Rough Guide to Hokum Blues

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff

I love these Rough Guides to the various Blues genres and this one is well up to standard.

Hokum Blues is a term for generally humorous songs, often based on thinly disguised sexual innuendo.  You know exactly where you are from the start here, with Bo Carter's Cigarette Blues: "Smoke my cigarette, baby/Draw it all night long…"  The lyrics throughout are often inventively filthy and often funny as a result, but the music is really high-quality.  There's some superb guitar work from the likes of Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller and many more immortals of the Blues, and some outstanding singing, too.  Ma Rainey's Black Bottom may lack lyrical subtlety, but she was an absolute genius of a singer and it shows here.  The same can be said of Bessie Smith and others and it's great stuff from start to finish, including plenty of well-known greats but also some obscurities which I am very glad to have in my collection.

The sound is generally very good and even though some recordings show their age with hiss or rather muddy sound, it's all very listenable.  Frankly, I don't think you can go wrong with this; it's a terrific compilation.

John Renbourn - Live in Kyoto 1978

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A joy

This is a really good disc.  I'm pretty sceptical now about any posthumous release of "rediscovered" live material because so many of them are terrible recordings, but this is a wonderful, professional-standard recording of John Renbourn playing superbly.

The material shows the breadth and depth of John's musical interests, with traditional English music, blues, ragtime and so on.  There's even an encore of two pieces by the late Renaissance lutenist Hans Neusidler, which are extraordinary both in their composition and in John's amazing playing.  It's a fine, fine programme and the guitar work is stunning.  There's just the right amount of chat between tracks to give an idea of the live atmosphere but not to become tedious on repeated listening, and it's all very engaging.

John has been right near the top of my "Wish I could play like…" list for 50 years now.  If I ever play one-tenth as well as he does here, I'll be very, very happy.  (I know I won't but I can still dream and practice…)  It's a joy of a release which any Rebourn fan or any lover of great acoustic guitar playing will love.  Very warmly recommended.

(Just in case anyone is interested, John is rather rude about Hans Neusidler but there's a very good disc of lute music by his son Melchior recorded by the great Paul O'Dette, which I can also recommend very warmly. Amazon page HERE.)

Claire Hamill - One House Left Standing

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Interesting rather than great

I'm discovering most of Claire Hamill's work in retrospect.  To my shame, I was only dimly aware of her in the early 70s but tried October, her second album, recently and liked it a lot.  This, her debut, is interesting but shows promise rather than being a great album. 

There is plenty to like – Hamill was a good singer with an individual approach and nice voice and there is some very good musicianship here.  However, it's patchy, a bit self-consciously quirky in places and some of the material isn't up to all that much.  It's a first album which shows why people thought she was worth investing in and persevering with rather than being an classic in its own right.  I'm glad to have heard it and collectors and fans will undoubtedly want it in their collections, but it's not one I'll be playing much, I suspect.  If you're looking for somewhere to start with Claire Hamill, I'd recommend doing what I did and trying October first.  Who knows, you may want to come back to One House Left Standing, but for me she hadn't yet quite hit her stride.

Wilko Johnson - Blow Your Mind

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A solid album from Wilco

I award Wilko 5 stars for being here to make this album and 4 stars for the album itself.  It's a perfectly decent album with some good, solid stuff on it, but it's not a classic, however much we may love the man.

Blow Your Mind has a lot of driving, almost funky blues-rock, generally slower and more intense than Wilko's earlier years but none the worse for that.  It has a pretty familiar feel – so much so that the riff from Take It Easy is a slowed down version of the riff from Roxette – but again, that's fine by me.  Wilko does what he does and he does it fantastically well, so I'm certainly not going to carp about it.

All that said, this is a good album rather than an outstanding one.  The material is solid rather than brilliant and, 40-odd years on, Wilko isn’t the dangerous young man who thrilled me so at those early Feelgood gigs in the mid 70s any more.  Nevertheless, Blow Your Mind is a well made and very enjoyable album from one of the greats and I like it a lot.

Claire Hamill - October

Rating: 4/5

Review: 
A very decent album

I tried October out of curiosity because the name Claire Hamill was very familiar from my teenage years, but I couldn't actually remember having hear any of her music.  It turns out to be a very decent album.

Claire Hamill was plainly a good singer and songwriter because there is a good deal more character and originality here than in a lot of other half-forgotten singer/songwriter stuff from that period.  There are hints of Joni Mitchell's unusual chord sequences, of Judee Sill's melodic style and harmonies and occasionally of the slight huskiness of Melanie Safka's voice.  Hamill isn't "like" any of them, though, and although there's nothing here which screams Classic at me, it's good, intelligent material both musically and lyrically.  For example, Speedbreaker, although it ends up rambling a bit, is an arresting song, I think, which speaks of a thoughtful musicality and expressive lyrical ability – and it's very well sung.

