PUT THIS GUY IN THE SIMPSONS, MISTER GROENING
Not inappropriately the new Martin Simpson album is called Prodigal Son.
Simpson, 54, made his first album, the also appropriately named Golden Vanity, in 1976.
1976 was the key year in ukpunk, an era which the late Ian McDonald says augured a weakenening of the skills base of British music.
Of course the inherent musicality and curiosity of performers as disparate as Mick Jones and John Lydon could not allow the year zero Stalinisms of punk to preside.
But McDonald does capture an attitude prevalent at the time, and in subsequent eras, that learning, the pursuit of excellence, technique were all in excess to getting up there and doing it.
Simpson isnt all learning - there’s oodles of tender and sharp feeling too.
Prescience, even - in the choice of Randy Newman’s greatest deepest water song, Louisiana 1927 on his new album, rewritten to take account of Katrina, but recorded prior too the advent of recent North East English floods (Welcome to Hull - shat on by two Jags and rained on by God) its resonance is unmistakable.
Music over time, music over water, music as healin’ magic.
Louisiana 1927 is played with the same thrumming accuracy and pellucid splendour Simpson exacts elsewhere on Trad arrangements The Granemore Hare and Andrew Lammie.
He plays possibly the greatest ever version of Little Musgrave too.
Instead of going on TV to complain about minstrels giving their music away wouldn’t the business be better off highlighting stuff like this?
Just a thought.
Im sure there’s a moral attached to the Prodigal Son story in the bible (maybe in the Quoran and Kabbbalah and Scientology and Torah too) to tag on here.. but I cant remember what it is.
