, slowly becoming aware of my sexuality, there was such little LGBTQ+ representation anywhere, other than in 2-dimensional caricatures - I clung to k d lang in the sea of heteronormativity. Seeing this beautiful TV show as an adult had a profound effect on me. I wish it had been there when I was growing up. It would have saved me a whole lot of shame. This song is a love letter to A League Of Their Own”. She knocks it out of the park.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN NOVEMBER 2022

Keeping his creative renaissance going, MARC LEMON digitally releases The Key, the sound harking back to the psychedelic 60s (although the intro actually recalls The Beat’s Can’t Get Used To Losing You) with echoes of Sonny Bono, John’s Children, The Herd and The Kinks and the sort of reverb guitar solo that regularly featured in British movies of and about the swinging sixties.

It’s twelve years since Birmingham’s Michelle Lawrence (cousin of Omar) released her debut album, Invisible, the track I’m Not Invisible justifiably earning her comparisons to Joan Armatrading, though sadly remaining a somewhat undiscovered classic. She most recently (2018) released a single, Running Away, but these days is focusing on live work with her band the Equations playing Motown and soul covers and writing for and with her multi-hyphenate  daughter JAADA LAWRENCE-GREEN, a model and actress as well as a singer. As such, she’s just released a new single, The One That Got Away, a bittersweet midtempo strings-swathed pop soul love song with an earworm melody she clearly having inherited her mother’s vocal talents (though perhaps more with shades of Natalie Imbruglia, the hugely catchy chorus having hints of Torn) that, in a just world, would be getting saturated airplay. 

Mick Butler aka alt-pop individualist SICKY returns with a new album, Garbage Town, one that, unlike the melodic wash of last year’s Bowling Balls, is more about the dirty pop groove, opening with the swaggeringly propulsive, breathily sung and nigglingly infectious Northern Soul influenced The Bridge and following on with glam stomp boogie Swim Shallow, the repeated title providing the nagging refrain.  Beans is a more staccato rhythm with a strobing guitar riff and ooh oohs while None Of That, with lyrics about violence and murder, plays like a spry antique clockwork fairground carousel.

Marc Bolan vocal influences and falsetto suffuse the sinewy stop start rhythm and fuzzy synths of A Bite Without A Mark while Sleep On It has a swift handclap marching beat, a growly refrain offsetting the lighter anxiety-laced tone of the verses and some discordant flourishes as the effects pedal wails in the background.

The remaining six tracks vary the textures, Head First a falsetto sung woozy otherwordly dream miasma, Protect Me, Protect Mine a keyboard pulsing nervy soundtrack to a noir police series, the title track another sinister Bolan meets Slade boogie crunch with a bounce across the walls chorus hook and a lyric about breaking free of a toxic state of mind as he sings “finding my way ain’t easy”. 

Under 30 seconds, the vocally mixed back New Bones comes over like an unsettling lullaby, things rounding out with the insistent repetitive driving beat of Einstein’s Baby, another number propelled by sonic strobe lighting and the final creepy off-kilter Blur jauntiness and background cooing of Times Ten. 

The son of Neil Cook  of Wild Flowers and Salt Flat 80s underground fame, OLIVER COOK nods to his dad’s Neil Young inspired guitar rock with his self-released one-man band debut album The Boy With Pearls For Eyes, following on from the Candy Moon EP. Indeed you can heard Young’s lonesome weariness in the spare, echoey Pearls along with perhaps the strangled afterhours tones of Mark Eitzel as well as in the swaggery, circling slung guitar riffs of Apocalypse Now (with of course references Brando and Sheen) and   Plush Theatre.  

But strung out post alt-rock (Bell Tower Blue) and druggy American prog-folk (To Be A God) are also in the mix. Identity issues (I'm perfectly okay with staying in and rotting away/Now don't go search for the man you used to know”) loom large (on the lockdown-fuelled Everything Explained he despairs “What exactly do you find funny about the current situation that we're in?/I can't keep this persona/The Boy With Pearls For Eyes/Nothing's ever gonna get solved through digital ones and zeros”), along with  fractured relationships as in Completely (To Me) (“You know I'll never go again/You know I'll never hurt you again”), To Be A God (“You kept calling me up/Didn't I tell you to give it up/We're not friends/So why do you keep me alive?”) and Please Let Go containing the line “Take your metal clamp off my arm/This isn't love/It's an ambulance in a scrap yard”.

