singer songwriter

Waltzing With Ghosts

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 14:52:36 +0000

Waltzing With Ghosts Robert Cochrane July 11, 2022 - 10:52

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MICHAEL WESTON KING: The Struggle (Cherry Red Records)

Sometimes the best laid plans can go awry, and in the throes of a pandemic arrive with only the merest hint of their original intention. The Struggle was meant to see life as an album by My Darling Clementine -- Michael Weston King's long respected and productive collaboration with his wife Lou Dalgleish, think "a tongue in chic" George Jones and Tammy Wynette with a modernity of approach. Deft and ironic, for the past twelve years they have been garnering an ever increasing audience and rightly so. Lou however does make a cameo vignette in the closing track as an erstwhile country Nancy Sinatra. The album is pefectly pitched between storytelling aspects and moments of introspective confession.

It soon became clear that this batch of tunes belonged more to one voice than two, personal, reflective and haunting it is an album of American ghosts walking on a more distant and rugged shore. Specteral touches arrive and abide, the scope and ambition of Mickey Newbury, the doomed swagger of Gram Parsons,and the majestic melancholy of Townes Van Zandt, a friend and collaborator, whose funeral Weston King had the tragic honour to play. 'The Struggle' being his first offering of new solo work in over twelve years,arrives as a timely reminder of the unique nature of his singular gifts.

Recorded in Wales at a remote studio it is an album of chills and assurances. Americana remains awash with deft reflectiveness, loss and longing, mostly unfulfilled, and even if they are, exemplify the grief that mostly comes from answered prayers. A raw and honest work, stark but with the imbued artifice of honed craft, it lingers in the mind whilst haunting the heart.

Proceedings begin with "The Weight Of The World" a song presented in the guise of a Trump voting cop and the disillusionment his brief act of support creates.

"Now I'm looking to the man who got my vote.

Why do decency and love stick in his throat?

Who sends soldiers to the streets instead of messengers of hope"

It is a perfect embodiment from a distance of a confusion from false promises that remains pertinent. The song in a longer guise with reportage snippets bookends the album. Observation and regret going hand in hand.

"Sugar" is a fine collaboration with the legendary Peter Case. A treatise on the addictive nature of emotions, a murder ballad that toys with but never succumbs to the impulse, self-immolation versus personal pragmatism.

"Struck by the cane

Every time I feel the pain.

Just one hit

And I can't stop"

In "The Hardest Thing Of All" piano melancholy underscores depression:

"And you're trying to tell someone

That you've known for so long.

They say they're coming round today

Or maybe they'll just call

Will you answer the door?"

A terse enscapsulation of a wished for need denied by the one that requires it most. This theme of confessional honesty continues with 'Another Dying Day' a sombre reflection on having to keep up with someone whose positivity grates and annoys especially when your mood is at the polar opposite of their spectrum of apparent joy.

"The Old Soft Shoe" utilizes the tempo of a waltz in the guise of a widower remembering their dance hall days:

"I still do the old soft shoe

I trip around the kirchen,

There's a table for two,

But I live here alone

And nobody knows

That I dance each evening on my own"

Sad songs can say so much and this one does so exquisitely.

This mournful theme is also annotated and observed with diligent honesty in "Valerie's Coming Home" about the death of his wife's mother.

"They packed away her cards and letters

Folded up her favourite sweaters

Handed you her wedding band

That's not been off in fifty years.

Took down all the photographs

Snapshot moments from the past

Boxed up all her memories and faded souvenirs.

Nobody wants to see her leaving

Nobody wants to find her not at home"

A song for tears without warning, a treatise on the universal aspect of mourning, it is one of the album's most nakedly honest tracks, whilst savouring affectionate and playful traits from a respectful and rewarding relationship that has been snatched away.

Backwards glances are the subject of "Me & Frank" an epistle about remembering a lost teenage friendship with someone who went off the rails, though entirely English in inspiration it could have been lifted from Peter Bogdanovich's haunting monochrome masterpiece of snalltown America The Last Picture Show.

"I've not seen him in thirty years

I miss his smile but not the tears"

The last brace of songs are inspired by his friend the late Jackie Leven. A troubadour and maverick giant of man "The Final Reel" expresses both admiration and the stark reality of interfacing with such a driven soul.

"Now the trumpets have all faded out

And the final reel has been shown

You taught me the ways of the drinking man

Now I must drink alone

But I'll play the halls we know so well

And I'll sing the songs we cried

Until I join you in the devil's choir

Your voice will never die"

It is both a celebration and a romancing of recklessness, and a stark reminder of the consequences via absence.

Some fine piano by ex-Attraction Steve Nieve entwines with caressing strings from Mike Cosgrove on "Theory Of Truthmakers" Weston King's setting a lyrical fragment by Leven. It is the perfect closer.

"But you and I

We press our palms

And reach for the sky

There's a face in the cloud

I don't recognize

That stares down on you and I"

There lurks an appropriately church-like quality reminiscent of David Ackles, whilst the ghost of My Darling Clementine walks when Lou Dalgleish joins in on the chorus of a song from an album that might have been theirs.

What remains is a work of integrity, perhaps his finest solo outing because of its unintentionally altered path towards construction. Though the title comes from a hill walk in the English Lake District it is a perfect allegory for the pitfalls of simply surviving.

Solid, honest and vulnerable here is a work adorned with hurts unstitched from a well worn sleeve. A confidence of maturity without a need to boast.

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A Life As Songs

Robert Cochrane — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:05:05 +0000

A Life As Songs Robert Cochrane March 27, 2022 - 20:05

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John Howard: LOOK - the Unknown Story of Danielle Du Bois (Kool Kat)

The concept album has a rather tarnished legacy as an excuse for preposterous excess. With LOOK the English songwriter John Howard, a man who understands that less is more, unless when a flourish of refinement is required, has tackled the genre with kindly pathos and gentle sentiment.

