As good a way possible to spend the early part of a Sunday morning. Listening to Adios Senor Pussycat, the latest album by Mick Head & the Red Elastic Band, just out this Friday. Head has a long backstory, he's been doing his thing for coming onto forty years now and has experienced much to contemplate during those years. It shows. This is a highly contemplative piece of art. The work of a man in his mid-fifties rediscovering his mojo and surveying the rocky road that life and his own decision-making have taken him down.
Originally the leader of Pale Fountains, a wondrous Liverpool band who were feted for huge commercial success at the time they were signed to Virgin Records in the early eighties but denied that success by poor record company decisions and a certain wilful attitude on the part of the band. Since then Head has continued making records intermittently, with his next project Shack and under his own name. Plagued by drug and alcohol dependency for the best part of twenty years, he's finally sober, has got 'piece of mind' in his own words, as he sings on 'Winter Turns to Spring'. And here are the results. A small masterpiece.
He's one of the finest pop songwriters Britain has produced over the last forty years, though he's barely ever had a brush with the actual charts. Adios Senor Pussycat, establishes the truth of that fairly on and goes on to explore the subtle, but quite exquisite songwriting and arranging gifts the man possesses over thirteen thoughtful, flecked and dappled songs. Very much a Liverpool record with its songs of the sea, the booze and poetic romance
The album is not hugely different from several that Head has put out over the course of his career. Just slightly older and wiser. A disciple first and foremost of Love and Arthur Lee and The Byrds, he's used their example as the basis of his art but over the years has crafted it all into an utterly specific personal vision. A sound that's all his own. Full of poetic Scouse dreaming, Adios Senor Pussycat feels like an early Christmas present that you'll want to wrap and unwrap again and again over the next couple of months. It'll catch you by surprise with joy every single time.
No comments:
Post a Comment