Clearly a gifted musician and lyricist, this is nevertheless a rough and raw album that takes some time to get under the skin; it’ll be interesting to see what he can do with a solid band and a good studio behind him.

Formed from the ashes of Active Restraint in 1985 featuring former members Paul Marsh on vocals, bassist Tony Linehan and guitarist David Newton (who had a brief interim stint alongside Neil Cook in The Wild Flowers) with Keith Rowley on drums, Wolverhampton’s THE MIGHTY LEMON DROPS were one of the leading lights of the so-called C86 movement. Between 1985 and 1989, following indie hit Like An Angel on Dreamworld, they released three albums on the Blue Guitar label (a further two would follow in 1991 and 1992 via their American label Sire), the second, World Without End, making the Top 40 (and topping the US Modern Rock/College chart above Morrissey and Talking Heads) and four singles, including Blue Guitars’ first release, The Other Side Of You, entering the lower reaches of the Top 100. Likened to Echo & The Bunnymen, with Newton’s semi-acoustic "Teardrop" 12-string electric guitar and Micro-Frets Spacetone 6-string giving them their distinctive sound, they were one of the era’s most exciting bands and, I’m pleased say, their reputation and influence has only grown over the years. 

Having issued the 24 track Uptight: The Early Recordings 1985–1986 in 2014, Cherry Red have now put the boat out and repacked it as Inside Out 1985-1990 as a jawdropping 83 track, 5CD box set that embraces the first three albums alongside non-album singles, B-Sides / bonus tracks, extended versions, US radio mixes, previously unreleased demos and rare session recordings with extensive sleevenotes by Dave (currently out in the States working as a producer and fronting Thee Mighty Angels). 

I won’t even attempt to detail the album bonus tracks or the exhaustive rarities gathered together on Discs Four and Five, but suffice it to say there’s four different recordings of the  seminal Like An Angel, three of Inside Out (one extended) and Happy Head (including the rough demo version on the NME C86 cassette), both studio and live covers of Paint It Black,  a live take on the Velvets There She Goes Again and a storming rendition of The Standells garage hit Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White from the Dominion in 1989, a demo of Hear Me Call recorded at the legendary Old Smithy studio in Wolverhampton along with Mighty Lemon Talk, a 1988 promo by Tony and Dave detailing their background for US radio bridging live at the Astoria versions  of Fall Down and Inside Out. It’s like Christmas come early.

Following his acoustic live album, CHRIS CLEVERLEY pushes his musical envelope with  Broadcast The Secret Verse (Opiate Records) exploring the use of electronics and more complex arrangements to create new textural soundscapes. Produced by and featuring The Little Unsaid’s John Patrick Ellliot alongside drummer Rob Pemberton, bassist Lukas Drinkwater, Graham Coe on cello with backing vocals by Lucy Farrell and Kathy Pilkinton, it’s both experimental and accessible work, breathtaking in its musical beauty as it touches on issues that range from displacement to connection.

It opens with the quiet dawning wash of Borderlands, a song that explores the making of the modern world and how a rise in nationalistic, isolationist ideologies will shape young minds and how parents should address this.  Just under a minute in, the guitar and other instruments emerge from the electronic mist along with the whisperingly hushed vocals that evoke thoughts of Art Garfunkel’s solo debut, Angel Clare. 

Joined by Farrell, the walking beat drum rhythm, electronics swathed Chlorophyll with its dreamy chorus was inspired by the mechanism by which flowers change their colour pigmentation cells to protect themselves from UV rays but, in the process, become less attractive to pollinators. You don’t need me to tell you how this serves as an analogy for the way that we harden ourselves to the world around us but lose a part of who we are in the process.

