Show of Hands Live in Sheffield

Devon-based Show of Hands continue to be one of the great enigmas of today’s music scene.

Well known as a duo, their lineup normally feature three members. Famed for their strong links to their Devon home, their material covers everything from South American sailers to bankers’ bonuses. And renowned as folk singers, they genre hop with abandon.

It therefore came as little surprise that the audience gathered for the standing-only gig was filled with expectation as the band opened proceedings with Country Life. Composed by the band’s lead singer, Steve Knightley, its non-sentimental description of the realities of country living married to a great sing-along melody has become a band trademark.

From this point the audience was in as good voice as the band and many took advantage of frequent opportunities to sing along with such concert favourites as Cousin Jack and an affecting Crazy Boy.

Phil Beer was on particularly strong form with his much praised multi-instrumentalist skills given plenty of space to shine. His fiddle playing was often quite mesmerising and while it would have been nice to hear him featured as a vocalist a little more often, this was more than compensated for by his show-stopping performance on Falmouth Packet.

The third member of the so-called duo, Miranda Sykes, played double bass throughout. Her vocals that have given the band such extra depth over the past few years were largely confined to a supporting role, but her one solo spot on a track from her new Sweet Pea E.P. was one of the night’s highlights.

Possibly the biggest cheer of the night was saved for the title track of the band’s current album, Arrogance Ignorance and Greed. Taking to task the bankers for their huge bonuses, the song has already become one of the most popular in their repertoire. Despite being one of their few recorded songs to feature drums (usually absent, as they were tonight), it helped them win in two categories at this year’s Folk Awards. It’s a song that really touched a chord will everyone present.

The two song encore began with the biggest surprise of the night. SInger Steve informed the audience that they thought it was only right that they perform a Sheffield folk song, before launching into the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby? Despite having their collective tongues firmly in their cheeks, it was a strangely successful treatment and benefitted from an exquisitely deadpan vocal from Miranda.

The night finished with what has become the band’s unofficial anthem, Roots. Decrying the fact that the English have so few songs that can be sung together on social occasions, it is perhaps the band’s finest attempt in combing social comment with a hook-laden tune.

As the lights went up and the audience began to disperse, they may have been no nearer finding a pigeon hole in which to place Show of Hands, but they left just as the band would have wanted. Singing.

The Greatest Swan Song in History

It’s now three months since the Beatles Remasters spun into our lives and it’s been an amazing journey. Now the dust has settled, we can begin to judge their quality detached from the hype.

And what quality. Every single CD has been a revelation, from the raw almost feral power of Please Please Me to the splintered wake of Let It Be. The listening experience has been revelatory, with ultra-familiar tracks taking on a whole new life of their own and forgotten gems suddenly being revealed as lost classics.

But of all the albums, none shines so brightly in the galaxy of rock as the group’s majestic swan song, Abbey Road. Never have the Beatles sounded so warm and yet so edgy. Never have they sounded better. The album is a beautiful, life-affirming testament to the power of music to move the listener and the 2009 Remaster has taken the experience to a whole new level.

Come Together, the funkiest album opener of their career, positively bounds out of the speaker, like a dog that has been chained up for too long. Of course, it sounds brilliant and it’s little surprise that the bass is so full and forceful. But as with so many of the albums, this remaster hits you will a killer sucker punch. Just as you’re marvelling at the speaker-popping bass, along comes a guitar part that is rawer, sexier and damn right dirtier than it has ever sounded before. Not for the first time you ask yourself it it was even on the original record, although you know it was.

And so it goes on. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, one of the most derided things the band ever recorded, is revealed as a scary and menacing trip of a tune. If the Stones had recorded it, critics would have been wowed by its tale of a judge-killing serial killer. The fact the whole thing is cloaked in a melodic, misleadingly simple tune is further proof of the band’s ability to wrong foot the listener.

I Want You (She’s so Heavy) has always been a little mad. The new sound lets it break from the asylum of despair to rampage its way from your speakers with stunning guitar work, mixed with a vocal that treads a line between deranged despair and soulful pleading. When it ends – famously mid bar – it’s as if you have been yanked back up the rabbit hole to a reality that isn’t quite as you remember it.