A cabaret and burlesque sensibility pervades the affair, with a "high" church other worldliness, in a dissection and consideration of the life of his friend and transgender crusader April Ashley 1935-2021. A compliment of which she was aware, though sadly her death occured just prior to its completion.

Appropriately adorned in a perfectly realized painting by the artist Nigel Wade, a diligent cross between the efforts of Peter Blake and David Hockney from the Sixties, the kind of image that adorned book covers and magazines then, it also neatly encapsulates the contradiction at the heart of the matter. A handsome man in a grey suit gazes into a mirror, but his reflection is a beautiful girl in a vivid green dress. The look within a look.

April Ashley and Howard go back to the Seventies when he, a young aspirant to pop stardom, played piano and sang in her nightclub in London. Ashley had been born a boy in a working class district of Liverpool. Trans before the condition even had a name, she transitioned in Casablanca in 1960 after a period of National Service in the Royal Navy had failed to suppress his desire to suppress her true identity. Her name was taken as a tribute to the month in which she arrived. In LOOK she becomes a pop star who merely vanishes into a woman nobody knows he has become until the press comes a calling on Danielle Du Bois, her new true self.

Howard is a correct and kindly pair of hands for such a sensitive subject. The album has the air of a musical festooned with McCartney-esque ballads beautifully mired in the exquisite backdrop of Paris. Musical postcards cascade like confetti as the tale of April's strangely conflicted but resolute and elegant life unfurls. It all swishes along as beautifully as Ashley did, even when she was vilified and outed in the press for her otherness. Unbowed she continued in her quest to be truthful, and for others like her to be accepted.

Proceedings begin with a child's voice singing, wishing to be someone other and something more, it utilises the creepy familiarity of an old folk song. In part a madrigal a wish, a spell, a curse, before flowering into "Last Night He Woke Up Screaming" a paean of parental recognition and confusion. A neat surmising of assumptions nearly everyone is guilty of making. The song is jaunty, playful with just a hint of a darkness behind the pathos and the sorrow.

"Every Day A New Adventure" spins into life with a fairground organ casualness, a touch of madness in its surreal jollity, and possesses a psychedelic confection whilst delivering images of bright lights and foreboding.

In "Good Day Daniel" we enter pure Howard terrain, an eloquent, longing ballad with a luscious melody that wanders through the mind and wants to remain there, lush and lingering it winds and billows like a scarf in the breeze. A chamber pop gem, as though "Elenor Rigby" has donned "She's Leaving Home," it uses the line uttered by her surgeon to the boy as he went under the anaesthetic."'Au Revoir Monsieur" as goodbye to the old self, and "Bonjour Mademoiselle" the greeting when she came round as her true one.

"The Mirror (Look)" is the majestic heart of the album, a haunting, quivering piece of lapsed Catholicism, a slab of monastic Glam if such a category ever existed, then it certainly does now. Haunting and soaring with a sense of joyous sorrow in its fragile but determined air of self proclamation.

"It's really me

I'm who I always seen

smiling back at me

in all my dreams.

Now I am free of all my fears.'

"Where Did The Boy Go" could be Billy Joel or Randy Newman in delightfully playful mood, a wandering melody that also suggests the much maligned Gilbert O' Sullivan at his fluent, fluid, piano-driven best

"Here I Am In Paris" arrives as a stylish monochromatic photograph mutating slowly into gharish tones. Sophisticated and rather world weary in all the yearning it confers, whilst being neatly underscored by a gliding piano in tandem with gentle guitar.

"Monsieur Boudoir' Has Parties" is campy but perfectly focused, a serious song with pathos and tremendous melodic aplomb. Think "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" with glitter and more of a sense of humor.

"Still Gorgeous" manifests a music hall romp, a cross between Gavin Friday's sublime "Mr Pussy" and the vaudevillian nature of the late Jobriath's Creatures Of The Street album, an ivories driven knees-up of time and time's passing, giving two fingers to mortality.

"I may be old but I'm still gorgeous.

I may be grey but in my heart

I'm a beautiful blonde

I may be old

But I'm not giving up till

I'm six feet in the ground"

Camp as camp should be, seriously funny and arch with elements of David Bowies's Hunky Dory it raises a wry smile.

"Stick & Stones" begins with a motif of sinister piano, a poignant ballad, a torch song for every sense of wretchedness. It begs for the larynx of Shirley Bassey to bring her own special magic, though Howard delivers a wonderful piece of eloquent melancholia. He glides through the same terrain as I Am Kloot's "The Same Deep Water As Me." Wonderfully melodic, it also has a strangely underlying patriotic edge.

"The Mirror (Look) Reprise" revives the album's motif, a reflection on reflections -- an existential summary of life's contradictions. As though a world weary chorister reflects on an eloquent hauntingness of themes. Identity in slithers that build to an epic of crescendo. It could so easily fail as a ridiculous travesty but emerges as a work of implicit majesty and distilled regret.

"16 (Woo! Woo!)" a deceptively clever throwaway piece of Sixties pop froth with Carnaby Street or the Moulin Rouge as the backdrop, has a Beatles-like catchiness that builds and develops, as if McCartney had joined The New Christy Minstrels.

"A Place in Time" is the last gasp reprise, an amalgam, a precis of all that has gone before, an astute concision, neatly patched and witty, and possibly unique. You can almost hear the red velvet and gold brocade swish shut on an eloquent performance.

LOOK demands and deserves to be much more than it presently is, a new work steeped in old world, worldly qualities and charm. A West End or Broadway production would be a fitting recognition. It is an extraordinary achievement, a work of perfect understanding and a fitting tribute to a truly amazing life. April Ashley lived against the grain till she became a celebrated and respected part of it. Such is the ethos and reward of LOOK.

