Cult Albums: Richie Havens

 

FREEDOM! 

FREEDOM!! 

FREEDOM!!! 

Album Review of: 

‘SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN’ 

by RICHIE HAVENS 

(2018, FLOATING WORLD RECORDS) 

www.floatingworldrecords.co.uk 

He was the Greenwich Village beatnik reading the kind of Beat Generation poetry he strips across the rear album-sleeve. He was the Folkie who played open ‘E’ thumb-chord acoustic guitar with minimalist highly percussive rawness. He took songs by the best contemporary writers, his fluid baritone translating them into his own compelling urgency, while Jeremy & The Satyrs cook dense and busy grooves around him. Issued on prestigious Verve Forecast in 1968, this second album followed ‘Mixed Bag’ (1966) into the lower rungs of both the Pop and Jazz charts, just before he did ‘Woodstock’. Six are Havens originals, three of them written with producer John Court. Loose jerky rhythms, pattering bongos, darting flute, clavinet and smashing gong on “No Opportunity Necessary” – later covered by Yes. “The Klan” is a stark anti-racist weapon, written under alias by Alan Arkin of ‘Catch-22’ and the ‘Pentagon Papers’. Havens even anticipates World Music with the 7:27-minute raga-Rock title-track, which must have been soundtrack for every crash-pad and psychedelic dungeon, even though the stoned bliss liner photos of him wielding the sitar look more of their time than timeless. The shamanistic trance-dance “Run, Shaker Life” proves the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes, because Havens had several of his own. 

Published in: 

‘R’N’R: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 no.72 (Nov-Dec)’ 

(UK – November 2018)

 

CD review of: 

‘GRACE OF THE SUN’ 

by RICHIE HAVENS 

(Stormy Forest/ Evangeline GEL 4080) 

www.evangeline.co.uk 

There are artists whose careers dazzle with a phantasmagoria of change, reinvention, style-switches and startling evolutions. There are others who first define the exact limits of their terrain, then stay within them. Although there was a recent collaboration with Groove Armada, suffice to say that Richard P Havens (born 1941) is not one of the former. A Brooklyn street-kid from the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, steeped in Gospel and Doo-Wop, he developed his distinctive style way back in the beatnik hootenanny Greenwich Village coffee-houses, as early as the early sixties folk scene. That insistent acoustic rhythm played on that E-chord open-tuned guitar, that intense, gruff, yet surprisingly interpretive voice which Andy Gill calls a ‘gentle fervour’. His grizzled beard, sandals and beads, investing a powerful, near guru-like presence. 

He’s there, naturally, at ‘Woodstock’. A black folkie in a white genre. Not soul enough for the black market. Something between. An underground figure catching the fragile zeitgeist to perfection as he improvises “Motherless Child” into an impassioned ‘Freedom’. ‘Progressive Folk Blues’ they called it. Perhaps it could now rate as early ‘World Music’ (he uses Turkish violin, bouzouki, and electric sitar here), or some kind of Jose Feliciano fortunate misfit? He’s also better known as an interpreter of other’s songs that as a writer in his own right, having covered Jackson Browne, Marty Balin, Bob Lind, John Martyn and even Pink Floyd (“On The Turning Away”). Whatever, he here revisits himself – most tellingly, through “Woodstock” itself via Joni Mitchell’s oft-recorded anthem, and yet another Dylan – this time it’s “All Along The Watchtower”. But then again, they go back a long way, Havens was there at the 1965 Newport Festival where Dylan first ‘went electric’. 

He goes on to select another Jack Hammer, and also an early Fred Neil song which I’d never heard before, yet “Red Flowers” is a tortured Cold War anti-nukes relic (‘red were the flowers, growing out of the ashes of war’) charged with all the contemporary relevance of the Cuba Crisis. “By The Grace Of The Sun” with its tabla percussion is one of six new Havens’ originals (including instrumental “Dusk”), his highest ratio of own-compositions since 1999’s ‘Time’ which had seven. And this is something like his twenty-seventh album. For some, a melodic irrelevance. But if you liked it then you just might like it now.

