Blogcritics Author: Sid Smith

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Bassist Boz Burrell: 1 August 1946 - 21 September 2006

Sid Smith — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 11:46:32 EDT

When I was writing my biography of King Crimson back in 1999, I’d been pleasantly surprised by how many of the ex-members were keen to talk to me about their time with the band. Even the couple who at first were reluctant eventually agreed to talk. The one person who declined to talk was Boz Burrell.He was always polite when I rang him at his home. Sometimes his wife would answer and she’d say “Oh hang on, he’s just out playing some golf. I’ll just go and get him.” My head would immediately fill with the image of Boz in those Pringle sweaters and the ludicrous slacks. It somehow didn’t fit the image of the hard-drinking, hard-rocking blues and jazz loving singer who’d joined Crimson as a brief stopping point on his way to global success with Bad Company.I think I spoke to him three times in total. On each occasion he’d politely enquire how the book was progressing. Sometimes I’d tell a little of what someone had said, hoping it would spur him into a response, but Boz was too seasoned a pro to be caught like that. Instead he would offer neutral comments: “Well, it might have been like that but, you know I can’t really remember,” was about as far as he would be drawn.Only once or twice did he offer an opinion, but it was strictly off the record and most definitely non-attributable. He always struck me as affable and courteous and I felt sure that if I kept up with the calls he would have relented and talked on the record.Everyone from Crimson who had an association with Boz that I talked to – Dik Fraser, Robert Fripp, Peter Sinfield, Mel Collins, and Ian Wallace – all had good things to say about him. Both Mel and Ian were particularly defensive about their ex-band mate, feeling he’d been unfairly maligned by certain sections of the Crimson fanbase.It wasn’t until the release of material through the King Crimson Collectors Club, and more recently though DGMLive, that the reputation of the “Boz-era KC” was rehabilitated, from being dismissed as a mere jam-band, and now exonerated as a group with its own distinctive identity. Certainly my own opinion of the group received a 360° turn-around after hearing the first four gigs the band played at the Zoom Club in April of 1971.Once Crimson toured the UK they’d somehow lost the sense of danger and adventure which is such a vital part of those Zoom Club recordings, hampered as they were by the need to bring what was, for them, the ill-fitting material of the previous incarnation to the punters who were eager to hear the Court material played live.Unfortunately, I never saw Boz with Crimson, having missed them at Newcastle’s City Hall by a matter of days. There was a compensation of sorts when Bad Company played the same venue on their first UK tour a few years later.I think we watched Boz the whole night in his red leather rock-god trousers, secretly hoping that Bad Company would break into a Crimson tune. Of course, given Boz’s antipathy to that part of his career, it was never going to happen. Even though we knew it deep down, we still held out hope until the end of the show. "Ladies of the Road" from Islands would have been ideal, but of course it wasn’t to be.I heard about Boz’s death from Jakko Jakszyk, singer and guitarist with the King Crimson alumni project who’d heard the news himself from lyricist Peter Sinfield. I know Jakko was a huge fan of the Islands line-up – with Boz’s version of the title track being one of his favourites.Details were sketchy. Nobody quite knew what was going on. We thought at first that Boz was in Edinburgh with Tam White. I rang the news desk of The Scotsman newspaper but they'd heard nothing. I checked out the local radio station but they knew zilch.After contacting Tam White’s agent, I eventually spoke to guitarist Neil Warden who played with Boz and Tam in The Groove Connection. Neil clarified and confirmed the sad details.Tam was visiting Boz at his place in Spain. They were getting ready to go out. Boz had just picked up a guitar to play, sat back and died there and then in the chair, killed (it seems likely) by a massive heart attack.As the DGM HQ team hastily prepared a tribute page to Boz, I thought it was appropriate that they had chosen an alternative mix of "Ladies of the Road" as Boz’s last encore with Crimson.

Sid Smith is a freelance writer from the North-east of England. He's written sleeve notes for albums on major and independent record labels as well as contributing articles and reviews for national and local press in the UK. As well as copy-editing for publishers, and providing online content for seversal music-related website including the Robert Fripp / King Crimson online archive, DGMLive, Sid is the author of a critically acclaimed biography, In The Court of King Crimson (2001), and Northstars (2005), Granada TV's Royal Television Award winning series profiling musicians from the North-east of England. Sid has been blogging since 1999 about music, movies, books, art, kids, politics and life in general.