As April approaches it's a shame that the April in question is no longer here, but via these songs her spirit is remembered, respected and rightly cherished

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Song of the Week: "Build A Fire"

Webmaster — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:39:59 +0000

Song of the Week: "Build A Fire" Webmaster March 8, 2021 - 09:39

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This funky-time tune, and album, checks all of my favorite elements of Americana music -- great song, melodic hooks, smart lyrics, tasty guitar playing, and wonderful soulful vocals. It's one of many playlist-worthy songs from the critically lauded singer/songwriter Adam Douglas. If you like this one, you'll love his new album BETTER ANGELS.

Douglas -- who was born and raised in Oklahoma, lived in Chicago and Minneapolis, but for the past decade has lived in Norway -- takes us on a journey of what he calls a "midlife analysis." Better Angels is a soul-searching collection of songs and a landing strip for a musician who has found himself and his genre. Considered one of the best guitar players in Norway, too.

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Backward Glances, Moving Forward, Getting By

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 13:02:02 +0000

Backward Glances, Moving Forward, Getting By Robert Cochrane August 7, 2020 - 09:02

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Original linocut artwork by UK artist Kester Hackney

DUSTY WRIGHT: Can Anyone Hear Me? (PetRock)

The idea of the protest song has become something that belongs to young earnest souls from the sixties. When Joan Baez loved Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs couldn't stop singing his politics. A host of seriously activated individuals rode the crest of a wave that their own minds and consciences had created. They sang, they rioted, they put flowers down the barrels of guns, and some got shot for their audacity. But even the changing times change. They eventually moved towards introspection, and it seemed we'd progressed beyond requiring the song as a protest vehicle. In 2020 that couldn't be much further from the truth. The year where things really did fall apart, and continue to.

A spoilt baby of a man who hijacked the Republican party as the ticket for his ego and his sense of entitlement, began to finally unravel when the brown stuff hit the fan in the form of a virus we only distantly knew of in January. Behaving like a schoolyard bully his hiring and firing became an almost weekly routine, as was his inability to articulate anything more illuminating than a walkout when scrutinised, became a source of comedic folly. Not so much the emperor's new clothes, more something that mentioned the architecture of his hair, or the lack of it.

George Floyd got killed by a police officer, a murder in plain sight and one replayed and revisited in our loop system mentality, and the centre began to buckle and fold. People took to the streets.

In Britain, a waffling twerp performed his comedy toff routine and lied and scraped and bowed and finally became what he'd always wanted. If karma exists, and it seems to a random sort of system, then he got his prayers answered at precisely the wrong/right time. In the shadow of the virus, he and his version of the Keystone Cops, have waffled, promised, did another u-turn, and then a third, and have only been successful in revealing the paucity of their ideas. He also has hair that looks like a wig and makes Andy Warhol's mane look convincing and the genuine article.

The appeased children have taken over the asylum at the wrong time. Surely, finally it's time to reach for the guitar, and a pen and some paper, and to begin to annotate the crisis of a shambles.

Dusty Wright is one such singer who has recorded an album within these ever extending and darkening shadows of uncertainty. Something has to be said. A song is a song is a song, but it also depends on the soil from which it sprang. Protest by default, or simply via circumstance, he has created a collection that references the past in order to articulate the future. New York City in a time of plague and masks. A fertile aspect he would have rather not encountered, but since he has, he hasn't ducked the gauntlet, but manfully grasped the bouquet of nettles that represents his experience of the country that spawned him. It is a protest of disappointment. An articulation of frustration and rage. Honesty may be the best policy in most circumstances, but in this case it's the only one at hand.

This collection connects with an understated urgency, an edge of despair that caresses the vestiges, the rags of hope for better times ahead, and sunshine at the tunnel's exit, but it begins with "Rain Rain." A cleansing madrigal that sways in a transcendent fashion like The Polyphonic Spree arms stretched outwards in a downpour. It has an inherent optimism and a almost hip-hop backbeat, with a Native American edge, catchy as hell, and with some neat banjitar. A Covid-19 epistle with hope at its centre.

"'New Year Bliss" bears a cynical spring in its step. A REM vibe, a seemingly optimistic lyric, and a flippant teaser of the fates.

"It's a New Year

Better than the last year

So much better than before.

It's New Year

Gonna be great year

Once we get past our fears."

That fresh hope that rings hollow in the light of older experiences, but this year has taken the biscuit, the cookie box, and the urge to be sociable.

In "Broken Birds" there resides an analogy on the horrors of abused children. A jangly, jingling melody that runs at odds with the words.

"I will always wondered why

Why the child has to die...

Fairytales don't come true

Life's a mess

Nobody what you do.

Broken birds try to fly..."

A song I'd love to hear from the larynx of Mary Gauthier.

The title track has a hook and swagger at its heart. "Can Anyone Hear Me?" holds an alt-country swagger and poise, but is a song about feeling like the margins are where you belong, by misadventure.

"Can anyone hear me?

Does anyone care?

Can anyone see me?

I'm standing right here"

A perfect take on the invisibility delivered by daily life. Poised, articulate, but perfectly understated, and immensely radio friendly.

"You can buy more guns

And build more walls

But the hate in your heart

Will be the end of us all."

A song for the here that is our now.

"I Don't Understand" continues to dissect the modern world from a stance of innocence rendered outraged and betrayed. A lullaby of fearful doom.

"I don't understand

Why evil fills our land.

I'don't understand

Why evil ties our hands

I don't... understand"

The song rather suggests that he does via the apparent absence of an interventionist deity.

In "Book Of Tears" is a direct challenge to the American love affair with guns and the ever growing pool of loss it claims.

''How many lives must be lost?

What's the price?

Who pays the cost?"

It could be a collaboration between Dwight Yokham and Randy Travis, though that's a doubtful state of collaborative action. A minor evangelical edge creeps in with some wonderful vocal shadowing from Caitlin Bement.

