Anybody listening to this edition of John Peel’s Music on BFBS would have got a 2 year head start on the rest of us in learning one of the immutable laws of pop music: The gorgeousness quotient of any song will increase by at least 50% if David McAlmont sings on it.
For me, McAlmont was the best UK singer of the 1990s, only Jaime Harding of Marion came close. His achievement, which may also have been his curse, is that his voice needed lush, ecstatic and grand settings to be heard in. Certainly anyone who worked with him in the 1990s knew that you couldn’t have that voice in front of your bog-standard guitars/bass/drums sound. The boat needed to be pushed out to make use of such a stunning voice and on several occasions in the 90s, McAlmont’s voice was at the forefront of several aural luxury cruise liners which sailed beyond the waters of a John Peel playlist and into the harbours of mainstream popularity. His brace of 1995 singles with Bernard Butler, Yes and You Do as well as his 1997 solo effort, Look At Yourself are all massive, brilliant songs which feature the kitchen sink being thrown at the listener, because to do anything less would be to let McAlmont down.
At times, it felt as though one reason for the sonic excess was because it was needed to try and cover the awkwardness of the material. As a lyricist, McAlmont was seemingly incapable of writing anything which could be thought trite, banal or cliched. His work has always been emotionally deep, humane, often scathing of those who’ve treated him poorly but ready to reach out to those desiring a connection with him. His work doesn’t lend itself to simple ditties or melodies and even in the hands of someone as musically savvy as Butler, there could still be tracks such as The Debitor, which as a listener, you had to sit back and let them get on with because there was no way you could keep up with them.
This tendency to use McAlmont's voice and big arrangements as a cover for densely personal material was evident from his earliest work as part of the duo, Thieves which McAlmont formed with multi-instrumentalist, Saul Freeman. An NME review of their show at the Camden Falcon from December 1991 written by Gina Morris mentions that, They've got no songs to speak of, there's no definite hit amongst fillers, but the music does serve as a foundation for his voice. And what a voice he has - mesmerising, encapsulating and hypnotic, where the lyrics are inconsequential and the band don’t exist.
It’s a summation which you may find yourself agreeing with as you listen to Placed Aside. If you were to take the track apart and examine each element individually, you’d be hard-pressed to see how any of it would fit together convincingly, but McAlmont’s stunning voice and Freeman’s equally ecstatic arrangement - under the production of Paul Sampson at the Cabin in Coventry, producer of this blog’s most viewed post - are enough to assuage any doubts.
Peel liked the track and resolved to keep an eye on Thieves’ progress, though it doesn’t look as though McAlmont ever featured on a Peel running order again, so I’m invoking blogger’s privilege by ensuring one of my favourites gets on the metaphorical mixtape. And while this post may be a slice of McAlmont at the start of his musical career, I was delighted to see that this very month sees the release of a new album from him with Hifi Sean.
Videos courtesy of David McAlmont and Hifi Sean.
No comments:
Post a Comment