Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band: Dear Scott
Vinyl | CD | DL available here
Can music really save your mortal soul? Maybe…Maybe not… But after listening to the new Michael Head and the Red Elastic band album Dear Scott you will surely think it can says Stephen Canavan…
It is tempting to pull out your favourite On the Waterfront quote when describing the career of Michael William Head but that would be reductive and unfair. For more than forty years, as one of our greatest ever songwriters, from the Bacharach/Love fuelled beauty of the Pale Fountains, to the shimmering majesty of Shack, to the sea-spray, heroin haunted, deceptively bucolic majesty of the Magical World of the Strands to his current home with the Red Elastic band, Michael Head, has with typical Scouse intransigence, been tilting heroically against the music industry’s merciless windmills, armed only with his genius for melody and song writing and an adoring, devoted fanbase.
He came close with Shack to tasting mainstream success in 1999, when their classic HMS Fable album, featuring the sublime Comedy, reached number 25 in the charts, but despite endless critical acclaim for his work, greater chart success always seemed tantalisingly out of his reach. The fact then, that in early June 2022 Dear Scott reached number six in the album charts on the first week of its release, was not only the most unexpected musical news of the year, but arguably the most welcome, and had me punching the air with joy, for no songwriter deserves the success more than he.
Inspired by a motivational self-addressed postcard that a debt-ridden F Scott Fitzgerald wrote to himself whilst staying as a struggling screenwriter at the infamous Garden of Allah hotel in Los Angeles in 1937, it is hard not to see Head drawing deep creative inspiration from that inspirational message throughout the whole of the writing and recording of Dear Scott. Although I adored his first release with the Red Elastic Band, Adios Senior Pussycat in 2017, finding it a record that was uplifting, life affirming, and unexpectedly moving, for all its myriad glories, there was a feeling that it was a record still bearing old wounds refusing to heal entirely, while his voice seemed a little tentative, war -weary, and way too low in the mix for my tastes. But as the opening see-saw guitar chimes and kinetic Bo Diddly rhythms of Dear Scott’s joyous opening track Kismet kick in, a song that sounds like a lost classic from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, it is clear that producer and ex Coral man, Bill Ryder -Jones has captured not only Head’s best vocal performance of his career, booming out clearly and melodically, and ringing with a genuine confidence and ease, but his best sound too. When Michael sings “I see a light…” You’ll see it too….
The next track, his collaboration with his inspiring daughter Alice, Broken Beauty is a stirring, moving Motown strut. A Bacharachian trumpet fuelled pean, to the type of woman whom although life may have kicked into the gutter on occasion, it has never crushed her enough to stop her staring up at the stars. A broken beauty perhaps, but a beauty still… When the chorus kicks in and the trumpet soars and Head sings “People try to put you down …They don’t win…” it is both uplifting, defiant and deeply moving.The understated folk melody of ’The Next Day follows’ featuring lovely backing vocals, lilting flutes and enough harmonised ‘Ba-ba-ba – bas’ to bring out Brian Wilson in envious hives.
Other album highlights are American Kid a typically insightful, delightful character piece about an Americana and Hollywood obsessed friend, “It goes from Elvis to Tarantino across your bedroom walls” Head sings sympathetically, the brooding, atmospheric The Grass, and the gorgeous Fluke, its chiming melody all starry eyes-and laughing, and which once again mines the rich seam of the ambiguous, unrequited love for Americana on this album.
For most of his career, Head has arguably been the poet laureate of Liverpool in his songs, and an expert in turning the mundane into the magical, and The Ten is his great Liverpool song on the record, a deeply personal tale of a rum bus journey with his brother John and mate Badger, “Floating past Kenny, up past the Icy and Yorkies where we’d sing” to see his dad who worked on Kensington market. From the jazzy, almost mellow vibes of ‘Gino and Rico’ to the classic Byrdsian chimes of Pretty Girl, Dear Scott is a consistently enervating, uplifting and often moving triumph. Like all works of genuine beauty it may take time to reveal all its wonders, but reveal them it will.
The old insecurities, doubts and personal demons that have blighted but not diminished Michael Head’s career, not may not yet be banished entire, who am I to say? But, when you listen to ‘’Dear Scott’ and hear these precious songs and his newly freed voice, the overwhelming feeling you get from this record is that they are no longer the taunting Banquo’s that haunted even his most inspiring albums. Are these songs then to save your mortal soul? In the case of Michael Head… Weren’t they always? Words by Stephen Canavan. His profile his here.
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