With "Makes No Sense" the theme of innocent outrage continues to develop:

"It makes no sense

That children are afraid

It makes no sense

They won't go out and play

It makes no sense.

It makes no sense."

The harmonica gives an folk edge whilst the sentiment betrays Cat Stevens at his bedsitter best. A song that evidences the virtue of honesty over guile. It screams out for a choir for it to rise beyond as it fades.

"Loaded Dice" is John Mellencamp's "Jack & Diane" revisited in the new world order. A neat sharp take on desperation within a dysfunctional home. A shopping list of woes it suggests a country influenced version of the drug observation that Sixto Rodriguez annotated on his now revered "Cold Fact." The more things change, the more they don't.

"Loaded dice never win the roll

Loaded dice stuck in a hole

Loaded dice in the land of the free....

There ain't nothin' free about it."

A lyric as far removed as one can get from the mysticism imbued by Norman Rockwell in his depiction of the American Dream.

"Pardon My Love," a majestic murder ballad of dark, melancholy, ghosts a Bad Seeds noir take on emotion and revenge. A song of a lover extinguishing his beloved's abusive partner and the pointlessness of revenge. Hauntingly gothic in arrangement it stands out in its simplicity and grace and crests across some beautiful cello from Matt Goeke in perfect cohesion with trem guitar by Jonathan K Bendis.

"When She Comes Back" is a broken-hearted prayer of emotional requirements that are at odds with what there is on offer. Suggestions fly of Chris Isaak in the guitar trembles and the vocal delivery.

"Lord, she...

Ran off with my friend

I've seen this movie

And I know how it ends."

The eternal new hope of the wretched in a song for a line dance of despair. Going to the edge and falling.

As a closer "Every Man's Burden" brings us a Canned Heat boogie plea for justice, compassion and understanding a love and let live affair. Starkly raw it betrays a lyrical honesty is best means to hammer home a point of sense and clarity.

"You may think you know my anger

You may say you share my rage

You might even see my struggles

But you'll never... feel my pain.

The entire affair is a valiant effort to distill sense of a senseless world. In that fashion it therefore isn't a typical protest album. It's a personal statement of alienation and disappointment felt not just by Wright but by many, though he has mastered and attested to his demons rather well. Arriving beautifully dressed in a cover by UK-based linocut artist Kester Hackney that echoes both Paul Klee and a restrained Jean Michel Basquiat, bearing a profile head full of symbols lifted from the songs, here's an image that deserves to be on vinyl, and hopefully will be one day soon

The album has a clarity of tone rendered by producer/mixer Dan Cardinal whose deftness of touch has also graced the songs of Darlingside and Josh Ritter. Here's hope that the question implicit in the title results in the audience and the answer it so richly deserves. A modern protest via tried and tested means, and the refinement of hurt and personal rage.

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A Considering of Pearls

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:20:09 +0000

A Considering of Pearls Robert Cochrane August 6, 2020 - 11:20

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Cecilie Anna: I'm Here (Familieforetaket CD & Download)

Even now in the joined up, hooked-up, overly connected virtual world, certain things by circumstance or geography fall by the wayside. Privately distributed and largely unheralded beyond her native Norway, Cecilie Anna's I'm Here from 2017 is one such victim of regional circumstances, and the limitations of self-generated social media. For an album that has universal appeal, and one laden with tender melodies and astute, heartfelt observations, it is equally possessed by an assured sense of its own worth. Modest and unfussy, but a collection of refined charm and tender grace, it should be on playlists across the globe. However if you don't know of its existence it remains a secret, shared quietly, enjoyed perfectly, but frustratingly worthy of much wider recognition.

Possessed by elements of Joni Mitchell at her most winsome and Dory Previn at her astutely observational best, this is an heartfelt and honest affair. Imagine a Laurel Canyon sensibility of the early '70s with a chill and a touch of a colder climate. Sunshine and ice, and a glacial elegance. I'm Here will take you there. It is a rare and unfettered gift of artistry in an increasingly calculated world. It also bears a beautiful backwards glance in the fact that it was mastered at Abbey Road, and rightly so. These songs deserve to be heard in hallowed surroundings.

"Morning Star" begins with a Nico-like moodiness. A missive of awakening and the need to belong delivered in a vocal of faltering and fragile sincerity.

"Where am I

Is this my home

If I'm the beginning

What am I told"

A starkly heartbreaking lament for her late father "Summer Storm" has echoes of early Kate Bush and "The Man With The Child In His Eyes." A ballad imbued with the ache of longing and the cost of a love that remains.

"Oh, and I can almost see your smile

Oh, and I can almost hear you laugh

Summer storm has waited long

And I can almost feel the curves of your hand

I can almost see the way that you stand...

Oh, and I can almost hear you laugh

Oh, and I can almost feel your embrace"

A song that chills the heart with its inspiring honesty and a perfect admission of sorrow.

Reminiscent of Carole King at her Tapestry period concision "Another You" visits a hope we've all cherished, but few could distill so succinctly with a playful sense of irony. A reflection on when the reality of what we have isn't what one's wishes might desire.

"Oh, I was dreaming 'bout another you

And yes I was wrong

I was so wrong

As wrong as can be."

Resignation and humor in touching collusion.

"Horses 2" has the sweep and grace of Tori Amos at her most starkly reflective. An utter beauty of a song, personal and haunting, existential and contrite with a sparkling piano track, it has an epic sweep at its heart...

"The look of God just passed us in the hallway

And they answer our prayers

But we don't know what we were asked

So we lay down for the horses of the Lord."

As near perfect as a song can get in lyric and musical craft "I'm Here" deserves its elevation as the title track. Steeped in poetic grace and a languid elegance it is littered with stark images of stunning originality.

"They say women bleed

Men just work at day time

They say sisters weep

Boys just blow their brains out

They say babies cry

To find out where their voice is

They say old folks die

To find out where their souls hide."