Music Review: Free - Live At The BBC

Sid Smith — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:40:35 EDT

There’s a story in Ken Garner’s history of Radio 1 sessions (In Session Tonight) about when up and coming band, Free, had finished a recording for a John Peel programme in April 1970, a member of the group casually asked one of the engineers present what they thought of one the songs as a potential single. Island, their record company, didn’t rate it too highly. The band wanted a second opinion. The engineer, the story goes, rang label boss, Muff Winwood to tell them they should release the track immediately. This was just a few months before the release of Fire and Water and the song under discussion was “All Right Now”. Whether true or not, it illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the BBC and the bands of the day striding into studios with quaintly mythic names such as Aeolian Hall 1 and Maida Vale 5, in the hope of getting a leg-up the career ladder. The first of these sessions (of which only one track now survives) was recorded just months after they’d formed, and only days after the 16th birthday of the bass player Andy Fraser, who even at such a tender age was already able to put ex-John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers on his fledgling CV. Free were frequent visitors to the BBC as they slogged around the clubs and halls hewing a solid live reputation as something of a good-time band. With Paul Kossoff’s swaggering, attitude-laden guitar breaks, and the “lick-my-love-pump” innuendo from Paul Rodgers, the patron saint of the leather trouser industry, it’s easy to why Free have been dismissed in some quarters as a bunch of cocky blues-rock bruisers looking to get their collective lemons squeezed.The problem with this approach in concert was that some of the subtlety that infused Free’s studio albums was set aside for Olympic-standard mike-stand twirling, brow-furrows and other crowd-pleasing tactics. Yet these sessions demonstrate Free occupied a half-way house somewhere between brain and brawn when it came to the radio. Culled from a variety of sources that includes Paul Kossoff’s personal archive, off-air recordings made by fans, and the regular BBC vaults, several make their appearance for the first time. Given this provenance, it’s not surprising that some of the sonics, (the second disc in particular) are bootleg raw. Perversely, this very coarseness lends the slower numbers a vintage patina, as though “Over The Green Hills” and the mournful “Free Me” have spilled out from the spools of an old Smithsonian field recording. When the performances are as good as these you happily take the rough with the smooth. The real star is Andy Fraser, whose bass playing stalks every single moment of this 2 disc set with an inventive flair above and beyond the call of duty, beyond his years and beyond anything most of his contemporaries were managing. There’s a gratifying ‘first to last’ completeness about this release, spanning as it does their inaugural Top Gear session through to the triumphant finale for John Peel, when “All Right Now” shot them past the grasp of the producers in what must be (if you believe the old tale) something of an own goal for the engineer who made that fateful call.

Music Review: John Martyn - In Session At The BBC

Sid Smith — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:08:30 EDT

One of the great pleasures of listening to evening radio in the UK back in the 1970s was stumbling across a track or a session by John Martyn. Blessed with a late-night voice whose smoky insouciance, cured and tanned by years of bar-room reverie when combined with his unique brand of dream-laden guitar, provided a perfect fit for those evening airwaves, he guaranteed to warm away the wintry chills.Primarily a folk artist, Martyn was also a serious space cadet making liberal use of devices such as the Echoplex, with which he converted rock licks into moibus strips of stellar sound, and numerous distortion pedals to help him on such trippy excursions. In full flight he was able to make a glorious multi-layered racket as “Eibhli Ghail Chiuin Ni Chearbhail” - notwithstanding its slightly scary resemblance to “Mull of Kintyre” - demonstrates.Listening to the loop-propelled “Devil Get My Woman” and “Inside” you’d have to have cloth ears not to conclude that Martyn’s experiments went beyond the confines of the folk world and into the stadiums inhabited by the likes of a heyday Simple Minds or The Edge’s shimmering lines in U2.Long-time collaborator Danny Thompson adds sinuous ripples of agile Double Bass on “Make No Mistake”. Together they were an amazing team able to blur the boundaries between folk, jazz and rock to make a rewarding brew of style and substance.Though his famously slurred voice may suggest a laissez-faire approach “May You Never”, “Spencer The Rover” and “The Message” show Martyn’s command and precision when it comes to his playing. However it's the sublime electric guitar and the eight and half minute "Small Hours" from his criminally under-valued One World album that really steals the set, capturing Martyn's uncanny knack of bearing his soul without any histrionics.Recorded between 1973 and 1978 this is John Martyn BC (Before [Phil] Collins) and thus at the very height of his powers. It's an irresistible combination of writing, playing and performance. Though several of these tunes previously appeared as bonus tracks spread across Universal’s 2005 remastering of Martyn’s Island catalogue, gathered here in one place they make a near perfect introduction to a remarkable musician.At a time when the numbers of guitars being sold has never been higher, and the media is teeming with growing numbers of earnest looking young men singing meaningful songs, sporting guitars and even beards (a sure sign that they want to be taken seriously), this collection seems timely indeed.

