Rediscovering an old friend

I’ve got more music than I could ever realistically listen to. I have a couple of hundred vinyl LPs, at least twice as many CDs and well over ten thousand digital audio tracks. Many of the digital tracks have been ripped from my CDs so I have probably have 90% of the music I own immediately available to me. Just like the blokes from Nick Hornby’s Hi-Fidelity, I do like to make sure that my music is catalogued and indexed so that I can find the track I want very quickly. However, one of the unintended benefits of having a large collection of digital music is the joy of random shuffle.

There is something faintly perverse about “Express Yourself” by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band coming up right after Johnny Cash singing “The Streets of Laredo” or a movement from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. It’s a great way to rediscover music that you’d completely forgotten about, although it can occasionally expose tragic lapses of  judgement from the past. I really can’t ever see myself wanting to listen to many tracks from Nik Kershaw’s second album again.

However, sometimes you are delivered a track that leads you on a journey of discovery rather than rediscovery. In the very early 1980s the music that was beginning to speak to me was guitar-based. Of course, there was still a load of synth-based stuff out there that I listened to, but the music that really caught my interest had real instruments in it. Bands like the Jam and The Police had the energy of early New Wave without the anachist message of punk and they could actually play their instruments. I still think The Police is a band with some of the finest musicians ever to play in the modern rock era. Anyway, on my random shuffle a track popped up that led me into discovering some new music by an old favourite.

In 1985 a record was released which became the feel-good summertime hit of that year. It’s an infectious uplifting song that has been latched onto by advertisers who use it to sell products that need that kind of image. It’s been so successful that it has reportedly earned that band that performed it over a million dollars a year from 2000 to 2010. That record is “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves.

When the record was released, the band was championed by Richard Skinner who played tracks from their album on his Radio 1 show at the time. My recall is hazy but I seem to remember that he was also dropping their name on Whistle Test, which was the only real serious TV programme showing live music at the time. I managed to record enough of the tracks from the radio show (with the cassette recorder sitting on “pause” so I didn’t get too much of the DJ chatter!) to convince me that I should lay out some of my pocket money on their album.

The album was excellent. “Walking on Sunshine” wasn’t really representative of the rest of the album. There were several things that stood out for me. Firstly it was the outstanding vocals of Katrina Leskanitch. She has an powerful and expressive voice with all the range you could wish for. Whether it was the torch-song blues of  “Cry For Me” or “The Sun Won’t Shine Without You” or the slightly-psychedelic moody opener “Red Wine and Whiskey” or the straight ahead rock ‘n roll of “Game of Life” she hit the spot every time. The second thing to grab me was the outstanding guitar work of Kimberley Rew. He always played exactly the right thing, never leaving the song empty but never overplaying. The final thing were the songs. If I were to describe the music it would be as perfectly-formed slices of bluesy pop with a rocky edge and a twist of classic Stax R&B. One surprise was the song “Going Down To Liverpool” which was a major hit for The Bangles but was written by Kimberly Rew. It always seemed strange to have a group of Californian valley girls singing about having a “UB40 in my hand” and the fact that the song was written by an Englishman did manage to explain things. I won’t say that Kimberly Rew’s guitar work was a great influence on me although I did sit down and work out the outro solo on “Game of Love” note-for-note which was quite an accomplishment at the time for me.

The follow-up album, “Waves”, was a tragic disappointment. It was really pretty bland apart from two standout tracks, “Is That It” and “Lovely Lindsey” plus a cracking vocal workout on “Stop Trying To Prove”.  However there was one track, “Sun Street”, which was so bad I almost broke my record player trying to stop it from playing. Unaccountably it was a minor hit in the UK. After the second album, they just disappeared from my radar and I didn’t see anything more of them for years, yet that original album remains one of my favourite ever.

There was one slightly surprising reappearance when they resurfaced to win the Eurovision Song Contest for the UK in 1997. However, apart from the evergreen “Walking on Sunshine” they’ve pretty much been forgotten. A few years ago they released a CD of the original recordings of their very early songs from 1983-1984. I saw a review somewhere and bought a copy and it was a pleasure to hear some of the old favourites plus a lot of songs that I’d never heard before. It also included a DVD of a live performance which showed that they truly could play. They were certainly not a  manufactured band in a any way.

Anyway, I had pretty much forgot about the band until “Red Wine and Whiskey” popped up on random shuffle. It really is a cracking song and now that the Internet is so pervasive I was able to nip off to Google and Wikipedia within seconds to find out about the band. After a little reading it became obvious that Kimberly Rew was the main creative force behind the band. He wrote most of the original songs on the early albums yet on “Waves”, the dodgy follow-up to the breakthrough album, he had only written the two stand-out tracks I have mentioned.

This investigation led me to Kimberly Rew’s home on the web at http://www.kimberleyrew.com/ where it seems that he hasn’t been resting on his laurels, despite the income from “Walking on Sunshine”. At regular intervals he’s been knocking out solo albums so I bought a couple of the early ones, “Tunnel Into Summer” and “Grand Central Revisited”. I started with “Tunnel Into Summer” and loved it almost immediately. As a guitarist I can appreciate the excellent tones and the well-arranged parts that fitted the songs perfectly. The songs are classic slices of pop with memorable melodies and unexpected harmonies. What stands out for me are the vocals and lyrics. The lyrics are wry and observant, even arch in some cases, yet sung without the affected American accent that so many vocalists from the UK adopt. It’s classic pop yet it sounds so English. Standout tracks for me are “Heart of the Sun” and “Little Ray of Sunshine”. Many tracks are stripped back of percussion such as “Rosemary Jean” and there is even a John Lee Hooker tribute, “The Truth” which rather bizarrely is sung in a cod-Australian accent.

The second album picks up where the first leaves off. It sounds like a man having fun, making  music for his own pleasure with no pressure to have a hit record. To me it’s a less immediate record without songs which obviously grab you from the outset. There’s more depth to it, including an unsettling accapella song which is sung with Robyn Hitchcock called “Purple and Orange Stripes” which appears (to me anyway) to be an anti-racism number. At less than one minute and twenty seconds long it is still the most memorable track on the album, purely because it is just so unusual. However, the highlight of the other more orthodox songs on the album is “We Will Swim Together” a life-affirming romp complete with uplifting chorus topped off with what sounds like jaws harp.

When I listen to a new album I like to listen to it to the exclusion of all other albums until I get to know it well. Only when I feel it beginning to outstay its welcome will I park it and move to a new one. I did that with “Tunnel Into Summer” and have done it with “Grand Central Revisited”. I have already bought the next three albums “Essex Hideaway”, “The Safest Place” and “Strawberry Fair” as well as his very first solo album “Bible of Bop” which appears to have been reissued recently. I’m really looking forward to getting to know them well.

Some people complain that the digital downloading of music has spoiled the event of buying a new record. I can partially understand that. I remember taking hard-earned pocket money along to record shops and buying an LP. There was the experience of taking it home, putting it on the turntable and dropping the needle gently onto the first track. There is a comforting hiss until the first track kicks in. There is the pleasure of looking over the cover art and reading the sleeve notes as the album plays. None of that happens with CDs or digital downloads. However, the fact that having a digital collection of music from which I can hear any one of the thousands of tracks in my collection at random, and through it discover new music is something that would never have happened with vinyl. While I’ve got a soft spot for vinyl there’s definitely a place for digital, especially when it helps you discover new music from someone who now seems like an old friend.