Prosaic to the point of flippancy it leaves a lingering impression of someone all too aware of the ways of the world, but without resorting to delivering any answer. A humble wisdom in itself in a song that deserves to be discovered and valued.

"Close To Four" ghosts the melancholia of Michael Stipe's "Everybody Hurts," and the reflective majesty of John Lennon's "Imagine" as it sweeps along with a stilted eloquence.

"Before all this I was on the kitchen floor

I wondered how you look

When you woke and no-one's there

Before all this

I was on the airport floor

I wondered how you look

When you leave and no-one cares."

Stark in its sincerity it meanders to a sweet but assured conclusion that suggests Nick Cave in its brevity.

"Den Groen Dagen" quietly interrupts the stream of thoughts; an instrumental of Satie-like hesitancy. A perfect interlude and a song without words.

"Baby Doll" has the stillness and spookiness of Bjork. Like a solo in an abandoned church it has that hymnal element the late David Ackles utilised to such profound and considered effect. Stark and confident it betrays an artist who isn't afraid of allowing space within her delivery, who knows how not to overdraw a moment by giving in to the temptation of adding more.

"Old Love" suggests the teenage concision of Claire Hamill's overlooked October album in all its natural beauty:

"There's pale

Women in the cars

They must have left their darlings

At the bars."

A perfect vista and vignette, accompanied by a pastoral undertow of rarified classicism.

In "The Smallest Bird" we are gifted an anthem and a carol that allows a Leonard Cohen-like majesty to build and then soar.

"The boxer stands

Light flowing through the ring

his hands on his cheeks

Softly he's whispering

Oh, roll with me now"

Cecilie Anna has a rare gift of finding the poetry in an an image and then like a jeweller she embeds it in her lilting melodies. The song rises and recedes from a sea of of layered voices, but remains singular, considered and true.

All too soon "Flower In Between" arrives as the final cut and as a perfect closer:

"A few minutes of this song

With nothing right and nothing wrong

Just a little less to say

A few flowers less to stay

Just a flower in between

You must have flowered through the seams"

I have been haunted by these songs since they first arrived. It is time to share my bewitchment. Mannered without pretension. Rarified but with an ability to be commonplace, they reveal what can be achieved when a singer lets down her guard and shares that interior world without guile. Her artistry shines through and connects. Some secrets are made to be broken. I'm Here is slowly fracturing in order to be considered afresh, and to be cherished. Pearls from the soul that reflect in the heart.

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The Resurrection Man

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:07:14 +0000

The Resurrection Man Robert Cochrane September 17, 2009 - 14:07

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Rodriguez: Coming from Reality (Light in the Attic)

Rodriguez proved a striking presence when he left his native Detroit to record the successor to Cold Fact, his at times uncompromising debut for Sussex Records. Londoners in the winter of 1970 thought he was a Native American Indian -- the world was smaller then, and their innocent assumption was an understandable stab at the origins of the bohemian exotic in their midst.

Resembling a hybrid of Hendrix in shades and Arthur Lee, Rodriguez was proof positive, and remains so, that some stars are born, no matter what success denies them on their journey forth.

What resulted from this sabbatical abroad, produced by Steve Rowland, whose credits stretch from P. J. Proby to the Cure, remains one of the most hauntingly poetic albums to grace the dark grooves of plastic, and now the silvery digital domain.

The record opens with a spirited invitation to "Climb Up on My Music," the perfect insistent guitar of Chris Spedding driving the song along via a divine air of sophistication. Cold Fact had grit, but these confections are more expansive, urbane, and refined.

The amusingly biting "A Most Disgusting Song" is the perfect travelogue amalgam of dives that Rodriguez has had the dubious privilege of playing. It is casually littered with brilliantly observed vignettes.

Talking is the lawyer in the crumpled up shirt

And everyone's drinking the detergents that will not remove their hurts....

And there's old playboy Ralph who's always been shorter than himself, and there's a man with his chin in his hand who knows more than he'll ever understand.

And there's the bearded schoolboy with the wooden eyes who at every scented skirt whispers up and sighs...

And there's the militant with his store-bought soul

There's someone here who's almost a virgin I've been told.

Who talk to dogs, chase broads, have hopes of being mobbed. who mislay their dreams and later claim that they were robbed."

Rodriguez delivers these verbal Polaroids with the warm, but unsentimental tones of a wearied watcher, but this mood dissolves with a sweet and tender love song, "I Think of You," all Spanish guitar, and an alluring bed of strings. He then kicks things up a notch or three with "Heikki's Suburbia Bus Tour," a catchy acid-edged gem cascading with eloquent strangeness.

"Hospitals for flowers, the matron ladies cry
Itchy trigger fingers as our caravan walks by
Overcrowded laughter, cause they're all four gallons high
On Heikki's suburbia bus tour ride"

Then he slips into a short, touchingly tender, almost throwaway sketch of truth and can't-believe-my-luck yearning, with "Silver Words":

"But oh if you could see

The change you've made in me

That the angels in the skies

Were envious and surprised

That anyone as nice as you

Would chance with me. "

What follows is a subtle surprise, a piece of perfect majesty. "Sandrevan Lullaby / Lifestyles" is a rare combination of harp, raw lyricism, and string-drenched melancholia. The words suggest T.S Eliot in the unlikely guise of troubadour, or Kerouac at his finest.

"The generals hate holidays

Others shoot up to chase the sun blue away

Another store front church is open

Sea of neon lights, a boxer his shadow fights soldier tired and sailor broken....

Judges with metermaid hearts

Order super market justice starts

Frozen children inner city

Walkers in the paper rain

Waiting for those nights that never came

the hi-jacked trying so hard to be pretty"

Songs like this are hard to come by; this level of artistry is sadly scarce -- but again Rodriguez veers away from following the listener's expectations. His moment of sublime suggestion morphs into "To Whom It May Concern," a single that should have been a smash, radio-friendly and commercial. "It Started Out So Nice" stands as a viable follow-up, if one had transpired, but despite blending poetry with hit potential, Rodriguez never released another missive to tackle the charts.