DVD Review: Bruford - Rock Goes To College

Sid Smith — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 08:15:39 EDT

Sometimes you see old photographs of gathering crowds taken in the early part of the 20th Century in which nearly every single soul is wearing a cap or hat of some sort. It’s a time overtaken by changing fashions, the hat-wearers and the people who made them, both long lost in mutual oblivion.You get a similar feeling when the camera pulls back to reveal the audience at Oxford Polytechnic in 1979; the incongruous sight of lots of people crammed together nodding, swaying, cheering, and otherwise showing irrefutable signs they are enjoying the music flowing off-stage by fluent and gifted musicians.But surely it was exactly this kind of music, in exactly this kind of venue, punk was meant to have done away with?Even allowing for the attraction of a BBC TV unit, and the attendant opportunities to wave a “Hello Mum” placard as an extra incentive for going along, this DVD provides incontrovertible proof people used to turn out in decent numbers for this fast-moving, complex, and often knotty music. Sure it was ‘difficult’ but it was also, relatively speaking, popular enough amongst young people of the day.Lest we forgot, it was common, even in the UK during the late '70s, for gigs by jazz-rockers such as Isotope, Pacific Eardrum, Turning Point, John Steven’s Away, Soft Machine, Hatfield & The North, etc., to be well attended by enthusiastic punters who not only knew the material, but were able to nod their heads in 12/8 whilst jabbing troublesome chord shapes in the direction of their air-Fender Rhodes (with optional mini-moog at the side).With Bruford, things generally rocked along and moved so fast there was little time for folks to worry about whether it was jazz, or rock, or something between the two. It simply was what it was. With customary understatement, Bill Bruford notes in the scrapbook accompanying this release as far as they were concerned, Bruford was just a 'rock group with fancy chords.'The playing from the quartet is astoundingly confident throughout. Aside from their leader’s never less than athletic urgings from behind the kit, the finicky handiwork from Jeff Berlin and Alan Holdsworth’s quicksilver guitar glance and dart above Dave Stewart’s consistently classy keyboards.Vocalist Annette Peacock who appears on two tracks makes an oddly timid addition to the show. During “Back To The Beginning Again” she wanders to the rear of the stage delivering her brand of sprechgesang from behind the drum riser at one point.Whether this is due to indifferent on-stage monitoring, disdain for rock show convention, or fashionable truculence is unclear, but it has the effect of making her contribution somewhat dispassionate and lack-lustre.Transmitted back in the days when television appeared to value music for its own sake rather than as an adjunct to cross-promotion, filler or without it being mediated by an omnipresent host, this DVD captures 40 minutes of intelligent, racy tunes whose wit and virtuosity now appears as arcane as all those hat-wearing types way back when.