 

Published in: 

‘KEYSTONE no.6’ 

(UK – December 2004)

Gig Archive: Bluetones & Marion, BritPop in Leeds

 

THE LEEDS FOUR-DAY NATION 

Gig Review of: 

MARION & THE BLUETONES 

at the ‘Heineken Festival’, Leeds

 

What’s so great about living in the mid-nineties? Let me count the ways, (a) this four-day nation of Mad Togs & Englishmen, (b) kicking through an autumn-leaves sediment of crushed lager cans, while (c) submerging in music as familiar and comforting as pools of warm beer. Rock without originality might be an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it’s still pretty damn good. Take a Bluetonic. Watch Mark Morris do his neat little shuffling dance as the Bluetones bring their lilting “Are You Blue Or Are You Blind” all the way from Hounslow. It’s got all the distinguishing features of Now-Indie without any startlingly different ingredients. But hey, life’s complicated enough. There’s always Sixty-Foot Dolls dragging an energetic mess of neo-Mod Grunge from Newport, Gwent, a power-trio ‘White-Knuckle Ride’, they do a biting “Stay” laced with a Pop-catchy chorus, then close with the Beatles amped-up “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey)”. 

Marion

Originality? Well – there’s Cecil who open with some taped psychedelic yodelling and close with Vera Lynn, even if what happens between intro and outro is less memorable. While at one point petulant Menswear lead Johnny Dean announces ‘I’m not gonna be satisfied until I can see you STEAM!,’ although it’s left to Marion’s leather terrorist-chic to raise the temperature sufficiently close to meltdown for that to happen. Today, they’re the choice of a New Generation. The first intimations of their status come with the ‘Pretty Vacant’ play-in to “Time”, framed by their symmetry of inward-pointing guitars. Jaime Harding sits on the monitors in all-over black, leaning out into the audience to banter ‘whoever it is throwing cans at the band… make sure you fucking do it right, and actually HIT us!!!’ They’ve largely gone beyond the new-Smiths tag enforced by their ex-Morrissey support spot, and despite the open-air sound they’re tighter than tight on new song “Wait”. Again, originality might not be their strong point. But here at Leeds, it seems even the winner fakes all, and unlike every other A.N. Other band who become increasingly average as the day’s turn-over progresses, Marion power-up the ingredients into a toxic concoction that rollerblades effortlessly across the opposition. There’s an undeniably Morrissey inflection after the harmonica bursts of “Asleep”, but there’s also something oddly like a Robert Plant strangled wail during “My Children”, but then “It Stopped Dancing” is a new drug altogether, out on its own in a solid metal wall of guitar noise. 

That’s what’s so great about living in the mid-nineties. It might not be THAT new. But it’s here. And it’s happening now.

DVD: 'The Adjustment Bureau' (2011)

 

WHO WROTE 
THE BOOK OF LOVE…? 

Review of: 

‘THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU’ 

With Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, & Terence Stamp. Director: George Nolfi. 

Producer: George Nolfi, Chris Moore, Michael Hackett, 

Bill Carraro, Isa Dick Hacktt & Joel Viertel. 

Original Release: Universal Pictures/ Media Rights Capital, 

March 2011.106-minutes. DVD, Universal Pictures, July 2011

 

You have to love Dick. While everyone else in the SF continuum was still clumping on about Moon-bases and adventuring to Mars, he – and well, maybe JG Ballard too, was already into the next level of weirdness. Which is why he only later came into posthumous public consciousness. With a vengeance. Arnie’s lumbering ‘Total Recall’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’, Will Smith’s ‘Minority Report’, ‘Screamers’ – plus one of the finest SF films of them all, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’, are all derived from his paranoid vision. Now there’s ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ which might just be described as a romance of star-crossed lovers. Although the original Philip Kindred Dick short story – in ‘Orbit’ magazine (September 1954), wasn’t a romance. Nothing like it. But not much of that original plot remains. What stays intact is the theme. The idea. The concept. That familiar Dickian riff that life is not as we know or understand it. 