"It started out so nice with butterflies

On a velvet afternoon

With flashing eyes and promises

Caught and held too soon

In a place called Ixea

With its pumpkin oval moon

It started out so nice."

The whole conceit of the songs lies in the suggestion, never expressed, of how things actually ended. "Halfway Up the Stairs" is a near-perfect lullaby, deceptively simple in the way only the masterful achieve, but the album closes with one final punch of heartbreak surrealism. "Cause," like "Sandrevan Lullabye / Lifestyles," is brilliantly scored by Jimmy Horowitz, who worked with the Faces and Lesley Duncan, and is the perfect closer to this -- or any -- album.

Subdued anger and disappointment arc to the point of uniqueness as fractured eloquence and beauty emerge in a street poetics master class.

"My Estonian Archangel came and got me wasted

Cause the sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I never tasted

Oh but they'll take their bonus pay to Molly MacDonald.

Neon ladies, beauty is that which obeys, is bought or borrowed.

'Cause my heart's become a crooked hotel full of rumors

But it's I who pays the rent for those finger-face out-of-tuners

And I make 16 solid half-hour friendships every evening

'Cause your queen of hearts who is half a stone

And likes to laugh alone, is always threatening you with leaving

Oh but they play their token games on Willy Thompson

And give a medal to replace the son of Mrs. Annie Johnson. "

Although we know none of the faceless names in the song, this trick of familiarity gives a sense of closeness and warmth to the bleakness. A fanciful ruse, but one that works, and then, the rest was silence.

Although Coming from Reality was a lavish act of faith by Sussex Records, it fared less well than Cold Fact, which hadn't fared well at all. The label was in financial difficulties, and despite being contracted to do a third album, bar a few initial sessions, Rodriguez saw his career dissolve. That almost four decades on it has been lovingly restored to vinyl, and released on compact disc, on the back of the successful re-surfacing of Cold Fact is a strange consolation that quality eventually finds its deserved level.

The reviews have been full of appreciation and praise and Rodriguez, now 67, has been touring. The missing link between folk and Motown, he still has the air of a major star, the enigma that talent allows. This success can only be gratifying, even if it does arrive long after the expectation of it, has retired. Like they say of revenge, it is a dish best served cold.

A Victim of Fashion and True Style

Robert Cochrane — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:32:37 +0000

A Victim of Fashion and True Style Robert Cochrane March 19, 2009 - 23:32

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Gerald Watkiss: Purgatory and Paradise (Pye)

Fashion is a cruel mistress, one that treats talent with little respect. It isn't just in couture houses that the effort of yesterday is quickly rendered obsolete. Just as nobody would be seen in last year's flair of inspiration, so too can music be a classic victim of the fickle-hearted and the fashionably fearful. The shame of lending one's ears to sounds that might raise a derisory smile from the lips of those whose opinions appear to matter, albeit briefly, can be perilous to both the listener and the artist who takes one or two steps beyond the current boundaries of accepted taste.

Never was this more prevalent than than in the heady days of punk, and one sophisticated straggler who hit the wrong party in the wrong clothes was Gerald Watkiss. A little like a maiden aunt who expected tea at the Ritz Hotel, only to find herself at the Marquee Club being gobbed at, Watkiss released an album whose title betrayed the effete nature of his musings. That it appeared at all is amazing, even if it did drift into discreet oblivion.

Watkiss had a knack of poor timing. He had been a member of Flashman, a short-lived pastoral prog outfit whose sole single and album sank amongst the invasion of mohawks and safety pins.

Purgatory and Paradise, his 1979 solo debut, was housed in a sleeve featuring a drawing of a crowd reaching skyward from within the body of a grand piano. Resembling an illustration from the pages of an arts magazine, it was an unlikely adornment for an initial stab at pop stardom. Released on Pye Records, a label adrift in the New Wave, its glory days of the '60s long gone, his record was a perfect misadventure of modernity. Though now unbearably effete and chic, in the late '70s such mannered classicism was loathed and despised. A man with a piano was bound to be shot at with barbed words from insulting reviews, if indeed anyone could be bothered to exercise such disdain.

The album bursts into life with the unashamedly tuneful and poppy "City Life," which with its up-tempo guitar and rising piano motif wouldn't be out of place on the soundtrack to Miami Vice. The mood visibly slows for the slinky sophistication of Picture Days, which displays Watkiss at his plaintive best, but the album is really everything the mood of the time despised: Fey, mannered, and ornate, it would have angered any self-respecting punk to apoplexy.

The songs have elements of Elton John, Jimmy Webb, and Eric Carmen, with a twist of Manilow, and titles such as If the Line Broke on My World were not in the mood of a time that valued energy over musicianship and attitude beyond panache.

It is the title track, which teeters magnificently between classicism and pomp, that retains the truest sense of wonderment. It sounds like an ever-so-English version of David Ackles's extraordinarily haunting and beautifully epic American Gothic. With piano flourishes flying in every direction, and strings layering everything with astonishing accomplishment, it emotes echoes of Gershwin, Copland, and Coward.

Watkiss was obviously a boy who'd relished his piano lessons. When he sings "Stop the world I want to get off / Too many gins at the party last night" with intimations of suicide and debauchery, you enter a louche world of unashamedly divine decadence. After ten minutes it builds to an epic crescendo, Jobriath meets Al Stewart and John Howard for a Palm court afternoon.

If talent is a gift to share with others, then Watkiss was not ashamed by his punishment of riches, but times they were already in flux-like change, and adrift from the moorings of fashion, his album was appropriately titled. With Antony, Rufus Wainwright, and Patrick Wolf, broken-wristed camp is the order of the night.