The side two medley is as close to perfect as any band has probably ever managed. So much greater than the sum of its parts, the remastering nevertheless reveals some mesmerising performances. You Never Give Me Your Money is rescued from its world weary business lunch feel and transported onto an open highway. Yes, the party’s almost over the songs seems to be saying, but Christ was it fun.

Perhaps the single greatest moment of the Abbey Road remaster comes 43 seconds into Golden Slumbers. In a way, it’s a moment that stands for the entire remastered series. When McCartney sings the line, “smiles awake you when you rise” the world seems to stop for a moment. Hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you find yourself wondering where the hell that came from. Surely you’d never heard so much emotion in that one line before?

It’s a stunning and truly moving moment. When, just a few short minutes later, The End finishes with that famous final couplet, you are left realising once and for all that for all the great music still to be recorded and for all the classic records of the 1970s, things would never be quite that great again.

The Restoration of Renaissance

It all starts with the sound of a gong.

Renaissance’s fourth studio album, but the first great one with their classic line up, Ashes Are Burning is one of the forgotten gems of 1973. In fact, the band are largely forgotten today which is a real shame.

They made a series of truly wonderful albums between 1973 and 1977. Many of which have recently been remastered and issued in replica sleeves. All are worth acquiring, but Ashes Are Burning is the place to start.

Often classed as Art Rock (whatever that’s supposed to mean) the band’s music cuts through such categorisation and takes flight on wings powered by the truly transcendental vocals of Annie Haslam. The owner of one of the best female voices in rock, her high-end voice gives the band’s music an other-worldly feel.

Although many of the band’s songs are well over the usual four minute length, Carpet Of The Sun is a relatively short but perfectly judged performance. It may be their finest moment and is certainly a showcase for the talented musicians in the band.

It’s a lovely, beautiful almost childlike performance whose fragility develops into life affirming majesty as only tracks from that period could do.

The eleven minute title track gives a feel of what was in store over the next few albums. The band used the lyrics of poet Betty Thatcher throughout their golden period and you can really see the advantage of such a decision. It’s all very English, pastoral and with hints of Tolkien, but the band pulls this off with verve.

All their albums from Ashes Are Burning to A Song For All Seasons should be checked out. The remastered sound really allows the band to shine and the listener to wallow in the glory of Haslam’s vocals.

It’s time for a Renaissance Renaissance.

Still With the Beatles

It’s been 10 days now. A full 10 days since the Beatles Remastered in Stereo arrived at Some Music Matters Towers and the effect remains the same as on that bright Wednesday morning: shocking.

Shocking because no matter how many times I listen, I continue to be surprised by what a superb job the engineers at Abbey Road have done.

And I’m only on With the Beatles.

In common with many people who bought the box, I expected to rush through and skip from one mid/late period album to another. But then I listened to Please Please Me.

I have managed to make it onto With the Beatles, but I remain so amazed at the difference in sound on what are two track recordings that I have spent the last 10 days just soaking up every note in all its new shining glory.

If you can hold off the joys of the later album, it’s worth doing. For instance, I Wanna Be Your Man has suddenly come to life with the band’s playing wild and joyous. You can feel the sweat dripping from the walls of the Cavern.

The second album’s closing track, Money is also a revelation. You must wonder what those original engineers thought when they first witnessed a band creating such a sound in a recording studio.

The remastered CD seems to be fighting its way out of the speakers with a level of energy never before heard on a pop record. Even now, 46 years later the sound is incredible. Brutal, alive and powerful in a way that puts punk bands to shame, it’s the sound of a group of musicians holding nothing back.

The whole experience is breathtaking – and that’s before the four track joys that await in album number three – A Hard Day’s Night.

If you have yet to invest – whether in the box set or individual CDs – I would suggest you take the plunge.

It’s been a long time since listening to music has been this much fun.

09.09.09

There can only be one topic of conversation this week and that’s the Beatles Remastered.

Deciding to start at the beginning, the first CD played in Some Music Matters Towers was Please Please Me.