This time, history is not a random process. It is controlled, edited and manipulated. And the determining factor here is a spilled coffee. David Norris (Matt Damon) is tipped to be New York senator when his campaign is derailed by a prank mooning film-clip from his college years. Already the youngest-ever congressmen, he’s the kind of clean-cut JFK honest politician you only ever find in US productions. He’s snub-nosed in what some might consider an endearingly cute way. He meets a girl in a black dress as she’s coming out of the cubicle in the gents, where she’s been hiding to avoid hotel security. She is Elise (Emily Blunt), who does contemporary dance for the ‘Cedar Lake’ ballet and has something of the arty-cookiness Diane Keaton deployed to such effect in ‘Annie Hall’. ‘Do I know you?’ he asks. No, but he soon will, despite the vast omnipotent cosmic forces ranged against them. They kiss, then she disappears, hotly chased by security. This is where the coffee comes in. With his election plans scuppered he prepares to take the bus to a dull meeting about solar panels. But his movements are being monitored by mysterious Men in Black. It’s they who conspire that he must spill coffee on his shirt at 07:05, setting up a chain of consequences. 

As it is, the operator responsible – Harry (Anthony Mackie) nods off on the bench, and misses the vital moment, an omission that initiates an ‘endless ripple effect’. David catches the bus he was supposed to miss, finds himself sitting next to Elise, eyeing up her attractively abbreviated miniskirt. They are reunited. Then, arriving at the office he finds the personnel frozen into immobility and being scanned by the Men in Black. He’s seen behind a curtain he’s not even supposed to know exists. The correctly spilled coffee would have ensured none of this happened. Now, they must level with him, and warn him off. So they explain that they are the Intervention Team who ‘make sure things happen according to plan’. They monitor the world. They can reset and recalibrate reality. They have ledgers with dots moving across grids to represent the intersection of lives. Some things are meant to happen. Others are not meant to happen. He is destined, it is hinted, for the Presidency. She to become a world-renowned dancer. His career needs his raw hunger. She would fill the hunger, and demotivate him. Hence their love is not part of the plan. So he tries to give her up, he really does. But, like the lyrics from a cheesy Pop-tune, theirs is a love so strong it breaks all the rules. Three years later he’s back on the campaign-trail when he glimpses her on the street, and, despite deliberate obstruction, it begins again. The ‘adjuster’ Thompson (an acidic Terence Stamp) stands at the foot of their bed as they sleep together. ‘Whatever happened to Free Will?’ David protests. Only to be told ‘you don’t have free will. You have the appearance of free will’. ‘All I have is the choices I make’ he argues back, ‘and I choose her’. At the same moment she falls and sprains her ankle, a warning that they’re capable of wrecking her dance-career if events are not kept on-plan. Again, against his better judgment, he walks out on her. 

Some critics detect trace-elements of Christian mythology in the film’s ‘free will’ versus ‘determinism’ equation, but it’s not necessary to buy into such superstitious hokum to be intrigued by the concept. Are they angels? Not quite, although some theologies have seen them that way. Are they an ultimately benevolent extraterrestrial race shepherding truculent delinquent humanity towards a better evolutionary maturity? Or a secretive Dan Brown conspiracy-cabal exerting its tentacular influence in furtherance of its own control-freakery objectives? In truth they seem more a dull grey bureaucracy, headed by the Chairman – no messing here with the non-gender-specific ‘Chair’ or ‘Chairperson’. No, it’s the antique Judeo-Christian male authority figure. And they’ve been guiding history forever. Whenever they step back the Roman Empire collapses into Dark Age barbarism, or Nazi dictators destabilise the world into global war. But Norse pagan mythology also invented the Norns, the three Fates who weave the individual threads of our lives into the vast tapestry of existence. Harry Harrison, with Kathleen Maclean wrote a charming fantasy ‘The Web Of The Norns’ about it. So it’s a recurrent idea. A useful metaphor. 

And eleven months later, David is ahead in the polls. While in a spiteful rebound she’s engaged to her ex. The Plan is back on track. The credits for the film include ‘visual effects’, but its less CGi FX-spectacle than it is human story. The main visual gimmick is the magic doors by which the Adjusters navigate around the city, a network explained in the DVD bonus feature ‘Leaping Through New York’, although in truth it’s a cinema-splice no more impressive than stepping into, and out of the Tardis. Meanwhile, only Adjuster Harry has doubts, with his sense of aggrieved responsibility bothering him. He confides to David that the intensity of their love is due to the fact that in a previous draft of the ‘Plan’ they were destined to be together. Their intense attraction is a ‘remnant from old plans’. So the Plan is not inflexible. It can be amended. Harry also helpfully divulges the secret of the dimensional ‘doors’ – turn the doorknob clockwise and wear a fedora, enabling David to give ‘The Graduate’ wedding-prevention dash a sci-fi twist. One step through the Museum of Modern Art, the next into the Manhattan Pumping Station, a race through the rain in and out of doors as the Bureau pursue and call in the Intervention Team for an Emergency Reality-Reset. 