Music Review: Fripp and Eno - The Cotswold Gnomes - Unreleased Works Of Startling Genius

Sid Smith — Sat, 9 Sep 2006 05:54:08 EDT

You wait nearly 30 years for a new Fripp and Eno album and along come a couple at the same time. Well almost. First we had The Equatorial Stars in 2004 and now we have The Cotswold Gnomes: Unreleased Works Of Startling Genius.Comparable to Eno’s recent Curiosities series, the new download-only release was compiled by Brian Eno and consists of a sequence of sketches, outtakes, works in progress, and alternative mixes deriving from 2005, the period of The Equatorial Stars, and as far back as 1992.Eno once described himself as the intuitoso to Fripp’s virtuoso and this release is, in essence, an Eno eye-view of things, where Fripp’s ability is a flexible material to be processed into something that may or may not bear much resemblance to its origins.As might be expected given their previous form, the set includes a few choice chilled-out spacey climes (including no less than three early/alternate mixes from The Equatorial Stars) and some truly beautiful though short pieces.“Timean Sparkles” has a chiming melody evoking associations with the title track of Evening Star, whilst its augmented reprise, “Hopeful Timean,” has Fripp’s sound stripped to the bare essentials. Consisting of delicately plucked notes against one of Eno’s elusive ethereal backdrops, it’s simple but wonderfully effective -- perfectly highlighting their respective strengths.Yet for all their association with nebulous ambience, a lot here has several rough, if not downright sharp edges to it, though thankfully none quite so abrasive as the infamous "Healthy Colours" suite, which sullied 1994’s Essential Fripp & Eno package.Fans of Fripp’s patented laser beam sound will warm to “The Idea Of Decline,” which is set against a highly filtered bedrock of dub-funk replete with glitches, short-wave radio angst, and ghostly chorales.So far so up-tempo. However, "Cross Crisis In Lust Storm" is more beat-up than upbeat. Imagine an automated steel plant going full-tilt at 180 bpm with Fripp oiling the metallic head-banging in his most dissonant manner. It’s almost as if they said “Ah, fuck this ambient stuff -- let’s rock out!”When they recorded the piece (circa 1991/92 with Trey Gunn on Stick), Eno reckoned it to be one of Fripp’s best-ever recorded performances, a view apparently shared by the man himself. It would be a foolish person who would disagree with such informed opinions as these.“Tripoli 2020” conjures the brooding grooves of Eno’s work with J. Peter Schwalm with Fripp’s guitar set to pan-pipe mode heavy-breathing down the spine of the skittering beat. It’s an unsettling track whose portentous nature is entirely off-set by a burst of freaky-deaky sitar guitar.Eno’s working practices necessarily generates lots of surplus material and it’s this very variety which is both a strength and weakness of the album. If it lacks the uniformity characteristic of their previous mainstream releases, the less restrictive nature of the download medium gives them the space to provide a fascinating insight into the artistic processes and outcomes of two influential musicians at work and play.This album is released on download only at www.dgmlive.com

Book Review: The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Sid Smith — Mon, 4 Sep 2006 11:04:42 EDT

Despite living a world in which we are daily exposed to the news and images of death, nothing can prepare us for the up-close loss of a loved one. Even where this occurs after a period of illness where in theory affairs are put in order and appropriate provisions made, the consuming void of grief is enormous, devastating, and nearly always underestimated by those caught in its maw.The sudden death of Joan Didion’s husband, the writer and critic John Gregory Dunne, in their New York home and the devastating impact of its aftermath is forensically documented in The Year Of Magical Thinking. The facts are starkly presented without dramatic device or adornment. Married for nearly forty years and occasionally collaborating on screenplays, they lived and worked in the same apartment and had barely been separated for more than a few days in that time.After visiting their daughter Quintana, a grown woman in her thirties who has been admitted to hospital after contracting pneumonia and septic shock, Didion describes the moment when the world she knew abruptly halted following Dunne’s massive heart attack:Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.From these opening words of her book, the first words she wrote some five months after his death, Didion recounts how she was hurled from the rational world of certainty into the chaotic anguish of loss, grief, and mourning.Her journalistic instincts to get on top of the facts and make sense of what’s happened quickly come unstuck. No amount of medical research about the heart condition that felled her husband or the chronology contained in the coroner’s report nor still yet, her poring over the weighty academic studies of loss and mourning, gain her a toehold back to the “normal” world from which she had been irrevocably dislodged.If knowledge is normally equated with power, in the face of death its usefulness is overrated. No amount of understanding the cause and effect can change the outcome or lend “meaning” to her partner’s absence.In trying to restart her life she becomes a tightrope walker fearing to look anywhere but straight ahead as streets, restaurants, dates, books, and people are rendered off limits lest she be sideswiped by what Didion calls “the vortex”. Happier times are now too painful to bear, once cherished memories now a desolate territory tainted by “what if?” and “if only…”The demand of caring for her gravely ill daughter occupies much of the narrative. Didion’s smouldering rage at being unable to do anything to help her husband adds to her determination to see her child pull through.The passages where mother sits with her unconscious offspring tethered to her life-support are charged and incredibly poignant. Any reader who has a child will appreciate the utter nightmare of this situation and hope it's somewhere we never have to be.When she tells an unconscious Quintana, “You’re safe. I’m here,” Didion reluctantly recognises with a sense of rising panic and horror that nothing can be guaranteed anymore.The tremendous effort involved in writing such an account, with its raw, honest clarity is obvious. Her constant gnawing over facts and potential portents of what was about to happen to both her husband and daughter becomes obsessive bordering on the deranged.Didion acknowledges her reluctance to finishing the account. Whilst writing it she is able to keep Dunne from being dead. Finishing the book begins the process of letting go, of moving on with her life but not his.The unbelievably cruel postscript not mentioned in these pages was that although Quintana apparently recovered, she would later die following complications from acute pancreatitis.With a book so firmly rooted in reality there can be no neat happy ending, no reconciling force that makes it all fall into place, or defining epiphany to bind together the unravelled threads of Didion’s family life. Instead, there is only the unforgiving forward motion of time and those it leaves behind.