No progress has been made since because the remaster is revelatory. Details barely hinted at before now leap out of the speakers. The harmonies on Anna (go to him) are so lifelike, you find yourself checking behind the stereo for any hidden Beatles.

The whole album no longer sounds like a dated, if brilliant debut. It sounds remarkably modern without losing any of its essence.

We’ve already reviewed the album, but it’s worth adding that the penultimate track, There’s A Place is now fully revealed as an early masterpiece and also a hint at what was to come.

Worth the wait? Absolutely. But be warned, you’ll need to put aside some serious listening time to take in the sheer beauty of what has been revealed.

Something to dab your eyes with might be an idea, too.

The Lost Chord

In Search of the Lost Chord

Ah, The Moody Blues. Bonkers in a way only a British band can be.

Between 1967 and 1972 the band released a series of seven studio albums, classics one and all.

Time has not been good to the group and their reputation has diminished over the years.

Yes, it’s true that some of their 1980s albums were pretty awful (as were almost all 1980s albums by their peers), but that should not diminish how we think about the band. And as ever, the true worth of any group is in their music. And what music…

Probably the band’s most famous album was 1967’s Days of Future Past. But this week we’re going to look at its follow-up, 1968’s In Search of the Lost Chord.

It is certainly an album of its time, with songs about Timothy Leary and an almost six minute closing track called Om, but look beyond the hippy mists and you’ll be rewarded by an LP of some truly great tunes. After the rather barmy opener, Departure, the first real song is the wonderfully rocking Ride My See-Saw. Some biting guitar playing backs a song with real driving force.

House of Four Doors is one of those tracks that may look a bit mad on paper, but the actual delivery is excellent and the musical backing evokes a spectral feel that the lyric does nothing to dispel. It’s melodic and slightly detached and seems to be saying much more than the lyric states. There are moments of true beauty here, like a Glastonbury sunrise over a Pagan dawn.

It comes in two parts, separated by Legend of a Mind about the afore mentioned Mr. Leary. Astral planes and the like certainly date the track, but that’s no bad thing. It is resplendent with its slightly deranged harmonies which give the sense that it all made more sense back in 1968. Taking a marijuana leaf out of the Beatles’ Day in the Life book, it’s a song of many parts all of which feature some lovely instrumentation.

Voice in the Sky is relatively straight forward with its three minutes being taken up by a melody carried along on the wings of an ethereal flute that seems to swoop in and out of the tune like a lost child looking for its mother. It’s actually a very good song which repays repeated listens.

The Best Way to Travel features the great line, “Thinking is the best way to travel”. Half way it drifts off into a world the listener isn’t privy to, but then returns to take us on the second leg of the journey. Cosmic, indeed.

The album’s penultimate proper track is the fantastic strangeness that is The Actor. For this magazine’s money, The Actor is the band’s greatest ever moment. Even when we consider the times the LP was recorded in and the almost other-worldly nature of much music of the time, it’s still at turns both a truly mystical and absolutely mysterious song.

The lyric traverses a path from the mundane to the spiritual, but the track’s real magic comes from Justin Haywood’s career best singing. His voice doesn’t just ride the carpet of melody, but actually seems to soar beyond our dimension to some other time and place. Yes, that may sound fanciful, but only if you’ve never heard the track. Listen to the song from 1:06 as the vocal begins to glide free of the song and then as Haywood sings, “Oh, darling, you’re almost part of me”, he seems to have left the confines of our normal world and ascended to some spiritual nirvana that never fails to make your heart surge. It’s powerful, emotive, strange and mystical. It’s also the best moment of the band’s career.

As if this was too much, the album ends with Om. It must be heard to be believed. Beautiful, baffling and without a doubt bonkers.

One Year in 33 Minutes

Colin Blunstone's Debut LP

Back in 1971, Colin Blunstone released his first solo LP. One Year, for this magazine’s money, is one of the most remarkable albums of the period and it remains today – almost four decades later – a criminally neglected classic.

Blunstone had been lead singer with the wonderful Zombies who had split in the late sixties after releasing one of the decade’s great concept albums, Odyssey and Oracle.