In a reprise of their first meeting, David finds a troubled Elise again, in the courthouse bathroom, reuniting the lovers. Like the lyrics from another cheesy Pop-tune, he sort-of tells her ‘if loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right’, and they escape through the door to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, where they determine to take their protest direct to the Chairman. Towards a final confrontation on the roof of a building overlooking Central Park. And the Plan is rewritten in their favour. Strength of will and determination, it seems, can change your destiny. Very little of that is present in the original Philip K Dick short story. Just the idea of the omnipotent ‘Adjustment Team’ monitoring and editing, altering and guiding human lives. So when the internet goes down, and you think it’s chance. Sometimes, just sometimes it is. There was once a cartoon in ‘New Musical Express’ of a nerdy Sci-Fi geek getting seriously menaced for innocently enquiring ‘do you like Dick or Moorcock?’ Well, out beyond the Geek-o-sphere we all love Dick now. Unless we’ve just been adjusted that way?

‘THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU’ 

Director: George Nolfi. Producer: George Nolfi, Chris Moore, Michael Hackett, Bill Carraro, Isa Dick Hacktt & Joel Viertel. Screenplay by George Nolfi, based on the short story “Adjustment Team” by Philip K Dick. With Matt Damon (as David Norris), Emily Blunt (as Elise Sellas), Anthony Mackie (as Harry Mitchell), John Slattery (as Richardson), Anthony Ruivivar (as McCrady), Michael Kelly (as Charlie Traynor), Terence Stamp (as Thompson). Music by Thomas Newman, with two original songs by Richard Ashcroft (“Future’s Bright” & “Are You Ready?” over opening & closing credits. Original Release: Universal Pictures, March 2011.106-minutes. DVD, Universal Pictures, July 2011 Bonus DVD features include: Deleted & Extended Scenes, Leaping Through New York, Destined To Be, Becoming Elise, and George Nolfi Commentary.

 

Featured on website: 

‘VIDEOVISTA’ (UK – August 2011)  

reposted (14 March 2018) http://videovista-uk.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/the-adjustment-bureau.html

Poem: DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU

 

DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU 

when you went away
I declared war on owls,
bereavement needs a target,
they happen to be here,
this indefinable sense of ‘but’
that burns like a galleon
on a different ocean…
my history is being edited,
pieces are chipped away
and flare into extinction,
I don’t like these spaces,
this silence is scary,
people who are part of me
are no longer here,
David, Gwen, Denis,
I become slimmer, more tenuous
by the fact of their leaving,
since you went away
I argue with my reflection,
pick fights with my shadow,
the one certainty in this
uncertain cosmos is
this slow bleeding
of the self…
yet this morning there are
new buds on the willow,
for each life lost
there is new life

GRACE SLICK solo albums

 

GRACE FEEDS YOUR HEAD 

 

Album Review of: 

‘DREAMS’ 

by GRACE SLICK 

(Morello Records) www.cherryred.co.uk/morello.asp

 

This is Grace Slick. But there’s none of that laser-voice supernatural intensity you associate with ‘Grace Slick’. With the Airplane/Starship in suspension, Grace did a quartet of solo albums that seemed unfocused and ill at ease with the post Haight-Ashbury meltdown. Although unkind critics at the time labelled it her Shirley Bassey album, 1980s ‘Dreams’ was the best received. This reissue adds the bonus singles-edit of the big power-ballad title-song that briefly graced the UK Top 50. And yes, from “Dreams” through to the grandiose sweeping closer “Garden Of Man” it’s over-the-top orchestral dramas worthy of Jim Steinman. “Seasons” has a Mary Hopkin la-la-la children’s chorus. “El Diablo” is a pleasantly exotic flamenco excursion – and ‘pleasant’ is not a word you’d normally associate with Grace! There’s some dated indulgent guitars-on-boosters plank-spanking, but little evidence of the Sex, Drugs And Rock ‘n’ Roll Grace of ‘Volunteers’. Is this really the voice that played LSD-games with the White Rabbit? If she had misgivings about this curious career-evolution she never betrays it. The self-styled ‘Queen of the Nut-house’ gives it every nerve and sinew. Yet it’s not entirely a disGrace, the benefit of the intervening years reveals moments to discover and enjoy.

