A to Z
THE PRETTY THINGS
Bare As Bone Black As Blood , MADFISH
8/10
British veterans make an acoustic dash from Dartford to the Delta and beyond.
By Rob Hughes
IT seems The Pretty Things weren’t quite done when they played their final show in December 2018. Despite announcing their retirement as a live unit with a sell-out bash at London’s O2, some 55 years after they first began, sessions for a new studio album were already afoot. The project only fell through when it became apparent that lead singer Phil May, his appetite for performance restored, wouldn’t be able to tour it due to ongoing problems with emphysema.
Keen to press on with recording, the band eventually decided to unplug the electrics and, for the first time in their career, go acoustic, a less strenuous form of activity that might be more conducive to their frontman’s health. Alas, May’s death earlier this year, at the age of 75, put the blocks on The Pretty Things’ tentative plans to get back out before an audience.
Thus, the very wonderful Bare As Bone, Bright As Blood now serves as a fitting, if unintentional, epitaph to their late singer. There is a touching symmetry here too. Just as the band started as a core duo of May and guitarist Dick Taylor back in the late summer of 1963, the album finds them going out much as they came in. There are others adding further nuance and expression to this set – among them veteran guitar player Henry Padovani and multi-instrumentalist Sam Brothers – but Bare As Bone… is primarily May and Taylor, reaching back into the Delta blues that first inspired them as art students in southeast London.
Nor is it a nostalgic genre exercise. These 11 covers (some well known, some obscure) hum with the kind of vitality that only age and experience can bestow. When May cries hurt on Robert Johnson’s lovesick “Come Into My Kitchen”, the anguish feels empirical rather than affected. As does the sentiment of Muddy Waters’ “Can’t Be Satisfied”, a worried-mind blues full of portent and trouble, elevated by sliding chords and intense guitar runs. May takes licence with lyrics, especially on the former, which discards most of Johnson’s tale for a simpler and more personal study in desolation, while acknowledging its source directly: “I feel the blues comin’ down on me/Like the terraplane man I used to be.” Seeing as both the above were setlist regulars in later years – including at the O2 – the arrival of their pared-down studio counterparts makes perfect sense.
Other songs, however, are less expected. The version of “Faultline”, originally by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, feels arcane in places, like some atavistic hymn from the Southern hills, given fresh life with spasms of electric distortion.
Gillian Welch’s “The Devil Had A Hold Of Me” is another welcome surprise. May stays mostly faithful to the original lyric, while Taylor and Brothers surround it with ringing chords and a queasy sense of claustrophobia. As with the addition of “Ain’t No Grave”, the gospel tune written by Claude Ely but latterly associated with Johnny Cash’s American series, Bare As Bone… doesn’t bother sweating the small stuff. The Pretty Things have bigger themes in mind – sorrow, deliverance, life, death, absolution. Days of reckoning.
The elemental lyrics of these songs find a reflection in the arrangements. The settings may be chiefly acoustic, but there’s nothing genteel about the execution. Taylor and guests play with a kind of muted savagery, schooled musicians gone feral, very much in keeping with the enduringly untamed spirit of The Pretty Things. Guitars spit, harmonicas howl. Spare percussion, handled with admirable restraint by manager and producer Mark St John, usually takes the form of an ominous stomp.
The elemental lyrics of these songs find a reflection in the arrangements
Band member George Woosey is the author of “Bright As Blood”, a tune he first cut in 2017 as one half of Brighton-based duo Dull Knife. Here the band accentuate its folk roots, airing it with Brothers’ banjo and a violin turn from Jon Wigg. With a refusal to compromise and its dogged self-will, the song’s core message seems a natural fit for The Pretty Things. Especially May, whose delivery of certain lines – “This is my journey and I’m getting close/I don’t think I’ll make it first and foremost” – takes on added poignancy given the posthumous nature of this release.
May and Taylor excel on Bare As Bone…, a couple of old stagers with nothing to prove, but proving it anyway. Never mind that The Pretty Things will always be remembered as a loud and fierce electric vision; this is as good a way as any to take a final bow.
ALL WE ARE
Providence DOUBLE SIX 7/10
Multinational Liverpool trio dance away the gloom
All We Are’s third album seems made for the closeness that this year has denied – sweaty clubs, sticky floors and the last party of the summer. The tight-knit trio – Irishman Richard O’Flynn on drums, Norwegian Guro Gikling on bass and Brazilian Luis Santos on guitar – waste nothing creating their dream dancefloor from sultry rhythms, mischievous drum beats and a glorious disco sheen. O’Flynn and Gikling’s vocals melt together effortlessly on the infectious title track, while “Not Your Man” is the perfect summation of the trio’s sound: hot, sticky and sexy, the “like a piña colada you’re not going to waste me” refrain approaching nonsensical perfection. LISA-MARIE FERLA
THE ALLMAN BETTS BAND
Bless Your Heart BMG 7/10
Expansive second album from second-generation Southern rockers
As the sons of two legendary founders of the Allman Brothers, Duane Betts and Devon Allman share a mighty legacy, although on this double set they’ve drawn their inspiration from a wider constituency which they call “the United States of Americana”. On “Pale Rider” they channel the epic soloing of Neil Young’s “Hurricane”, while “Airboats And Cocaine” is an infectious heartland rocker in the style of John Mellencamp or Bob Seger. “King Crawler” is a good ol’ twin-guitar-ed Southern rocker in the family tradition, and on “Magnolia Road” they manage to sound like the Allmans, the Dead and The Band all at the same time. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
NUBYA GARCIA
Source CONCORD JAZZ
8/10
Soulful jazz saxophonist steps up. By Louis Pattison
PLENTY of ink has been spilt on the subject of London’s jazz scene over the last couple of years, but you’ve got to concede that the hype is broadly justified, backed up as it is by an impressive, ever-growing stack of wax. Moses Boyd, Kamaal Williams, Zara MacFarlane, Shabaka And The Ancestors, Emma-Jean Thackray, KOKOROKO – all have released music in 2020 that both feel situated in the jazz tradition, while smartly redefining the form with a modern, quintessentially London sensibility. With Source, saxophonist and bandleader Nubya Garcia positions herself right near the top of that list.
Born in Camden to parents from Trinidad and Guyana who came to the UK in the Windrush era, Garcia started playing piano aged five and played in youth groups before falling into the orbit of Gary Crosby’s Tomorrow’s Warriors in her late teens.works around this dichotomy. Centre-stage is Garcia’s saxophone, played with a languid and sumptuous soul that teeters at the boundary between grace and melancholy. Around it, her and her band – at its core, keys player Joe Armon-Jones, double bassist Daniel Casimir and drummer Sam Jones – prove an adaptable unit, their arrangements drawing from dub, cumbia and Latin modes, even as they switch between virtuoso workouts and segments of dreamy repose.
