The Mighty Several by Paul Heaton review: a paean to pubs
Paul Heaton: The Mighty Several (EMI) ★★★
Public Service Broadcasting: The Last Flight (SO Recordings) ★★★
Kevin P Gilday & the Glasgow Cross: How I Won the Culture War (Iffy Folk Records) ★★★★
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Hide AdPaul Heaton is depicted on the sleeve of his latest album with a band of outlaw guest vocalists. These are The Mighty Several, named with typical Heaton humour and bathos. On the right hand side of the tableau, wasting a good bottle of whisky, is Glaswegian singer Rianne Downey who filled in for an absent Jacqui Abbott at the 2023 TRNSMT festival and hasn’t gone home since. Yvonne Shelton and Danny Muldoon ride out with the gang as album guests.
As to the sound and spirit of The Mighty Several, it is familiar terrain, with catchy pop, quasi-country and soulful swing matched to witty lyrics which also thrum with anger or vibrate with melancholy. National Treasure reels us in with jaunty pub piano before delivering the withering putdown that “most nations like us need fools for heroes”. Heaton is clear who the real heroes are – the working folks who actually run the country. Small Boats, meanwhile, contrasts those who want to pull up the drawbridge with those who treat migrants with practical compassion.
There is also a pervasive theme involving one of the great loves of Heaton’s life – the traditional British boozer. Last year, he celebrated his 60th birthday by putting a £1,000 tab behind 60 bars throughout the country to support his favoured environment for thinking, lyric writing and people watching.
It seems the drinks are still on him as recent ska-tinged single Quicksand is a tribute to the unlikely establishments which reel you in and steal your time, with Downey leading the charge to the bar. Walk On, Slow Down is a smooth, soulful guide to the perfect pub, inspired by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s Walk On and JB Lenoir’s Slow Down – and definitely not, according to the lyrics, by anywhere with Britpop on the jukebox.
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Hide AdRetro power popper Fish’n’Chip Supper celebrates the unintentionally long walk home from the pub with a mitigating stop for flowers and straddles the other abiding theme of the album – long-term relationships – with lighter-waving MOR pop anthem After the Sugar Rush making a plea for a fine romance.
Heaton also deploys his wit carefully on songs about suicide (Couldn’t Get Dead), depression (The Blues Came In) and domestic dysfunction (Just Another Family) with Downey’s rich retro tones in powerhouse support.
You wait years for a concept album about Amelia Earhart’s ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe and two come along within months of each other. Laurie Anderson committed her song cycle Amelia to tape less than two months ago and now Public Service Broadcasting enlist This Is the Kit and Andeya Casablanca on The Last Flight, tracing the celebrated aviator’s final expedition in 1937.
The band are more usually an instrumental affair, but Casablanca soulfully conveys Earhart’s mantra “I do it because I want to” on The Fun Of It while Kate Stables aka This Is the Kit leads on the yearning orchestral number The South Atlantic. Earhart’s voice is also sampled throughout, over the gauzy ambience of I Was Always Dreaming and the ready for take-off momentum of Towards the Dawn, while A Different Kind of Love is a different mellow indie folk kind of song for this curious, inventive band.
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Hide AdKevin P Gilday & the Glasgow Cross comprise poet/crooner Gilday, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ralph Hector and drummer Ben Brown. How I Won the Culture War is their third album, collecting songs which address the division of our times, whether using guttural spoken word over the taut rhythm of Mediocre White Man Blues or the prowling, gothic bassline, baroque keyboards and brooding vocals of The Hungry Algorithm. At times, their vibe is smooth and languorous; elsewhere they sound like a wide-eyed Arab Strap.
CLASSICAL
Benevoli: Missa Benevola (CORO) ★★★★
If the great polychoral practitioners of the 16th and 17th centuries gave us something to remember them by it was surefire gratification, and there’s certainly plenty of that in the Missa Benevola for four choirs by French-born Orazio Benevoli (1605-72), lusciously extolled by I Fagiolini in the second volume of their Benevoli series. Whether the title of the Mass refers to its composer is a moot point. Regardless, it's the varied richness and endless invention, the architectural ingenuity, of Benevoli’s writing that sets this multi-choir setting apart from many earlier examples. Director Robert Hollingworth establishes a magical combination of spaciousness and energised momentum. He also includes works by Benevoli’s direct contemporary Giacomo Carissimi (1605-74): two motets for soloists and supporting consort - The City Musick - within the Mass; and the short oratorio Historia di Jeptha, not without its lively surprises. Ken Walton
FOLK
Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings: Parlour Ballads (Hudson Records) ★★★★
Renowned English singer Jon Boden is reunited with his Remnant Kings band and with the homely tones of an upright piano, delivering with characteristic passion a choice selection of songs – traditional, music hall or whatever – he envisages as being sung communally in 19th-century parlours or pubs. The Remnant Kings include Rob Harbron on concertina, Sally Hawkins and Sam Sweeney on fiddles and, oddly effectively, MG Boulter on steel guitars. Songs range from the warm eloquence of One April Morning, through the unabashed Victorian sentimentality of Old Brown’s Daughter or Merry Mountain Child while Cyril Tawney’s lament for lost love and Cornish pasties, The Oggie Man, takes on a rockabilly shuffle. Darker elements – the sanguinary Prentice Boy or the grim unfolding of Rudyard Kipling’s Danny Deever – suggest that 19th-century parlour tastes may not have been quite as decorous as we think. Jim Gilchrist
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