 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.43 

(Jan/February)’ (UK – January 2014)

 

‘WELCOME TO THE WRECKING BALL’ 

and ‘SOFTWARE’ 

by GRACE SLICK 

(BGO RECORDS) www.bgo-records.com 

Just don’t mention Miley Cyrus. Some years before ‘Hannah Montana’ was even born, Grace Slick was already riding that Wrecking Ball. Perfectly cast as the chemically-fuelled acid ice-queen of psychedelia, Grace found adapting to musical landscapes following the messy fragmentation of Jefferson Airplane-Starship, somewhat problematic. She adopted different guises across four solo albums, each with a separate and not-entirely satisfactory character. These two-for-one albums (no bonus tracks) follow ‘Manhole’ and her big shot at power-balladry, ‘Dreams’. Using the same producer, engineer and guitar trio of Ron Frangipane, Ed Sprigg and Scott Zito ‘Welcome To The Wrecking Ball’ from 1981 tries on a clean AM-radio friendly guitar-heavy AOR sound, with the grit of Grace’s strident contralto set to attack. She adds lyrics to four tracks, including the jack-hammering title and the anti-militarist marching-feet and tape-effects of standout “No More Heroes” – even if it does steal melodically from “Bang Bang”. From 1984, ‘Software’ radically shifts focus to electro-digital modernity with Linn-programming from ex-Zappa and future-Starship Peter Wolf, with sharply satiric Techno-Pop near-hit “All The Machines” poking fun at gadget-addiction. Despite its flaws, Miley Cyrus – even riding her wrecking-ball naked, just ain’t in the same league. 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.52’ 

(UK – July/August 2015)

Cult Albums: HOT TUNA

 

KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ 

Album Review of: 

‘FIRST PULL UP THEN PULL DOWN’ 

and ‘BURGERS’ 

by HOT TUNA 

 (T-Bird2 0041CD) www.t-birdrecords.com 

‘Keep On Truckin’’ was a slogan ripped from an iconic 1968 Robert Crumb cartoon in ‘Zap’ comics. It spread like a rash across underground magazines, T-shirts and pretty much everywhere else. So what’s it mean? In ‘The Simpsons’, Marge admits to Lisa ‘I didn’t know then and I don’t know now’. Blind Boy Fuller wrote the song it was lifted from, and for him it was most certainly a sexual metaphor. It later became – not quite a certified hit, but at least Hot Tuna’s most recognisable song-title. A stand-out track from their third album, but a part of their live set from the start. There’s a tale that the group’s name came about as they sang ‘tell me, what’s that smells like fish pretty mama, I really would like to know’ – a line not entirely unrelated to aspects of female genitalia, when an audience wag yelled out ‘Hot Tuna’. 

As regards the recipe for Tuna, first deduct Marty Balins’ honey-coated balladry, Grace Slick’s piercing laser-tuned lyrics and Paul Kantner’s Sci-Fi fantasias from Jefferson Airplane, until you’re left with bassist Jack Casady and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, who – during a quiet hiatus period, spun-off to become the Hot Tuna nucleus, doing what they’d always enjoyed doing and did best. Which was electric and sometimes acoustic traditional Blues, old-timey country swing and loose musicianly free-jams. Along with lots of informal stoned self-indulgence with bluegrass rootsy touches. 

Freed of Airplane’s commercial constrains, and as Airplane wound down, Tuna’s splinter-group status grew more central. Benefiting from fiddle-player Papa John Creach, whose violin input is versatile enough to add a scratchy resonance to “Been So Long” (on ‘First Pull Up Then Pull Down’), a supernaturally eerie edge to “Sunny Day Strut”, and even a Stefan Grappelli feel to “Let’s Get Together Right Down Here” (both from ‘Burgers’). Although ‘First Pull Up…’ (June 1971) was their second album, cut live at the ‘Chateau Liberte’ club deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, it was their first focused product with light-touch boogying rag-time takes on Rev Gary Davis and Lightnin’ Hopkins. 

