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- Folk Review
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- As might be expected of a
man who wrote every word and note of the phenomenally successful
musical Blood Brothers, Willy Russell has a decent ear for music
with immediate appeal and catchy hooklines. This quality, which
may have taken root during snatched adolescent moments listening
to the Beatles at the Cavern, surfaces repeatedly during this
impeccably professional collection of 14 Russell songs.
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- The strong opening track,
China, is an eloquent description of unfulfilled ambition
and features vocals from Kate Rusby on the dreamy chorus. Much
of what follows reveals the same wry, wistful lyricism together
with hints of calculated chaos. References to both Andrew Lloyd
Webber and the Coldstream Guards crop up in one song.
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- On another, Russell’s
energetic mind takes him from an outdated sneer at Tupperware
Girls - who "… really don’t mind/that the
postmodern novel is in decline" - to news of the SAS storming
the V&A.
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- The album’s content and
delivery may occasionally seems overcooked, but then it hardly
surprising that Russell’s songs should be so, well, showy.
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COLIN RANDALL
- The Daily Telegraph
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- Proving why old cowboys should just
fade away
- CURLY the cowboy said a wise
thing once. He said it on a horse, to Billy Crystal, the city
slicker who he’d been terrorising for the previous hour.
One thing, he said, raising a hairy cowboy finger; that’s
the meaning of life. What’s the thing, asked Billy, still
a little scared. It’s different for everybody, said Curly.
The point is: if you focus on one thing, you’ll be okay.
The trick is to work out what that thing is. For Curly, it was
cows.
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- There are probably better
philosophies to base your life on than the script of City Slickers,
but Curly works for me. I won’t bore you with the whys and
wherefores because this is a pop column so let’s just apply
the rule to pop. All our greatest pop stars, I tend to think,
are people who you simply cannot imagine doing anything else.
This is the point, surely, of being a Pop Star (as opposed to
its dull, careerist modern version, the Popstar).
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- It is why Morrissey - who
was telling the NME this week that he doesn’t know what
he would have done had he not been a singer since he wasn’t
keen on joining the human race, never mind getting a job - remains
an icon, despite being a grouchy, middle-aged bore whose idea
of integrity is to agree to appear on a cheesy chat show with
Jonathan Ross but attempt to rise above it by being rude. It
is why David Bowie fans, who can just about forgive his Tin Machine
albums, still feel ill watching him attempt to act (apart from
The Man Who Fell To Earth, because it’s less a film than
the best pop video he ever made).
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- I grasp on to my Curly philosophy
partly out of rebellion in an age when being a pop star is simply
a tick on the CV of professional famous people. As in colleges,
"multi-skilled" is the current buzz thought of the
music industry - ideally, you should be able to sing, dance,
act and host chat shows. I often feel that, my childhood having
taken place before Pop Idol and Heat ("This week, celebrity
sweat patches"), I am of the last generation to have spent
any time believing pop stars might be exotic creatures beamed
from outer space, capable of singing songs but not of ordinary
human communication. I am mainly thinking of Kate Bush here.
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- This week, though, I am prepared
to propose an amendment to the rule. Providing you’re over,
say, 30 you can do whatever you like. This is a good rule because
it criminalises horrible stage school brats but allows for Stephin
Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, who has made a wonderful new
pop album but also writes operas and film scores. It also allows
the playwright Willy Russell to be a pop star.
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- Yes, you read that right.
The man who wrote Educating Rita, Blood Brothers and Shirley
Valentine is currently on tour - no Scottish dates yet, alas
- accompanied by a guitar and fellow playwright Tim Firth (Alan
Bleasdale was going to come too, but he got stage fright). At
57, Russell is promoting his debut album, Hoovering the Moon,
recorded and released with his own money, with Kate Rusby on
backing vocals. There’s even a single, China, although only
at www.willyrussell.com.
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- It is a funny, eloquent, often
moving thing. China, about socialists growing old and giving
up the fight (and a youthful plan to visit Mao), is like late
Billy Bragg or Elvis Costello. Genius mourns the wasted talent
of a missing in action pop star, "seldom seen and rarely
heard since that debut single", who may well be Lee Mavers
from The Las. ("The boy’s too tender, the boy’s
too rare to take the air they breathe out there.")
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- Tupperware Girls, meanwhile,
is just bonkers: a vision of middle Britain melting down in which
the SAS invade the V&A and the Tate gallery cafe is serving
tea with cyanide. ("What will poor Mark Lawson do for next
week’s Late Review?" asks a concerned Russell.)
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- Mostly, though, it’s
an album about the compromises you make, and the beliefs you
adapt and sometimes dilute as you grow older. Hence, I assume,
the title Hoovering the Moon. When you’re young you want
to fly to the moon; later, when you get there, you realise it’s
not a glowing globe in the sky but a dusty rock that needs a
tidy. The song Pink Lambrusco puts this best: "I see you
in Tesco, in the five-door Polo, tell me what happened to the
moon."
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- So Curly was wrong. He was
a ridiculous old man who never left the ranch his whole life.
The trick, actually, is to multi-task with dignity - easier when
you’re over 30, I feel (but I would say that, being 30).
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- Perhaps this is the solution
to the music industry’s current woes - let playwrights have
a go. Personally I’d like to see Scotland’s own David
Greig, whose plays always go on about technology, airports and
motorways, make an electropop record. If you’re reading
this, David, I have a synthesiser I can lend you.
ANDREW EATON
- THE SCOTSMAN
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