Movie Review: Luc Besson's Angel-A

Sid Smith — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:10:21 EDT

When it comes to French movies, I am a complete sucker. The merest glimpse of neon-lit rain on Parisian cobbles, the brusque cadences of the language (which I don’t speak a word of, by the way), or the false-memory nostalgia of yearning accordion music, rumbles through my soul like the night train to Nice.Yet despite an almost genetic predisposition to all things Gallic, by the end of director Luc Besson’s latest movie, Angel-A, I was left wanting to hurl myself from the nearest bridge -- exactly the situation in which the two central characters find themselves when we first meet them.After defaulting on payments to the mob and with a contract on his head, Andre (the grizzled-looking Jamel Debbouze) decides to throw himself into the Seine. To his surprise, further along the ledge there’s a statuesque blonde (Rie Rasmussen), long of leg, high of heel, and, this being a French movie, wearing the skimpiest of black cocktail dresses, who also wants to end it all. Unable to accept that someone so beautiful doesn’t have a reason to live, Andre jumps in and saves her.After which Andre discovers that the woman, Angela, happens to be an angel. Not just a metaphorical angel but the real deal with wings who happens to be down on her luck, feeling jaded about the sordid business of saving souls.The sharp contrast between their attitudes and appearances (light/dark, male/female, short/tall, good/bad, happy/sad, human/supernatural being!) coupled with Angela’s less than angelic behaviour when it comes to other men, and Andre’s unexpected morality should provide us with a screwball rom-com set against the noir-ish world of a subterranean Paris. Instead we get a too-predictable retread of It’s A Wonderful Life or Wings Of Desire but plucked of their respective humour, warmth, and pathos and oozing cheap sentimentality. This aspect has been a recurring difficulty in Besson’s work, tarnishing his otherwise classic Leon, although thankfully the saccharine was effectively staunched by Jean Reno’s sour yet vulnerable aura in the title role.Here however, the absence of comparable talent is telling. Debbouze may be fine in small parts (he makes a fleeting but effective appearance in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie as the greengrocer’s son who gets revenge on his tyrant father), but like Rasmussen lacks the range of skills or old-fashioned “presence” required to carry it off. Charisma is more than being able to pull off the ramshackle loser look or pouting sexily as your mascara runs.The blame lays not so much with the hapless cast punching above their weight as with the lead-lined script which clouts us with clunkers such as “You may not have a past but at least let me give you a future.” Even accepting that Besson’s dialogue may have lost something in translation when it comes to the subtitles, there seems little excuse for such poor writing from a director as experienced as this. This would-be parable about how heaven is in the most unexpected of places if we open our eyes and ourselves probably looked great in storyboard but falls to earth with a resounding thump.