‘Burgers’ from nine months later took them into the studio with a greater quota of originals, while customising “Keep On Truckin’”, and with the group’s occasionally weak vocals compensated for by David Crosby adding his voice to “Highway Song”. “Water” is another stand-out, a beautifully reflective instrumental in the classic sixties mould, pleasingly tuneful with tasty finger-picking. Collectively, the album took them closer to mainstream recognition. But is it any good? Normal critical rules seldom apply. It has very little to do with Rock, Pop – or even West Coast hippie. It’s eavesdropping on the participants’ own private party, with a few friends around who are similarly in on it, doing exactly what they want to do. Fairly bewildering and intimidating to a newbie, probably best left to devotees. Yet, over the years since, with personnel shifting around them, Hot Tuna continued both on the live circuit, and with regular albums, through until, virtually… now. 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 Issue.28 (July/Aug)’ 

(UK – July 2011)

CD: ATTILA THE STOCKBROKER 'Restoration Tragedy'

 

1649, MEET 2018

 

Album Review of: 

‘RESTORATION TRAGEDY’ 

by BARNSTORMER 1649 

(Roundhead Records Helmet CD9) 

 www.attilathestockbroker.com 

Worlds turn upside down, again. Cries for justice echo down the centuries – then, as we campaign today. Diggers, Ranters, Levellers, New Model Army, name-checking Seething Wells as well as Leon Rosselson… and progenitor Abiezer Coppe, all declaim a continuity of dissent. We know Attila The Stockbroker, he’s ‘been a Ranter for nearly forty years,’ he’s ‘done over three-thousand gigs and drunk a lot of beers.’ His stentorian voice fulminates, just the correct edge of grit, waking the dead for a wordy album of tricky rhymes inflicted with wit and precision. ‘Restoration Tragedy’ is an insurrectionary document, an incendiary Punk history with sideswipes at Corbynistas, esoteric as an issue of ‘History Revealed’ magazine, but direct as a kick in the head. 

He ignites English Civil War tales of violence, betrayal, pain, chaos, madness and pride, bold and steadfast, staunchly republican. There’s a mighty crumhorn re-creating “The Battle Of Worcester”, with Jason Pegg’s breakneck guitar, Attila’s nimble viola and mandola, marshalled into line by MM McGhee’s drums. John ‘Attila’ Baine formed Barnstormer in 1994, to celebrate ‘The Siege Of Shoreham’ (1996), where the opening “March Of The Leveller” triptych first appeared. 

A great album embodies the moment. This one spans centuries.

 

‘Restoration Tragedy’: 

Barnstormer 1649 

‘Restoration Tragedy’ is the new album by Barnstormer 1649 – and it doesn’t sound like anything else! It mixes early music and Punk in fifty-eight minutes of songs and instrumentals set around the aftermath of the Civil War and the English Revolution of 1649, when Charles I was beheaded, the ‘world turned upside down’ and unprecedented radical ideas spread across the land. 

(1) ‘The Leveller’s Trilogy’ (8:00-minutes, made up of ‘March Of The Levellers’, ‘The Diggers’ Song’ (written by Gerrard Winstanley) and ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ (written by Leon Rosselson)) 

(2) ‘Wellingborough And Wigan’ (4:17) 

(3) ‘The Monarch’s Way/ King Charles’ Cottage’ (6:29) 

(4) ‘Abierer Coppe’ (5:34) 

(5) ‘The Battle Of Worcester’ (4:58) 

(6) ‘The Man With The Beard’ (2:44) 

(7) ‘Pride’s Purge’ (2:40) 

(8) ‘Harrison’ (4:22) 

(9) ‘Burford Requiem’ (1:45) 

(10) ‘The Voice’ (2:28) 

(11) ‘The Fisherman’s Tale’ (3:15) 

(12) ‘Lord Protector’ (3:43) 

(13) ‘Cromwell’s Funeral’ (3:46, written by Robina Baine) 

(14) ‘Robina’ (3:21) 

It is the brainchild of poet and multi-instrumentalist Attila The Stockbroker, who has always wanted to do with early music and Punk what the Pogues did with Irish music and Punk. Now he’s done it. And it really, really doesn’t sound like anything else… 

Published in: 

‘R’N’R: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 no.73’ 

(UK – January/February 2019)