Several songs sound a cautionary note, most notably so the subtly funky piano and drum pattern driven post-apocalyptic Still Life where, in breathy tones he imagines the result of mankind’s  destructive path of consumption, growth and unsustainable carbon footprints, a world of collapsed “junk bond empires” in which “The last tree stands in a purifying tank/Centre of Times Square/In the remnants of the billboard screens/A dead American dream/Faint scream from the crossroads of the world/s the sunset sinks behind/A hollowed-out skyline”.  

The train of thought continues with the more stridently strummed, echoing vocals of the veritably rocking Ouroboros, the title referring to an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail and the song about “the small atrocities we commit towards one another within the cosmic loneliness of the 21st Century relationship” that doesn’t compromise on its lyrical imagery or the pessimistic conclusion of history repeating itself.

He’s addressed depression on earlier songs, and he returns to it again for  the near six-minute Eight Of Swords,  a measured walking rhythm and mixed back liminal vocals tracing a song exploring the intersection with love, the title referring to a Tarot card in the Minor Arcana that represents feeling trapped and restricted by your circumstances, your options limited with no clear path out. On the card, the woman is hemmed in by the swords, but if she only removed her blindfold she could break free, the lyrics striking a personal note as, the instrumentation swelling to a wordless fade,  he sings of emotional rescue.

Returning to a political commentary, the urgent tempo of  Paradise anchors a musing on global inequality a world of deregulation, be it on the basis of race, gender, class or wealth, where only the elite survive.

Another previous single, the pulsingly hypnotic Nausea continues into the darkness and depression, the line “You turned you face away, as we drowned/In the cosmic loneliness/While 'Figure 8' played loud through the stereo” a reference not to Ellie Goulding but the last album by Elliott Smith, an equally whispery-voiced singer who was plagued by mental issues.

Titled for the Greek city on the island of Crete and the Mediterranean warmth is embodies, an ambience captured in the balmy melody and cloud-surfing vocals, Heraklion draws on the Buddhist concept of ‘Interbeing’, the belief that nothing exists inherently in its own right, only in relation to everything that comes before and after it. In acknowledging that by being present and taking care of the world, we are taking better care of ourselves, it marks a more upbeat tenor. 

The light is dimmed again, however, with the subsequent The Centre Cannot Hold (the title a line in Yeats’s poem The Second Coming), a keyboard-based, gradually sonically building narrative account of the evacuation of Aleppo during the Syrian civil war in 2016 and a  reminder how in such events the human element becomes lost.

Another number that begins with an electronic wash and rides cosmic musical waves as its climbs to heavenly heights on a melody that echoes I Can’t Take It off the previous album,  Artificial Intelligence is the subject of  A Prediction Algorithm, examining the mental and emotional impact of the notion that that a quantum computer may one day be able to run a simulation of everything that has happened and everything that will happen, returning to earlier themes of interdependence with one.

The musically closest to his past work, it ends on the masterful gloriously upbeat anthemic choral note of  If I’d Have Listened, one of the year’s greatest  and another autobiographical-based song of a mind recovered and restored, a  reflection in gratitude of the light after the dark,  of not succumbing to oblivion and a radiant encouragement to hang in there. It’s a song born to be sung to a mass of swaying arms as the sun sets over the main stage at Glastonbury from an album that is unequivocally one of the year’s very best. Broadcast it on all wavelengths. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2022

Having acoustically revisited older material in his two ‘The Custodian’ albums, MILES HUNT returns with ‘Thing Can Change’ (Good Deeds) his first (and reputedly his last) all new solo album since 2002. Despite the title, fans will be pleased to know they haven’t to any great extent as, with remote collaborations with The Cults Billy Duffy, Steve Gurl, former Ned’s guitarist  Rat, and Pete Howard, this is his easily recognisable sound and style, opening with the sax of the mid-tempo ‘I Used To Want It All’, a song written in spring 2020 that speaks of  finding contentment (“I can wait until tomorrow before I make any plans”. Featuring Rat, the swayalong ‘And She Gives (For Laney)’, dedicated to one of his closest friends who donated a kidney to a mutual friend,  is about selflessness before the pace picks up slightly with Laura Kidd of  Penfriend on the drums-driven lockdown-based title track which is essentially about not giving in and giving up.