Music Review: Ahead Rings Out - Blodwyn Pig

Sid Smith — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:49:31 EDT

Blodwyn Pig was guitarist Mick Abraham’s response to Ian Anderson’s more pop and folk-friendly inclinations for Jethro Tull, the group they both helped found at the start of the blues-based music boom of the mid-60s. Leaving Anderson in charge of the soul and future direction of the group, Abraham put together a credible if short-lived outfit producing two very good albums that struck a chord with record buyers of the day.Blodwyn Pig was a rare example of an off-shoot band whose commercial appeal came close to rivaling that of its parent group; Tull’s Stand Up topped the charts in July ’69, Ahead Rings Out made it to number nine the following month.It was always going to be Abrahams’ beast and unsurprisingly it stuck to the formula expressed on Tull’s debut, This Was. However the secret ingredient that gave them an edge was wind player and multi-instrumentalist, Jack Lancaster. A more assured and robust soloist than Anderson, Lancaster’s playing moved between King Curtis or Coltrane as occasion demanded. The throwaway opener “It’s Only Love” is lifted by his sparkling, punchy horn arrangement, whilst “The Modern Alchemist” enables Lancaster to jazz it up large.Featuring exemplary backing from Andy Pyle on bass and drummer Ron Berg, the album sits firmly in the long-coated underground brigade camp that stretched the blues, if not quite to snapping point, then at least into some interesting shapes and occasionally humorous squeezes. “The Change Song”, with its mockney ‘boy done good’ monologue shows the irony of white boys getting rich by singing the blues wasn’t lost on Abrahams.“Leave It With Me” or “Sing Me A Song I Know” are pure Tull – close your eyes and it could easily be the cock-legged Anderson belting through those changes. Such similarities may help account for Blodwyn Pig’s commercial appeal which was consolidated on tours in both Europe and America ensuring their excellent sequel, Getting To This, charted at number eight when released in 1970.Unlike its previous outing on the BGO label, this new collection gathers non-album singles on CD for the first time, including the Tull-heavy “Same Old Story”. Though such additions are welcomed the original running order has been tampered with. "Backwash", the short and sweet pastoral set-up / sucker punch for the aggressive blasting of “Ain’t Ya Comin’ Home Babe?”, is relegated to an almost-ran slot as the end of the album, replaced by a chronologically out of place “See My Way” from their follow-up album.A now minor footnote in the Jethro Tull story, this reissue reminds us just how forceful and effective Blodwyn Pig were at their particular brand of jazz-tinged blues that never forgot to rock. Bracing stuff.

Music Review: Living Life Backwards: The Best Of Pete Brown

Sid Smith — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:58:02 EDT

Imagine the scene. It’s London 1969, you are poet singer Pete Brown and the band you’re in (Pete Brown And The Battered Ornaments) has a support slot on the bill of The Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park. That’s the good news. The bad news is your band has just voted to fire you and will wipe your vocals off their forthcoming album. By his own admission in the copious sleeve notes that accompany Living Life Backwards, Pete Brown could sometimes be a right royal pain in the ass. Best remembered as the principal lyricist for Cream and Jack Bruce’s post-Cream solo albums, this “best of” collection sheds welcome light on Brown’s alternative career as an unexpectedly credible underground rock singer with side orders of prog, jazz, and hallucinogenic words to go. On the evidence presented here it looks as though The Battered Ornaments (which featured Chris Spedding) did Brown a favour by giving him the push as clunkers such as the R&B footstomper, “Dark Lady” from A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark, stretch Brown’s vocals to the absolute edge of their capacity. These are thankfully few and instead the bulk of this collection is rightly taken up with the two more convincing albums he made with Piblokto! – Things May Come And Things May Go But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever and Thousands On A Raft (both 1970). Though Piblokto! lacked any kind of chart success in the UK (damned instead by the faint praise of being big in France), Harvest showed an almost touching loyalty in releasing a clutch of non-album singles, all collected here, including the languid ballad “Broken Magic” and its progtastic six-minute Hammond-heavy A-side, "Can’t Get Off This Planet" where Brown tries out a touch of Family’s Roger Chapmanesque strangulated warbling. The title track from Things May Come… details the line-up of usual suspects at the eponymous Art School Dance with a lyrical bravado equaled only by its shifting musical styles that takes in Jim Mullen’s heavy blasting guitars, noodling organ, and pernickety eastern-influenced baroque interludes from the sax; a case of everything but the mind-expanding, multi-coloured kitchen sink. The gorgeous “Station Song Platform Two”(awash with autumnal period-piece Mellotron) and the surprisingly powerful “Thousands On A Raft” (both from the album of the same name) show that given more emphasis on the music and less on partying, he could have been a contender. Evidence of Brown’s penchant for career-blighting hedonism can be found on “High Flying Electric Bird.” Roger Bunn’s tasteful bass playing should be the central feature of this bluesy reverie. However, its integrity is fatally undermined by an ill-advised swanny whistle solo - a swanny whistle ferchrisakes! Even making allowances for the “anything goes” ethos of the era it’s hard to know what on earth they were thinking of when they committed it to tape. Despite such a jaw-dropping crime against culture, taste and good sense, overall Living Life Backwards shows Brown’s left-field hairy college-rock with its larger than usual literary bent was made, as the handsomely packaged sleeve astutely suggests, “to be played loud” rather than focus on the small stuff. And sometimes that’s no bad thing. Does it sound dated? Of course it does. But if you’re up for an authentic fix on what was going in the second-division of rock bands groggily waking up, yawning and scratching their metaphorical balls in the first light of Britain’s post-psychedelic dawn, then look no further.