Gerald Watkiss deserves the languid loyalty of the Scissor Sister-hood as one who blatantly strove when the tide was against his mannered direction. With scorn as his reward, if indeed he even merited such derision, it seems likely that indifference was his ultimate accolade. Thirty years on he deserves to be forgiven for the sin of unfashionable excess, because it is quite rightly no longer viewed as such, but should be treasured for all its true and gloriously eccentric beauty. Any such recognition, though, will be sadly posthumous.

Watkiss died on February 5, 2007 at the age of 51. He made five albums in total, the last under the name Rescue Party the year prior to his untimely death, after a silence of more than twenty years.

A Queer Hippy Christ

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:48:34 +0000

A Queer Hippy Christ Robert Cochrane January 28, 2009 - 20:48

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Steven Grossman: Caravan Tonight (Mercury)

"It ain't what you do but the way that you do it" is a perfect adage for the brief career of Steven Grossman, who didn't do very much except make an album called Caravan Tonight.

It didn't shift in unit-crunching amounts, although Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone hailed it as "one of the most auspicious singer-songwriter debuts of the '70s."

What makes Grossman unusual was his brave honesty. He was the first openly gay artist signed to a major label, although the more contentious Jobriath was first to release an album.

A mixture of Cat Stevens and James Taylor, Grossman's work lacks the camp bravado implicit in most gay music. His album is astonishing on account of the honesty he harnesses to express his sexual awakening. Mercury Records handled their unusual charge without resorting to the shock tactics employed by Elektra to sell Jobriath to an unsuspecting public. He was marketed with rare tact for the time.

"Steven Grossman does not consider himself a crusader in the true meaning of the word. He wants to be judged as an artist who happens to be gay, rather than a gay performer."

It briefly seemed that Grossman might become a songwriter with longevity: Twiggy covered his song "Caravan Tonight." But he quickly grew unhappy with the expectations of having a public profile. Fame wasn't for him, and he wasn't one for fame. It would be difficult enough these days to sell a gay hippie who looked like Christ, but in 1974, it was even less of a walk in the park.

Grossman bowed out, becoming an accountant, and succumbed to AIDS in 1991. However, for all the the liberation and the anthems sung by proxy by soul divas with a rather odd relationship with their gay public and God (think Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor), for all the Will and Grace, Queer Eye acceptance, there remains something jaw-droppingly candid about Grossman's work.

We may delude ourselves that the world has moved on, and in many ways it thankfully has, but few artists have dared to grasp the nettles of their sexuality in such a profoundly exposed and direct way.

The ultimate irony is that gay culture hasn't traveled too far. Rufus Wainwright's plundering of fucked-up Judy's finest performance, be it on the Palladium or Carnegie Hall stages, be it a tribute or a travesty of ego over any sense of reality, misses one thing: Empathizing with a dysfunctional straight woman's travails with her men represents the same kind of socio-sexual identification-by-proxy that gay men were forced into when they had no choice, and no other outlet.

It seems like a willful great leap backwards into the sexual dark ages, if in fact it represents any kind of movement at all. "I will because I can" does not suggest advancement, merely an outmoded attachment to redundant furrows of being.

Steven Grossman was born in 1952 in Brooklyn. He initially toyed with being an actor, planning to study at the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse in New York while working at Coney Island during the summer to raise funds. He was a "stab and bagger," a garbage collector on the beach.

In "Out," he encompasses the universal problem of having an orientation which is at odds with your own expectations, and those of others.

"Mama dear mama I've something important to say

Yes I know you didn't plan on me

Turning out this way

Well you didn't fail me mama

And I don't love you any less

'Cause for me it's just a matter

Of what suits me best.

Well I know it's hard for you to take

And it's nothing you would brag

When your first born turns out to be a ... "

In "Dry Dock Dreaming":

"Oh devil don't you leave me,

I'm turning to stone.

I'm anxious and angry and want to go home.

But please not alone."

And in "Christopher's Blues," the emptiness of cruising is touched upon:

"And I don't want no hit and run cruiser

I don't want to waste my days -- these days

Trying to catch the eye on each corner

There must be a better way"

The album remains a stark testament of self-acceptance, and deserves to be a better known work because it remains largely undated in the emotions it explores and the tribulations it annotates. The human condition repeats itself in each generation with little indication that there is anything gleaned from the experiences of our predecessors.

Grossman recorded a second album in the months prior to his death in 1991. He was an innovative maverick who stood his ground at a time when that was a brave and dangerous stance to take. That he did so as himself, without the posturing and costumery of the New York Dolls, David Bowie, or Jobriath, is all the more admirable.

The world turns slowly, and in the time that has passed, much has changed, but the more things alter the more they stay the same. If this record appeared today, it would still be relevant, but probably no more successful. Consider this a parable of the poverty attached to the sin of innovation.

The Great Promise of Nothing...

Robert Cochrane — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 03:35:28 +0000

The Great Promise of Nothing... Robert Cochrane January 13, 2009 - 22:35

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Luke Toms: The Forever House (Island Records)

They had to come. It would have been churlish not to in the wake of Saint Rufus of Wainwright, that stream of fey young things attempting to out-Chatterton the rest. Languid and weary beyond their tender, tortured years, a straggling band of immaculate consumptives, cascading around us like broken butterflies, wonderfully attired travelers who believe in more romantic times than these.

Micha was an early English contender to the glittering crown of Foppery, and one that has successfully maintained his lavish claim. Another lurking in the wings, a zealot's glint of ambition in his haughty gaze, is Luke Toms. A Restoration dandy in 1970s guise, a creature of extraordinary confidence, who seems to disdain the faintest aspect of the dictum "less is more." His debut album, The Forever House, contains and unleashes these grand and far from blushing ambitions.

The references come flying at you thick and clever. Cheap and cheerful this album is not. It whiffs of expense, at times leaving the listener with a sense of having over-gorged on too much fine cuisine. A far from shy and retiring violet, this particular gaudy blossom wishes to be center stage, to grab the audience seductively by their collective throats and squeeze them slowly into a state of refined submission. Or rather, that's what he would have done had Island bothered to release the blessed item.