According to the brief liner notes, One Year was just that: an audio diary of the past twelve months following the band’s demise. It was written and recorded in isolation, away from the road and this results in an introspective masterpiece.

Opening with the Zombies-sounding, She Loves The Way They Love Her, the album begins with one its few up-tempo tracks which seems to act as a cathartic purging of Blunstone’s rock past. New decade, new sound.

The second track is where the brilliance of the LP really hits you, to such an extent that it stops you dead. To say it is lovely is to say Sinatra could carry a tune. It comes as a total surprise, which it shouldn’t do bearing in mind the sound the Zombies achieved on their final LP. Yet there is something other-worldly about its five minutes.  Written by the great Tim Hardin, Misty Roses remains one of the most elegant, wistful and down right perfect five minutes in pop/rock music.

The track begins with the guitar of Alan Crosthwaite, picking its way through Hardin’s inventive melody. Then Blunstone’s voice comes in, restrained, remote and yet fully engaged with the material, sounding like Nick Drake. Haunted and elegiac, Blunstone’s singing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

“You look to me like misty roses, so soft to touch, but too lovely not to try,” Blunstone sings.

The sheer weight of despair married to an acceptance of the inevitability of failure is heart-rendering. Again, there are similarities to Nick Drake and this magazine fully subscribes to the received wisdom of considering Drake a genius. However, we also accept that for some people his music is just too much stark beauty.

The difference with Blunstone’s reading of Misty Roses is that we have context. Blunstone has been successful so the listener is not weighed down by the sheer sadness of failure. The ex-Zombie singer brings a world-weary resignation to the song that lets us know that tomorrow will still come and life will go on.

“Flowers often cry, but too late to find that their beauty has been lost with their piece of mind,” is a line that never fails to bring you up short. The final line: “If I believed in love for ever, I’d forget the past, you’re too lovely not to try,” combines empty hope with the smallest hint of optimism.

From here a haunting cello comes in, as all other instrumentation vanishes like the song’s brief moment of hope. It is both melancholic and haunting, all the more so for its unexpected arrival. It gives the listener time to reflect on Hardin’s lyric and Blunstone’s matchless delivery. Like Scott Walker a few years earlier, Blunstone has delivered a definite reading of one of Tim Hardin’s great songs.

Misty Roses is one of the most startling entries in rock’s repertoire. Blunstone’s version is a meeting of the Metaphysical conceit poetry of John Donne with Elgar’s Cello Concerto, resulting in five minutes of music that is as breathtaking as it is unique in rock’s cannon.

From here on, most albums would struggle to maintain such a high standard, but One Year manages to keep surprising and moving the listener with its mixture of classical and rock accompaniments to songs by Blunstone, Rod Argent and Mike D’abo.

Track three, Smokey Day, functions as a coda to Misty Roses. It’s hypnotic vocal and Beatlesesque chamber arrangement act as a plaintive balm after the emotional intensity of the previous song.

Caroline Goodbye is another gem. A kind of non-identical British twin to Brian Wilson’s Caroline, No it is a perfect vehicle for Blunstone’s wistful delivery and reintroduces drums to bring the album back towards Brunstone’s roots.

Side two on the original album begins with D’abo’s Mary Won’t You Warm My Bed, possibly the most Zombie sounding track on the album. Its pulsating rhythm is a welcome, if brief respite from the emotional intensity of side one.

The next three songs act as a (probably) unintentional mini-suite of perfectly pitched tone poems. Lovely, brittle and moving.

The album closes with its best known track. Written by Denny Laine, Say You Don’t Mind is like little else in pop/rock music. Its shifting tempi, rhythmic cellos and swirling vocal delivery created an unlikely hit and act as the perfect encapsulation of a classic album.

One Year is the single greatest example of Baroque pop music ever produced. It is also an album thats individuality remains as startling today as it did on its original release.

Sounds Like Summer

“July she will fly and give no warning to her flight,” Paul Simon wrote in the days before his legal separation from melody some time in the 1990s.