CD Review: Down By The Jetty by Doctor Feelgood

Sid Smith — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:49:14 EDT

In the 12 months between the release of Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes (December, 1973) and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (December, 1974) by Genesis, there was a sense in some quarters in the UK that rock music had become terribly distended, distorted, and stretched out of shape and increasingly imperious and remote from ordinary fans. At a time when months could be spent dubbing ever more complex bass parts, or preciously tweaking a bit of echo in the mix of an erstwhile magnum opus, Dr. Feelgood’s debut, Down By The Jetty, was released in a deliberately dumbed-down, in-yer-face mono. It was a political statement as much as an artistic decision, eloquently conveying the simple élan of their back to basics message. Arguably the opening shot of the coming punk war that would soon grip the UK, the Feelgoods slashed and shoved their way out of the pubs and clubs of Essex and beyond with a gutsy no-nonsense, celebratory retro R&B. Literally inspired by Johnny Kidd and The Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over”, guitarist and principal visionary Wilko Johnson’s hyper-animated stage antics were a marvel to behold. The glassy-eyed stare and his steroid-chicken strut as he jabbed the chords from his black telecaster held audiences transfixed. With tightly drilled backing from John B. Sparks on bass and drums by The Big Figure, Lee Brilleaux’s wide boy menace gave his vocals a surly authority that you wouldn’t want to mess with. They had attitude with a capital A and took no prisoners when it came to on-stage commitment. The studio was another matter. Having found that the usual tracking and overdub regime was draining the vitality of their sound, Wilko persuaded producer Vic Maile to record them live in the studio. It was inspired and audacious and intuitively played upon Maile’s experience as engineer on The Who Live At Leeds. Only when the band played live in the studio was he able to capture the primal edge of the Feelgoods getting into their stride. “She Does It Right” and the syncopated body punches of “Roxette” hit hard then and still do today. Taut and lean, almost every track fizzes with an explosive energy that would carry the band from cultish obscurity to a number one act (the stunning live album Stupidity) in less than two years. Though firmly rooted in the pub rock movement that briefly flowered in the mid-'70s, it’s easy to understand why the punks took up with the Feelgoods and their minimalist short-sharp-shock approach to their music. The urgency of the album is undermined only once by a dreary stroll through “That Ain’t The Way To Behave.” Wilko’s slightly effete vocal on an otherwise consummate reading of “Boom Boom” confirms the wisdom of letting Brilleaux’s rumbling clout front things up. This expanded two-CD set includes outtakes from the original sessions at Rockfield Studios, a complete stereo version of the record, and a set of live recordings of the band wowing the crowds at Dingwalls circa ‘74. As welcome as all these extras may be, it’s the punch of original mono Down By The Jetty album that’ll have you reeling.