‘In My Sights’ is jaunty little bounce of a number that finds him reflecting on his solitary status (“I’m still waiting for the One./I thought I had her but she’s gone”), but again looking on the bright side (“while the space I’m in his tight/I always make it through the night/For the morning brings me light”) and “on the upside there’s calls coming down the line from people I truly admire”.

Billy Duffy features on the catchy, tumbling ‘Lucid Is As Lucid Does’, a response to a recent bust up that has him admitting “I don’t listen to reason and that’s my bad luck”, Penfriend making her second appearance on the strummed ‘A Picture By A Stranger’, the tune originally written by Mark Thwaite for The Wonder Stuff’s last album, the lyrics inspired by a walk some years earlier in Central Park West with a girl he’d recently met and their photo being taken (“right by Lennon’s place”) by someone putting together an exhibition called ‘couples’.

Morgan Nicholls brings his bass guitar to the staccato rhythm of ‘We Can All Do Better’, a reunion of all three Vent 414 members (Howard on drums)  after over 25 years, chasing a theme of  positivity in the face of others’ selfish greed. ‘This Descent (Someone To Save Me)”  brings the sax back with Gurl on organ, the song, one of the gnarlier tracks, a reference to his walking the hills near his home, the tempo matching his walking pace, and, in light of his earlier comment about reason, about letting his barriers down as he sings “I’ve listened to reason/And I’ve called in some favours/And I’ve held up my outstretched hand for/Someone to save me”. 

‘The chugging 'Teen Valentinos’ comes with Lennon echoes and comes described as him singing the blues and ‘wistful thoughts of a life lives as a much younger man”, the album ending with  Duffy and Nicholls returning for the five minute plus, sax-shaded raga-like , ‘Que Viva La Soledad’, inspired by seeing Jah Wobble in concert and another Vent 414 reunion, closing on a note of  collective resilience and defiance with “when you’re sick and tired and uninspired/You should join me on the altar/To pledge our love as we bear a grudge/Against all that have defaulted”. If this does prove his final solo outing, then he definitely bows out on a high note. 

A new outfit featuring former Ned’s Atomic Dustbin members John Penney and Dan Worton SPAIRS (the name comes from a contraction of despair and thus means hope) with ‘Spills’ (Good Deed) their debut album. There is, of course, evidence of their past mosh sensibility punchy guitar work. but from the opening ‘False Alarm’ there’s a wholly unexpected folk-rock influence at work, likely on account of Penney writing the songs on acoustic guitar, with the tumbling chugging notes and vocal delivery. It’s there too on the slow arms-linked sway of 'Spairs' and the spare walking beat of ‘Apart Together’  with its ‘it tears the heart from me…it spares no part of me” refrain and Penney’s soaring vocals.

There’s more familiar echoes of their Neds past with ‘Home And Dry’, ‘the urgent ‘Takes One To Know One’, ‘Solitude’ and ‘Keep It To Yourself’, but  otherwise the likes of  ‘Run Into A Standstill’, the shimmering ‘No Meaning’ and ‘We Know Ourselves’ with it mandolin/bouzouki could find themselves comfortably at home in a folk club acoustic setting. 

Having weathered storms that might have crushed others, SWIM DEEP follow up their ‘Familiarise Yourself With Your Closest Exit’ EP, setting the platform for an upcoming album with the electronic-washed  ‘Little Blue’, evocative of Caribou and a pulsingly euphoric song of hope and self-belief in its refrain “Here now we're gonna make it”. The album will  be more in their familiar guitar led sound but this is an infection taster of what might lie ahead.

Wolverhampton duo BLUEBYRD, singer-guitarist Chris Rowley and Gareth Pask on keyboards, self-release their third infectious single of the year with ‘Crystals’, a shimmering woodwind-shaded, fingerpicked song, with echoes perhaps of Ralph McTell, about a woman who, “when the world just isn’t right/When we’re too scared to think”, finds strength, solace and something to hold on to through her belief in the power of crystals.