The gentle “Birdsong and Reprise” leads nicely into the gorgeous “Moonshooter”. For this album Anthony was encouraged to provide his own vocals. The result is a sometimes quaint, faintly quirky, and always endearing performance that sits nicely against his trademark quality writing.
The ten minute title track provides an excellent centre piece to the album. Lush orchestration is added to “Regrets” whilst the painfully sad “Now What (Are They Doing To My Little Friends?)” came from Anthony’s horror at seeing seals being clubbed to death in a cull shown on the news. “Greenhouse”, “Paperchase”, and “Squirrel” all maintain the album’s quality.
Again the bonus disc contains a wealth of goodies. This time fourteen tracks ranging from demos to alternative takes are included.
1984
1979 was a busy year for Anthony Phillips. Two more solo albums, Sides, and the first of the Private Parts & Pieces series were released and he also helped old friend Mike Rutherford on his Smallcreeps Day album. In 1980 he released Private Parts & Pieces Part 2:- Back To The Pavilion and commenced work on his latest idea, 1984.
1984 represents something of a sidestep in his career. Perhaps this is best explained by the man himself when he says in the informative album notes, ‘what did come to mind was an idea to use a lot of interesting synth sounds, current electronic sounds if you like but at the same time to be quite descriptive and almost semi-classical in a way’.
He had, in fact, recently acquired two synthesizers, a Polymoog and an ARP 2600. They had already appeared tentatively in some of his previous albums, albeit adding mere splashes of colour behind his characteristic acoustic style. For 1984, however, he constructed the whole album around the instruments. It came as something of a shock to his many followers and admirers alike and certainly divided opinion.
Having said that, Anthony had been engaged in studying music at an extremely high level for some time and as a result classical influences are written deeply into the music.
During the writing for the album he was also commissioned to write the music for a television series called Rule Britannia. He was asked to provide music that sounded like ‘Vaughan Williams with a twist’. He succeeded in his brief and his music for the series was extremely well received, successfully managing to tap into the essential ‘Englishness’ required.
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