The label that almost scuppered Elbow's career years back appears to have left Toms in the waiting room of abandoned release schedules. Like all old whores, record labels see no shame in spending a lot while promising the world, but in the end, abandoning the new trick despite having wound them up to a point of fruitless anticipation.

"Can't Let You Go" begins with slow, bluesy piano, building to resemble the late Freddie Mercury in celestial collaboration with the Left Banke. Vocally Toms resembles a cultivated hybrid between Mercury's brazen sophistication and Kevin Rowland's plaintive Dexy's yelp. "Another Day" employs string-laden psychedelia a la "Excerpt from a Teenage Opera," while "Friends Reunited" builds delightfully, like some pastoral anthem. The absent ghost of Simon Warner walks once more.

Last year's debut single, "Fools with Money," unleashed Tom's flair and florid world upon an unsuspecting British public. A dizzyingly grand slice of Glam with an '"Oh You Pretty Things" style chorus, it enmeshes elements of baroque Beatles. A perfect synthesis of his latent ambition and conceit, it finds a perfect home on the album. Just when all seems to be drifting to the extreme edges of flamboyant excess, the haunting chamber instrumental "Estate Story" pulls the entire affair back from the verge of listener fatigue.

"Never Know" and "Hold This Thought" both have strong elements of mid-'70s Elton John, and as the album appears to be running out of gas, "Peace Be Myself" realigns the proceedings. Haunting, considered and smoldering, the song reveals Tom's considerable talent at its finest. Sensitive, louche, yet refined, it possesses an uncanny beauty.

"I ask you to be careful

When you are lying,

So that I don't find out."

It gives a perfect indication of the tone of "What's More Important," a late '60s breeze of a song that boasts a beautiful sing-along demise. It sounds like the Kinks at their London postcard best.

"Hangover Blues" brings down the heavily brocaded and scarlet curtains on these arch and glamorous proceedings. A torch song that again echoes Glam at its most refined, it sounds alarmingly new, yet is coated with exquisite references that are anything but.

You have to give Luke Toms ten out of ten for his sheer audacity. Even though he didn't quite succeed in having this album released, he didn't entirely fail. As debut albums go, this leaves most of the rivals languishing, defeated, and green with envy. At times a victim of its own grand design, it achieves the effect of a perfectly finished calling card casually cast upon a silver tray. Terribly English, a telling amalgam of the music hall and concert platform, it is ultimately worth the effort of a search for the advance version on eBay. Long after the current crop of heavy-headed fops have diminished under the weight of their own immense ambitions, this one should have progressed upwards towards a new Bohemia, if disappointment hasn't crushed his flamboyant heart.

Treat yourself to this abandoned and truncated spear of grand ambition. Pray that Luke Toms has sufficient gall to raise another stab at being fabulous and absolute, and curse Island Records for having enough vision to complete this album, but not enough to release the damned thing.

A Girl Before Winter

Robert Cochrane — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:48:10 +0000

A Girl Before Winter Robert Cochrane December 30, 2008 - 21:48

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Claire Hamill: October (Island Records)

Claire Hamill was a direct contemporary and label-mate of the late, but increasingly mythical, Nick Drake. Her second solo outing, October, proved her the mistress of tender bedsitter missives that still can haunt the heart. Fans of confessional songwriting should value and explore this neglected selection of artistry and craft that has stood the test of many passing seasons.

Recorded by Cat Stevens maestro Paul Samwell Smith in the month of 1972 that lends its name to the proceedings, it retains echoes of Joni Mitchell and Linda Thompson. Hamill possessed a maturity that reached far beyond the eighteen years her life had encompassed by the time the record appeared.

In its evocative shots of her by Lord Lichfield, she seems a wayward Alice, gazing from rain-streaked panes or kicking up a cloak of bronzed Autumn leaves. A small pearl of wintry perfection, October holds songs that pull with gentle strength on the strings of the heart, since she possess a voice of tremendous assurance and clarity. By turns piano-led, guitar driven, or beautifully coated in strings, she extols a wistful longing that lingers like an evocation.

Hamill has a neat lyrical ability that allows her to encapsulate the pain of an undesired absence in â€œWall to Wall Carpetingâ€: The first ray of sunshine let me know that you had left me what I didn't understand is how I never heard you go my room is carpeted you see. or how what passes for love is merely convenience thinly disguised in the bristling but subdued anger of "Speedbreaker"

"Don't worry I fully realize you only love me 'cos I'm here the only one available, the only woman near."

The refined creator of a mournful line, she unleashes moody vistas of loss and longing by bringing personal observations into a fine poetic relief: Met a girl once called peaceful with rice-cake hair and waterfall eyes always smiling and giving answers spent all her time in hallways traveling half-fare and in disguise... Maybe it's just that thing about sweet-sounding girls who know their way around a piano, but Kate Bush could easily have used the more self-contained October as a blueprint for The Kick Inside.

It is an essentially English confection without the sometimes strained drama inherent in the more extreme aspects of the Misses Amos and Bush. It rests easily alongside Bryter Layter as the perfect female companion piece. Delightful folk bookends, rarified and pure. Hamill went on to record two superlative albums for the Kinks' Ray Davies's short-lived Konk Records before briefly joining Wishbone Ash.

Her work throughout the '80s became more experimental and choral, though her recent outings hold more in common with the tone and texture of her Island years. One of the most alluring fantasy pairings would have been Claire Hamill and Nick Drake.

Everything was almost there, the talent, a shared sensibility, mouthfuls of reflective and haunting songs, even the same record label. It wasn't to be; it seems they never even met. The best dreams are the ones that hover just out of reach, beautiful but unsullied by the sad light of what we commonly know as the real world.