So, October isn't a long-lost classic album, but it's a good one which has lasted well over the 45 years since its release.  I'm glad I discovered it and I may well look into more of Claire Hamill's work.  I'd say it was well worth a try.

Marc Ellington - Marc Ellington

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Very forgettable

Marc Ellington was a good musician who played with bands like Fairport and Matthews Southern Comfort.  I tried this album because of that, because Richard Thompson plays on it and because I was told that it is a lost gem.  It isn't, I'm afraid.  It's a pleasant-sounding, decently played collection of covers and traditional songs, but it's no more than that and much of it is eminently forgettable.

Just as examples, the opener is Al Stewart's In Brooklyn – which sounds very like a rather feeble outtake by Stewart himself.  Reason To Believe is a truly great song but Ellington delivers a bland, unexciting version.  And Desolation Row…oh, dear.  You need to be Dylan himself or to bring something extra-special to this song (as Chris Smither does) to make it work.  Here, it's just a long, long, *long* recitation which sounds as though it's been sanitised for a Sunday-evening on the Light Programme.  It's truly grim.

To be fair, most of the album is listenable, but with every track I'm aware that there is at least one far, far better version of it.  However much I respect Ellington's work with other bands, I can't recommend this.

The Astronoauts - Competition Coupe

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Surprisingly good

This is surprisingly good.  I'd not come across The Astronauts before, but tried them because I was a sucker for surf music when I first heard it in the early 60s and still am.  I approached this with some scepticism, half expecting it to be sub-Beach-Boys rubbish, but although it's not in the Beach Boys/Jan & Dean class, it's very decently made and very enjoyable.

Obviously, surf music was concerned with three topics and three topics only: Surfing, Girls and Cars.  Competition Coupe is almost exclusively about cars, with the other two getting a peripheral look-in occasionally.  It's fun, with several direct references to other songs of the era; the title track (ironically, one of the weakest on the album) is obviously a challenge to Little Deuce Coupe, woodies (as revered in Surf City) are belittled and so on, and there's a wonderful bevy of familiar girls like Bony Moronie[1], Short Fat Fanny, Susie Q and the like in Our Car Club.  There's some genuine wit here and some enjoyable, slightly basic but well played music, too.  The instrumental tracks are all very decent, with strong echoes of The Shadows, The Champs, Duane Eddy…you get the idea.

Competition Coupe isn't a long-lost classic, but it's a very enjoyable album of fun surf music.  I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked it and I can recommend it.

[1]One of the great regrets of my life is that I never had a girl named either Bony Moronie or Ram-a-lam-a ding-dong.  I searched and searched, but amazingly never found one.

Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy - Anchor

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another cracker from two greats

Anchor is terrific – but then, what else did we expect?  Norma and Eliza represent two generations of the very finest in English folk music and they have produced another cracker here.

The music is varied, with a good number of traditional songs and some less obvious but extremely successful versions of fine songs by Tom Waits, Nick Lowe and others. As you'd expect from these two, they are respectful to the originals but often very adventurous in their arrangements and treatments.  The musicianship and singing is, of course, first rate and it's a very fine album all round.

Anyone with an interest in folk music at the moment will know that anything by these two is going to be special (especially after the brilliance of Gift) and won’t need me to recommend an album by these two giants – but I do.  It's terrific stuff.

Roger Daltrey - As Long As I Have You

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very decent album

This is a very decent album from Roger Daltrey.  It has its weak moments, but it's still very worthwhile, I think.

The best of the album is the lushly-produced, blues-rock which makes up most of it, including the title track which opens the album.  It's decent material with some good musicianship, including the guitar of Pete Townshend in places and a fine group of backing singers, and Daltrey himself is still in good voice.  Some reviewers have complained that his voice isn't what it was in the glory days of The Who, which is true, of course, but he uses what he has very well.  It's true that we don't get the thrilling magnificence of things like Love Reign O'er Me or Baba O'Reilly any more, but there's power and control here, combined with the long experience which means he can really put a song over.

It's not all great.  Some of the quieter tracks don't work so well, mainly because they're simply rather poor material; Into My Arms is a pretty dreadful song, for example, with a weak tune and dismally bad lyrics.  However, these are blips in an otherwise good album.  It's not a classic, but in my view it's largely good solid stuff with some very good highlights.  Recommended.