He wasn’t wrong. As August waits in the wings, we must face the fact that summer is well and truly here (whatever the weather may think). August is many people’s favourite month of the year, but for the dedicated music fan it can also be the dullest. The new release schedule dries up like a Mexican river bed and even worse for us, the re-release schedule is a parched landscape that taunts our thirst for the cool elixir of music.

To this end, the Some Music Matters Online Magazine has scoured the scorched soil for our top five albums to help us survive the next month.

No. 5 – The Duckworth Lewis Method by The Duckworth Lewis Method. Reviewed earlier on this very site, if your collection still lacks this mini-masterpiece then now is the time to get your whites on and pick up a copy. It’s a beautiful album which mixes hints of the Beatles, the Zombies and ELO to create something wonderfully original. It’s more fun, enjoyable and damn right tasty than anything you’ll get off the barbecue this summer. And it won’t give you food poisoning.

No.4 – No season is complete without the Beatles. While many of us are waiting for the second coming that will be 09/09/09, try taking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with you. Not only because it’s the ultimate statement of that ultimate summer of 1967, but because it’ll give you one final chance to marvel at just how terrible the 1987 mastering was. Few other albums could still sparkle after such a digital drubbing.

No.3 Desire by Bob Dylan – the subject of a future review – but for the time being it’s an album full of summery images from sandcastles via Mozambique to Romance in Durango. It’s ragged, loose and strangely mysterious. A perfect antidote to all those flight delays.

No.2 – Axis: Bold as Love by Jimi Hendrix. A near-prefect album with so many great tunes, it’s almost embarrassing. Castles in the Sand, If Six Was Nine and the peerless Little Wind make for perfect summer listening, especially through headphones while on the beach. Also great for playing loud to counter your neighbour’s addiction to Beyonce.

No.1 – Legend by Bob Marley. It’s a cliché yes, but reggae seems to the sun-starved  among us to be made for the summer and nowhere – ever – has a compilation album so successfully caught the essence of an artist. Yes, it lacks Marley’s more overtly political songs and yes, it may favour the ballads, but just listen to those songs. A wondrous, shimmering evocation of the power of music. The addition to the CD of Easy Skanking makes this the definitive summer album. Essential.

So there we have it. Five albums to help you  make the most of your summer.

After all, as Paul Simon also wrote, “August, die she must.”

He was a cheerful soul.

Argus

Wishbone Ash's Argus

It’s reappraisal time. When I was younger (so much younger than today) certain bands had a stigma attached to them. Obviously some deserved this, but many others were just as much victims of fashion’s fickle follies.

One genre more than any other suffered and that was so-called heavy rock. Now we’re not talking Heavy Metal, because let’s face it, men who wore drainpipe jeans, white trainers and sported Judas Priest t-shirts had no one to blame but themselves.

I’m thinking of those bands whose very names stimulate cider-infused memories: Uriah Heep, Tangerine Dream and the wonderful Wishbone Ash. Once able to fill arenas, they have been consigned to that dusty corner of the second hand record store where only those with long hair, misty eyes and well thumbed copies of Lord of the Rings visit.

It is one of the core themes of this online music magazine that we don’t give a flying Wild Honey Pie out-take whether a band is fashionable or not. It’s all about the music. And what music can be found on some of these albums.

Wishbone Ash’s Argus is a case in point. The band’s third album and the first one to show their full potential, it was released in 1972 with what has always been an iconic album cover. A Tolkienesque guard stares out over a mountainside, tinged through a psychedelic filter with requisite flying saucer. Barking, obviously; but it’s also both indicative of the music inside as well as being a calling card for its time.

But it’s the music that makes Argus a must-have addition to anyone’s collection. The album sounds like Led Zeppelin would have sounded if they were playing on a relaxed Sunday afternoon: it’s melodic, tuneful and the twin guitar is nothing short of magical.

The folk influences that would come to the fore on the band’s next album, Wishbone Four are here more subtly intertwined through the album’s seven tracks.

Opener, Time Was starts with a shimmering acoustic guitar that glides into Ted Turner and Martin Turner’s close harmonies that are so ethereally beautiful that they should send any boy band back to school, styled hair drooping in shame. Then, after almost three minutes of drifting on gorgeous melodic thermals, the full band soars in and the guitars go electric. Hairs stand up on the back of your neck, a beatific smile crosses your face and all is right with the world. Both euphoric and calming, the track sets the benchmark for the rest of the album.

Blowin’ Free ups the harmony ante from two to three. It’s Crosby Stills and Nash meets King Crimson without the scary bits. And it’s also superb.

The King Will Come stops you in your tracks. The lyric deals with some quite heavy biblical themes, such as the Second Coming; but then it was 1972. If that puts you off, don’t let it. The song simply oozes melodic invention and while the two harmonies sound strangely like Neil Young would sound a couple of years later on tracks such as Cortez the Killer, it’s a song that just demands to be played loud.

Leaf and Stream fully embraces the band’s folk influences and acts as a balm of calming rural soundscapes after the show-stopping previous track.

The album closes with some truly epic guitar playing in a sort of Riders of Rohan jam with Blind Faith kind of way. At the end you feel drained and sated. Then you’ll want to play it again.

Like the landscapes of Tolkien, the album’s epic, spiritual and mesmerising. It’s also largely misunderstood by those who have never actually heard it.

So next time you’re in that second hand record shop, head for the long-haired descendent of Middle-Earth in the corner, politely ask if you can peruse the racks and pick up a copy of Argus. It’s a quest worth the journey.

Or you could order the re-mastered CD from Amazon.

Rediscovering a Lost Gem

Street Legal

“Sixteen years…Sixteen years!”

So begins one of the great Dylan albums and also one of the lost gems in his catalogue. Dylan sings the first “sixteen years” and then backing singers repeat the phrase. It’s as if Dylan is amazed his career has lasted so long and the background singers are validating his longevity.

This was 1978. It was the time just before rock hit its mid-life crisis that was the 1980s. Rock’s elite were mostly in their mid to late thirties and back then, it seemed incredible that they were still going – especially considering those who had fallen along the way.

Hindsight shows us that 1978 was a bit of an odd year. The great years of rock and pop had come to an end around 1976, but music was still in some sort of episodic epilogue. Punk had hit and suddenly the rock order had become the old order.

The year produced some great music that got lost in the brave new world of punk and its illegitimate new wave children. Wings’ London Town was a minor classic, now almost forgotten; and Dylan’s Street Legal sold well, but then disappeared from the consciousness faster than a crowd from one of the singer’s later Christian concerts.

The album inherited the large band from the Rolling Thunder Tour and this produced a different sound from the seminal Blood on the Tracks and the following year’s Desire.

Changing of the Guard is a joyous life-affirming opener with Dylan’s voice riding over the background singers like a rusting boat on the Saragossa Sea: slightly incongruous, but wonderful to behold.

New Pony is tight in the way only a touring band can sound. Its blues licks ring out of the speakers with lazy insistence.

No Time to Think probably makes the best use of the extra singers in what is a typically obtuse Dylan tale.

Is Your Love In Vain? is arguably the album’s stand-out track and one that deserves to rank with Dylan’s mature masterpieces. “Do you love me, or are you just extending good will?” Dylan sings, with the confidence of a man who knows he’s just added another classic to his cannon, combined with the vulnerability he introduced on Blood on the Tracks. Lovely, sad and despairing, it’s a high watermark for the album and for Dylan.

Senor is the album’s Joey – you either love these long narratives or you take the opportunity to get another beer from the fridge and check on the cricket scores. For my money, you would be worse off for ignoring its smouldering charms.

The closer, Where Are You Tonight uses railway imagery and signals the lyrical conceits of 1979’s Slow Train Coming – the album that marked Dylan’s conversion to Christianity and a decade-long artistic slump.

Street Legal is an album that is definitely ripe for reappraisal. It would not be until 1997’s Time Out of Mind that Dylan would make a better album. The new SACD version sounds gorgeous and is a worthwhile addition to anyone’s collection.

The album was lost in the aftershock of the Christian trilogy and the truly horrible Empire Burlesque. It’s time it reclaimed its place as one of Dylan’s best – and most enjoyable albums.